Many of our customers have considered using Skype as the main communication tool within their company.  When asked for my opinion on that, I’ve always likened the use of Skype for business telephony with the use of Hotmail for business e-mail.  Usually this gets the point across fairly quickly.

While Skype is a nice tool for free person-to-person communications and extremely cheap international telephony, it is not suitable as a main telephony solution for companies.  Now it seems that Skype doesn’t want SMB’s to use it for that either.

In a recent change to Skype’s Fair Usage Policy, a number of new conditions were added:

• you can call a maximum of 50 different numbers per day
• there’s a maximum of six hours of SkypeOut calling per day
• your Skype account cannot be shared with anyone (whether by sharing a computer or by connecting it to a PBX)

This comes on top of the existing 10 000 minutes (167 hours) limit per month.  If either of these limits is exceeded, your calls will be billed at the normal rates and connection fees that apply at the time.  It is not clear how Skype will enforce the third limitation.

If you’re looking at a business service that doesn’t impose any similar limits, and offers cheap telephony with PBX features, have a look at our Sipcat Online solution

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 11:25 CET and is filed under Industry, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.