My mobile’s dying, it’s not just old, it’s venerable, I’ve been out of contract for maybe 3 years now, but you know how it is; the tariffs not that bad, the phone keeps plodding along, mostly reliably, (which, given that these days some phones seem to be designed to start dying while one is still in contract, is a bit of a technological miracle!) and so there’s no pressing incentive to do all the reasearch which, as a “savvy” consumer, I feel obliged to do before signing up to something as rigid as an 18 month contract.
Still, the phone’s days are surely numbered now, and maybe after Xmas, and after the January tax bill’s paid, I should probably get around to looking for a handset which has buttons that work reliably & which doesn’t have an annoying habit of trying to use a non-existant 3G signal, rather than switch over to good old reliable 2G. That latter is a real annoyance and actually something the phone’s been doing since I got it, why they couldn’t have built in a user option to force the mobile to switch to 2G I don’t know.
Anyway, I digress, I’ve been doing some looking around for what deals are on the market at the moment and one of the ones which I spotted looks almost too good to be true, to the extent that it’s set my cynical “what’s the catch” alarm bells well and truly ringing!
Essentially it seems that a lot of the latest generation of phones are able to use Skype mobile, which allows one to make free calls to other Skype Mobile users. Now from a consumer point of view this looks great; I’ve been using Skype as an IM service for years now, and have always found it to be a reliable, easy to use, app, and from what I’ve heard from friends, who have used it as a cheap alternative for chatting with relatives abroad, Skype’s calls service is just as stable as their IM.
The only catch I can see at the moment is the need for both parties to have Skype enabled phones, which is surely going to become less and less of a restriction as people with older phones upgrade. So, in theory one day we’ll all be making free mobile calls to all our friends, right?
It’s a lovely idea, but it leaves me wondering where the mobile service providers are going to fit into this utopia of free and easy communication? How are they going to make their money? for example there are deals at the moment where pay-as-you-go phones are being offered with free Skype, which, assuming all your friends have done similar, means that once you’ve paid out for the handset you could get away without paying anything for your calls. It’s even possible to buy credits “at very low rates” directly from Skype, for calls to non-Skype phones, so it’s not even as if the mobile service providers would be making their cash there.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious, surely someone at the mobile companies must have thought this business plan through, but I have to be honest, as things are at the moment I’m having trouble seeing how they’re going to make up the revenue they’re surely going to loose as less and less people use their networks for calls.
Tags: Tech