Once upon a time telephone calls went down specific lines; a ‘switchboard’ was a large, er, board at which an operator sat switching plugs to and fro into holes to connect individual people.
That got automated. Calls became cheaper and cheaper.
Then along came computers. Then the Internet. Based on (very cool) packet-switching – the process by which any piece of information such as an email is instantaneously dismantlked into gazillions of electronic tadpoles, who each find their own way to swim round the world’s telephone lines until they miraculously converge in someone else’s computer as one document again.
This meant that whereas telephone lines had been used overwhelmingly to carry voices, they moved in short order to overwhelmingly carrying electronic data instead. So the relative cost to the network of voice plummeted.
And phone calls got cheaper and cheaper. To the point where a Voice Over Internet Protocol was invented which broke down voice sounds into electronic tadpoles too. Then people could talk via their computers for free. Yay.
Hence the rise and rise of Skype.
Skype lets you talk to anyone in the world who is linked to a computer for free. But (for now) there are still people using landline telephones, so Skype charges you a teensy bit to call from your computer to those lines.
Let’s look at some current charges in cost per minute:
- Argentina: 2p
- Angola: 10p
- Australia: 1p
- Belarus: 14p
- China: 1p
- Cuba: 58p
- Falklands: 38p
- India: 4p
- N Korea: 39p
- S Korea: 1p
- Russia: 3p
- St Lucia: 14p
- St Helena: 80p
- Vietnam: 19p
- Zimbabwe: 5p
Cuba has no excuse for ripping people off like this. It is taxing everyone at home and overseas to pay for its own stupid oppression of its own people. Even more than North Korea?!
Hmm.
It takes a winning combination of greedy Brits and Americans to be the real Skype-cost Champs:
- Diego Garcia: £1.06
Viva Castro!
Down with exploitative capitalism!
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