The 3G Portal is honoured to host the 27th Carnival of the Mobilists. The ¬ìBest Post of the Week¬î for me is Judy Breck’s at Golden Swamp – Students say #1 obstacle includes no to mobiles . This week my daughter, Clare started her GCSE exams and the…

My take is that using Skype to your mobile in the way SoonR do, is attractive for three reasons:

1. Being able to contact people on Skype from your mobile
2. When you have minutes to burn on your mobile plan
3. When you call abroad and SkypeOut’s rates beat the cost of international calling

For some of these cases there’s a clear cost benefit, for others there’s a convenience benefit, but an overall benefit? YMMV.

Jim

1-time worstselling author and consultant to anyone who’ll listen, and resident lecturer at many of the world‚Äôs oldest established watering holes

In USA, callback, calling card and other callthrough possibilities also cost about 2c per minute for many international destinations.

There really are not many countries in the world that have a Skype tariff of 2c per minute – only Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and USA. Many Skype tariffs to mobiles are not competitive; if I wanted to forward from USA to my O2 UK mobile I could do this for US 15c rather than Skype’s 30c.

So the same applies to callback, which is what this seems to me to be most similar to in this application. I can see though that people that do want to use it like this may be able to save the cost of a Skype-In number with diversion to Skype-Out

Tomi, this really isn’t true. The cost of voice is so low here (particularly when compared to Europe) that most people buy a bucket of minutes each month that far exceeds their actual use, and getting free calls at night and on weekends is becoming a pretty standard feature of postpaid plans — so the days of people leaving their phone off because they were afraid of using their airtime are pretty much behind us.

In any case, so SoonR Talk isn’t a great application for European users because of the pricing structure of their markets… it’s still a good one here in the US — which is fine.

Also, I’m not sure I agree with that analysts’ conclusion that calling party pays is a better model for consumers — just look at the price disparity for both mobile and fixed service between the US and Europe

First of all, a fascinating variation on the Skype and VoIP play on mobile phones. Secondly, it will make business sense only in markets of “receiving party pays” like North America and parts of Asia. Europe is all “calling party pays” and many receiving party pays countries have shifted to calling party pays models as this is considerably more healthy for the telecoms economics and the end-users.

In this case, the so-called “free” portion of receiving the call – which is charged to Skype for calls to European mobile phone numbers – is actually charged to the mobile phone owner as part of RECEIVING the call from the Skype service to the cellphone in America. But as mobile operators have been building ever bigger minute-bundles, the calls are now “hidden among the clutter” of the total minutes buckets that the phone users receive. Nonetheless, the calls are billed to the phone owner, or counted against their total bundle of inclusive minutes. These calls are not free.

In Europe (calling party pays) when we are in our home country we do not pay for receiving calls on mobile phones. That is why European mobile phone owners all keep their phones permanently switched on, while still many American phone owners keep the phone often switched off. In Europe whoever calls a mobile phone number – the calling party – covers the full cost of the (mobile) call. That is why Skype calls to mobile phones in all of Europe are “so expensive”. Yet the costs are the same (or similar) if you call from any fixed landline phone to the mobile phone.

I should point out that no countries are shifting from a calling party pays model to a receiving party pays model but like I said, in many countries they have moved from receiving party pays to calling party pays. The industry financial analysts have proven about 5 years ago that calling party pays is an inherently better model for end-users, they understand the model, like it more, generate more traffic, keep their phones on longer, and do not resent incoming calls. Total traffic grows faster and total revenues grow faster than with receiving party pays models. So for this kind of opportunity, it is a small minority of all countries where this works, and that group of countries is likely to shrink, not grow.

in my humble opinion

Tomi T Ahonen
4-time bestselling author and consultant to the mobile telecoms industry
author of world’s first business book on advanced mobile telecoms, m-Profits, and lecturing at world’s oldest business course on 3G mobile, at Oxford University
website http://www.tomiahonen.com
blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com

Anders, you are correct that SkypeOut may not make sense for mobile to mobile calls in some countries. Skype makes the most sense when both parties have Skype and the call is free. What SoonR Talk adds to the equation is that you can now do this while you are mobile. There are lots of places in the world where this is $0.02 a minute US. In those cases, it makes sense. May I ask what country you are located in?

We are gated by the costs of the wireless infrastructure in some countries as we have to pay someone for their use.

Interestingly enough, we have lots of carrier interest. Although SoonR my affect long distance usage, it still uses mobile minutes so it does not try to totally cut out the carrier. Also carriers need to respond to the increasing availability of wifi. A SoonR based service not only keeps a customer with a carrier using mobile minutes, but it also makes it more compelling for a customer to use a carrier’s data plan, which is a profit center for the carrier.

Remember that billions have been spent building out a 3G infrastructure. Data plans are what pay for that cost.