Skype unveils new yearly calling plan; Dear Nokia: Make a Skype phone!

When Skype announced free long distance Skype-to-phone calls for the US and Canada in May of this year, the result was an explosion of new Skype users. Even though the promotion would end at the end of the calendar year, seven months of free long distance was enough to entice scores of people to sign up.

Now Skype hopes to turn those users into paying customers, as the company has now announced its intention to sell long distance packages for a yearly rate. When the free long distance hangs up on Near Year’s Day, Skype will begin a month-long promotion: $14.95 for one year of long distance. The promotion will also include 100 minutes of SkypeOut for International calls and over $50 worth of coupons for purchasing Skype-certified hardware products. After January 31, the yearly fee will increase to $29.95.

"The new Skype Unlimited Calling Plan is an affordable option that will save consumers hundreds of dollars compared to high rates charged by traditional phone companies," said Don Albert, North America General Manager for Skype. "We want to give Skype customers convenient options of choosing either an unlimited calling plan with a flat annual rate and or staying with our standard pay-per-minute offering."

Does Vonage have anything to fear? Maybe, maybe not. Skype requires a PC to use, and as of yet there have been no solutions for tying a home’s existing POTS infrastructure to Skype (although I know of at least one company that wants to try). But the quality is outstanding and some of the of nicer Skype phones (which we recently reviewed) are finally coming down in price.

Disclosure: I have nothing to disclose about Skype, other than the fact that I really like the service. At $1.25/month, I can tell you right now that I’m signing up. When calling family in Ireland, it simply cannot be beat. Heck, even calling back to Chi-town and Indy is great, because the sound quality is so outstanding. I can only thank eBay for spending $2.5 billion on Skype. We’re still not sure why they did it, but what’s that about virtual gift horses?

Source: Arstechnica (one of my favorite sites of all time; bookmark it)

Please Nokia (NYSE: NOK), please! Just take any old model, slap a custom OS on it that runs Skype only, no OTA radios, just WiFi built in, and sell it. Have you seen who your competition is? Basically they’re all the same devices, same OEM, just different color cases. You can differentiate yourself! I’m telling you right now this will be huge, bloody huge. I’m a Vonage customer and I need to hear more details about this before I cut them off in 2007.