Skype 2.8 beta in the wild
Dan dropped me a line on this earlier.
“Skype 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X provides screen sharing, WiFi access, chat features and Twitter-like mood messages”
My initial thought was “wow, incredible, at last two industry leaders Boingo and Skype get it together”
Then I happened to read through Dan’s post and came to
Probably the largest “new” feature is “Skype Access”, a service that lets you go to any of the 100,000 Boingo WiFi hotspots and – using Skype – connect to the Boingo hotspot. When you connect, you pay on a per-minute basis and the fee (roughly 20 cents per minute) is deducted from your Skype Credit. You do not have to pay the Boingo monthly fee. You do not have to pay any hourly or daily fees.
$12 per hour for Skype, No thanks Guv, I gave at the office
This is an incredible poor pricing structure and would be worth Skype users getting a dedicated Boingo account at a dollar a day. 5 minutes on “Skype access” would pay your daily fee to Boingo.
There should be no issue whatsoever for Skype to bring this to 5-10c then I think we would have a compelling story.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6c9384c6-9a20-424a-ac41-b05861b0ff12)
Or of course you could pop next door to the coffee shop, hook up to their free WiFi and just use Skype in the usual way for free.
I know you can’t get free WiFi everywhere, but I’ve been surprised by how often I have been able to find a free access point while out and about of late.
The appeal of Skype Access is the fact that you can pay with your Skype Credit, and pay by the minute – if you just need to make a quick call or send a couple of emails, you can connect for a few cents/pence with a few clicks.
It’s not intended to replace subscription access, and, as you point out, heavy users would be better off with an alternative deal