Worldwide weekend of free WiFi with Skype Access [telecom]

Worldwide weekend of free WiFi with Skype Access

Peter Parkes March 17, 2010

To celebrate the full launch of Skype Access, we're offering you free WiFi access at over 100,000 hotspots worldwide this weekend (20-21 March 2010).

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***** Moderator's Note *****

Skype is, as I understand it, an outlier on the VoIP competition curve. Rather than resort to OEM solutions (Vonage), or purpose-built hardware (MagicJack), it let's users employ PC's for VoIP. To me, that implies that Skype has aimed at the "early adopter" market, but I'm not sure it's a viable business model in the long term. Opinions?

Reply to
Monty Solomon
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I have a friend who lives in Japan who uses it to call the U.S. She was here recently and used my Vonage. She prefers my Vonage but doesn't want to deal with the issue of a telephone and the adapter. Plus, I guess Vonage costs more and she is counting her pennies.

Reply to
Sam Spade

Amongst my clients and acquaintances who have contacts in other countries, Skype is very popular. Not just individuals, but small organizations that have offices in other countries. And most of these are not people I'd call "early adopters", some of them have needed a little help getting it set up, even though it's very easy to set up. Not so much as a PC-to-telephone link, but as a PC-to-PC videophone link.

Because if both ends have Skype, it doesn't cost anything. Which of course does leave the question of the business model. I'm not sure that any of the people that I know pay Skype for calls to non-Skype telephones.

Skype Access is an interesting business idea. It is a micropayment plan that uses your Skype account to pay for access to wifi networks. Apparently there's software that takes care of logging on for you (logging onto networks _can_ be difficult, sometimes people report to me that they never did get logged on). While they seem to have signed up a number of wifi networks, some of which are operated by telcos, it seems like there are more and more free access points (in the US, not sure about other countries). Competing against "free" is very difficult.

Dave

Reply to
Dave Garland

You can get Skype wifi phones that look similar to normal cordless phones. I know people who use them as their primary phones.

R's, John

Reply to
John Levine

Including.... the original, pre-Apple, "Iphone". Yes, childrrrrn, before Apple came out with their unit, Cisco (which had and has a very serious line of corporate and backbone/enterprise level voice-over-IP-offerings) dabbled in the consumer market with a Skype optimized 802.11 ("wifi") phone. Led to some ugly court battles when Apple first prepared its phone for the market.

Mine works fine... with the annoying glitch that, while it can hook up to password protected bases, it can't handle the "splash screens" that some utilize.

(Same grumble, btw, for my UMA [a] enabled t-Mobile phone)

[a] UMA= "Unlicensed Mobile Access". It lets t-mobile "cell phones" utilize, when available, a "wifi" internet connection for connectivity. Has lots of advantages. disclaimer: I'm not only a user, I'm also a shareholder.
Reply to
danny burstein

I have the Skype Linksys (part of Cisco now) CIT200 iPhone, and while being cordless, its base connects to my PC through USB.

Brad H

Reply to
SVU

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