SEVERAL times a week, your correspondent makes a video call from California to relatives in Japan. He makes a similar number to friends and family in Britain. As, like himself, the recipients all have the Skype client software loaded on their mobile phones, tablets or computers, the lengthy video chats cost nothing. On the rare occasions he has to call an overseas house phone, Skype charges him 2.3 cents a minute.
This is a remarkable deal. Were he to make the same overseas calls from a conventional telephone, he would have to pay $3.10 a minute, plus a $4.95 monthly service charge. Making only 20 international telephone calls a month, each lasting just ten minutes, would add $620 to his monthly telephone bill. That would be an unimaginable luxury.
How come people can make countless calls to places half way around the world for free with services like Skype, yet have to pay hundreds of dollars to do the same using a telephone? The short answer is that one uses the internet to transmit calls, while the other relies on the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to do the job. A more nuanced answer is that the two networks have evolved so...Continue reading
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