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Skype

Annoying. So I peruse Skype's website trying to find which offering I need to fulfill my 'forward a VOIP phone # to my iPhone' plan. They offer subscription plans such as the 'US/Canada unlimited calling' plan for $2.95/month. They also offer the 'Online number' subscription plan for $60/year which gives you a 'real phone number.' The former just lets you call real phones from Skype. Aha, I say, I see here that they're offering the Online phone number for half off! Excellent! So I go to buy the Online number. Oh, no they're not - as soon as I go to check out, it comes up at the full price of $60/yr. I go back and hunt around the site - now there's no mention of the deal. Sigh. Whatever. I buy it and set it up, have a friend test it, and sure enough he can call this number and it's forwarded to the iPhone with callerID info intact. I get his message on my iPhone voice mail with proper ID info. Great!

The next day I try it again. Nope. Now callers get a surly female voice saying that the person at this number is not available, leave message after beep. However, the Skype client does show these incoming calls in my history. I try making sure that I have a Skype client running on my Mac while calling, in case they're dumb enough to make that a requirement. Nope, same deal.

So I go back over the website. Yeah, see, when they say 'subscription' for the Online number, they *just* mean the number. No calling plan. So forwarding won't work because of 'insufficient funds' for call out. I'm not sure why it worked the night before. In I go to purchase the unlimited USA/Canada plan for $2.95 a month.

And now it says if I buy a new online number, it'll give me half off. But no way to apply the savings to the one I bought. Fucking bait and switchers.

On the other hand, once I did that, everything worked as expected. So the moral of the story is that when you assemble your services from Skype, make sure you do everything in the right order.

Posted by jbz at July 18, 2008 4:02 PM | TrackBack