Free Long-Distance Calls…Almost

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  But there are cheap lunches, especially in long-distance communications. One of them got a little less cheap today.  Skype, the service that routes calls via the Internet, announced a a new "Unlimited Calling Plan" that allows customers to call anywhere in the U.S. and Canada for an annual fee of $29.95 a year.  You can find their press release HERE. That’s actually a price hike; the service had been free since May, when they were trying to keep potential customers from drifting to such competitors as Vonage.  Sign up by Jan. 31 and they’ll give half off–$14.95  It will still be free for a year if you rush and sign up by the end of December.  More HERE.  But even if you don’t make the deadline, just do some math.  Thirty dollars a year for long-distance?  I’d hardly be surprised if you spend that in a month for conventional long-distance service. (Skype presumably has deep pockets, by the way; they were bought by eBay last year.) You do need to download some software, and, depending on the phones you have to go with it (no, they’re not free), you may have to keep your computer running.  But once you get past the notion of a Ma Bell phone on the kitchen wall with a crank on the side, well, the future is here. I had a tickle of a memory in the back of my head when this last came up.  Arthur C. Clark, co-author with Stanley Kubrick of "2001: A Space Odyssey," wrote several sequels.  In "2061: Odyssey Three" (1987, Del Ray publishers), he predicted that "with the historic abolition of long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one large, gossiping family." So he was off by six years.
(A Skype handset.  Reuters photo.)