Skype Caveats
In a few moments of excitement for the upcoming Ireland tour, I bought a few Skype goodies, including a Skype Pro subscription and SkypeIn phone numbers in both Wisconsin and Belfast. I got a little less than I had bargained for, unfortunately.
Skype has a few things figured out. Their network makes calling places cheaper. They connect people across the globe. They do it for cheap.
They also have a few things that they need to get figured out a bit. The day I bought all my Skype stuff, the entire Skype logon network crashed. I bought this cool stuff, and I was locked out of it for a day-and-a-half. Skype blames it on a Windows update. Not impressive.
Then I see that when I call, I automatically lose 3 extra cents. It’s not much, but I really need to increase my conversation length to make this effective. There is a three cent connection fee. I guess it’s not really a big deal, but my balance was dropping much faster than I had expected. I will say that I was pleasantly surprised to see that all incoming calls are free–I guess that’s the American in me…I’m used to paying for my incoming phone calls.
And one last thing: outgoing caller ID does not work in the USA! When calling in the UK, my Belfast number will show up, but when calling in the US, it simply shows as “Unknown Caller”. There is no timeline on when Skype will finally support this. We simply have to hope it’ll work sometime soon.
If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t spend on Skype. They need to work out some of these silly bugs first. Now that I’m committed for a year, plus I have a Skype wifi handset, I’m too invested to quit. Dumb!
what handset to you own… or do you just have program that runs from a “smartphone” or ppc?
I wanted to find a software package that ran on the Treo, but unless I was in 3G coverage (which is only Green Bay and Milwaukee in Wisconsin), it wouldn’t have enough bandwidth to do any good anyway. I guess it was completely moot since there is no Skype client for Palm.
I bought the SMC Wifi Skype Phone WSKP100 package from Skype. This deal includes a FON router as well so that I can get access to the FON network. I saw that there are a few FON nodes in Ireland, though none in the city where I will be staying/starting (Ballymoney, UK–Northern Ireland). Anyway, this looks like a decent phone, though I don’t know about the battery life. Perhaps it was a waste of $150. We’ll see tomorrow when it arrives.