Unlimited calls coming?

Link: Telegraph | Money | Deal with Skype paves way for free mobile calls on the internet.

City analysts warned yesterday that if 3’s Skype service proves successful, larger rivals such as Vodafone will come under more pressure to offer free internet calls themselves, and to cut prices further for traditional calls over their networks.

"This is a very big deal," said Cyrus Mewawalla of Westhall Capital. "Investors in mobile stocks are going to get a massive shock at some point this year from a big downgrade. No matter what the networks do voice prices are going to come down."

This is a story firstly relating to Skype’s recent announcement with 3.  It’s quite exciting to see a ‘mainstream media’ article on the subject talking openly about downward pressure on calls.

How long can a consumer contenance spending 40p a minute from their mobile when the nice people at 3 will give you unlimited calls for one fixed fee?

With o2 already offering unlimited intra-network calls, how soon before the unlimited price plans start appearing?

It’s ripe. Absolutely ripe. Carnage too, from a revenue perspective, especially if your data revenues aren’t increasing dramatically enough to counter the lost revenue.

A note on Skype via 3:  I wonder how good it will actually be?  They can’t afford to put it to market ‘almost’ working.  The 3 network is pretty good for data from my day to day experience of it, but you know what, if my life depended on it, I’d use Vodafone.  Similarly with all the live mobile data services we have (where we’re running text-to-screen for a big concert in the middle of a field, for example), we don’t dare use anything but our Vodafone connect cards.  More and more though I think this is down to habit and psychosomatic tendancies than reality.  Because historically I’ve always found Vodafone more reliable, that tends to inform my perspective nowadays.  Thought I’d point this out.  That said, I haven’t met one person who’s had a good thing to say about T-Mobile’s data card.  (If that’s you, email me and I’ll stick up your comments).