David Beckemeyer, aka Mr. Blog put up a Skype vs. Vonage calling the world comparison, and in doing so revealed some very interesting facts about the concept of unlimited that we’ve all sort of known but in his post he made things very crystal clear.
What I saw first was that Skype’s numbers don’t really add up. Let’s look at their math. In the “Hidden Limits” section of his post David cites:
For Skype, the limits on this so-called “unlimited” plan are “10,000 minutes per user per month, with a maximum of 6 hours per day. Also, no more than 50 different numbers in total can be called per day” (see http://www.skype.com/legal/terms/fair_usage/).
Ok-so here’s the math error-6 hours a day is 360 minutes. Using 30 days a month that equals 10,800 minutes, which means for at least two and a half days the user couldn’t make outgoing calls to their maximum limit per day as they would have run out two and a half days earlier in total monthly minutes. Now let’s go one step deeper. The “fifty call a day limit” means that each call is limited to about 7 minutes and 12 seconds in order to fall into the six hours of calls (outbound).
As a business owner I happen to like that Skype is publishing these guidelines, but wish they would get the math right. What I also would like to see is the ability to buy added bundles of minutes to the unlimited plan, in case the so called “Skype Unlimited minutes” for some reason gets consumed. My guess is that the Skype For SIP program will really address this, and we’ll see a higher rate plan established so businesses will really understand what they’re getting. In business pricing, transparency is the key to a successful pricing model. And in this era, knowing what you’re getting and what you’re paying for becomes the key.