This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Revenue Assurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I am a real fan of Skype and Boingo services. They offer an option called Skype zones that enables me to connect from my laptop to the web from different places all over the world for 7.95$ per month. I have been using this service since 2006, paying the same price, and being permitted to use Skype and data services (e.g., browsing, email). Certainly a great deal have been made that perfectly answers my needs.Just a bit of history: in 2005, Skype and Boingo launched the Skype zones service.
“The service is being initially offered at $8 a month for unlimited Wi-Fi access for Skype calls, which is significantly less than the $22 a month that Boingo currently charges for unlimited data access.”
The underlines are mine. The tricky part is that the Skype zones did not limit me (or other users as I know) from using it with data services. I could never conceive what made the difference between the two services ($8 service and the $22 service) apart from the price.
On this subject, I just got an email from Boingo saying:
“Effective February 1, 2009, Boingo and Skype will discontinue the Skype Zones Unlimited service. But don’t worry - you can continue using Wi-Fi with Boingo!”
They were nice enough to offer me a similar (meeting my purposes) service:
“Boingo Global offers access to more than 100,000 hotspots in over 90 countries. This flat-rate plan costs $59 USD per month …”
Actually I found some little differences between the new and old services. The new service price is more than 6 times the price of what I am paying to Skype zones today, and almost 3 times the $22 USD Boingo were charging for “the none Skype zones” similar service in 2002, or 1.5 times $39 USD Boingo used to charge for a similar service, just a few months ago.
What can I tell you? I hope that this is a sign of prosperity of the world and telecom industry! At $59 per month it does not make sense for my needs. I hope that some company will come with a more sensitive plan for me, e.g. access for 30 roaming days per year.Skype is still advertizing a Skype zones service for €7.95.
Will it continue after February 1st? Will this service be really restricted only to enable just Skype calls, and no data services? Answers will be provided next month. Meanwhile let’s just be happy that the economical prosperity permits to triplicate prices of some communication services