Skype cut SMS charges in half

Link: Skype

I use Skype. I know lots of people who use Skype. I quite like it personally, but I’ve never really used it for SMS. So I was actually quite interested when this offer popped into my inbox.

Here’s the deal. Until May 8th, you can get 50% of texts sent to Austria, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand and the USA. So if you’re in the UK, instead of paying 6.2p to text your mates in Ireland, it’s now 3.1p. Belgium has gone from 6.5p down to 3.25p, and so on and so forth.

It’s a great idea, but where’s the UK in that list of countries? The current rate is 5.6p, which ain’t bad – but 2.8p would be even better. Yes ok I know that’s 0.2p below the ‘official’ interworking charges that the UK operators levy on each other for termination of text, but I know for a fact that if you have a large enough amount of traffic there’s some very good deals that can be done direct with the networks – therefore avoiding any interworking/termination costs.

Russell Shaw over at ZDNet has written a brief blog entry about his thoughts on why Skype are making this offer. Only time will tell what their master plan is..