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Skype Pro
Price: £9.20 inc VAT for 5 months

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 19/05/2007
Featured in magazine:
Issue 159
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: Skype
Web Address: www.skype.com


With its free PC-to-PC calls, Skype has revolutionised the way many of us think about our voice communications. Simply add a USB or wireless handset and you can almost forget about making all but emergency calls on a standard landline, since Skype's calls are well discounted, especially if you're calling abroad. But if you're a heavy Skype user and you use the service to call UK landlines, you may be able to save even more by upgrading to Skype Pro, which bundles some of Skype's paid-for services alongside unmetered calls to UK landlines to squeeze out some extra value.

Features
Once you've upgraded to the service, there's little to tell you that it's happened – only that your Skype credit should have gone up by £4. Skype Pro is basically a reshuffle of the standard Skype package, rather than an enhancement to the software. The biggest savings will probably come with unmetered calls to national landlines. There is a connection charge of 3.3p per call and a fair-use policy that limits you to 3,000 minutes – 50 hours – of call time a month. Although landline calls were previously cheaper with Skype than with most standard phone lines, using a fixed-rate subscription rather than pay-as-you-go will save money if you use it a lot (see 'Value for money', below).

Performance
As there's no change in the software or settings, Skype Pro's quality is exactly the same as the standard Skype's. If you haven't yet tried the original, download the software and sample the free service. Call quality is pretty good – you'd expect more from a landline, but for the price you'll be able to justify some reduction in call quality.

Ease of use
As with the performance (since there's no change to the software), it remains as easy to use as ever. If anything, extra features like voicemail merely serve to complicate things – but it's still very simple.

Value for money
OK, let's do the maths. The voicemail service, if you just wanted to add it to your existing pay-as-you-go Skype account, costs from 96p per month for 12 months. If you were making, say, four half-hour calls a week, it would cost you about £7.25 a month (1.4p per minute plus four connection fees of 3.3p per call). With the Skype Pro service costing £9.20 for five months – or about £1.84 a month – you can see that you're going to get significant savings by effectively paying for your calls up front, whether you want the voicemail service or not. The tipping point is actually quite low: if you use Skype to make more than four half-hour calls a month to UK landlines, it's worth swapping over to Skype Pro, and that still doesn't take into account the voicemail. Skype Pro also offers discounts on specific hardware and other service options, including SkypeIn (a number people with landlines can call to reach you on Skype).

More Internet Telephony reviews:

• Skype Pro
• Skype 3.0
• Vonage Wi-Fi Phone
• Freetalk
• Babble