Skype announced the public beta launch of two commercial services: inbound calls to a Skype users from the PSTN and voicemail. Separately, Skype announced an agreement with TDC Song to provide call termination services and numbering allocations for Skype premium offerings. TDC Song joins previously announced carriers, including B3G Telecom, Cable and Wireless, COLT, HGC, iBasis, Level3 and Teleglobe, in providing global termination and premium services.
SkypeIn provides customers with a regular telephone number so that they can receive inbound calls to their Skype client from ordinary fixed telephones or mobile phones. The Skype software client receives the call from any location where the user has broadband access. Users may purchase up to three numbers from their home country in Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States during the beta period. Three month SkypeIn subscriptions are available for €10 ($13) and 12 month subscriptions for €30 ($39).
Skype Voicemail enables customers to receive a voicemail message up to 10 minutes long from any user or traditional phone. Skype Voicemail customers may record their own personalized voicemail greeting, playback their messages, even while offline, and send incoming calls to voicemail if they away, offline or simply busy on another call.
Skype Voicemail subscriptions are available for €5 ($7) for 3 months or €15 ($19) for 12 months, and a free subscription is included with all SkypeIn orders.
Skype also updated several key metrics:
- Total downloads to date have exceeded 100 million. The company now has more than 35 million registered users.
- More than 150,000 new users are signing up per day.
- Skype has now enabled more than 7 billion minutes of talk time
- More than 1.2 million people are now using SkypeOut, which allows global calling to public telephone numbers for local rates
http://www.skype.com
