Skype - free calls from Papua New Guinea

Since the start of November 2008 I have being able to make free calls to Australia land line telepones and 29 other countries through Skype. Currently Skype is running a promotion where for the next 30 days you will be able to make free calls to a number of selected countries around the world. When I say free I am not taking into account the megabytes that are used for the calls. So there is some cost by it is an ISP that is making money instead of say Telikom or Digicel.

I personally have being using Skype for well over 2 years now to ring friends and family overseas which uses VoIP. I have found that this has dramatically decreased my phone bill. For example if you were to ring from your Digicel mobile in Papua New Guinea to a telephone land line in Australia it would cost you 99 toea per minute using Digicel. Normally when there are no Skype promotions on and you are ringing from Papua New Guine to Australia it would cost almost 3 australian cents. Which when converted at todays exchange rate of around 0.54 Aus$ to 1Kina it would cost you all most 6 toea per minute to call an Australian land line. You don't have to be a Uinversity of PNG accounting student to work out that you are saving 93 toea per minute by using Skype.

There is a large potential business use for this technology in Papua New Guinea. For starters companies can use Skype to call overseas to reduce their phone bills. They can also set up overseas numbers that are linked to there Skype account so when people from overseas want to call them they can dial a local number in the country that they are in, so that the call cost will be for a local call instead of an international call. Better yet people can do Skype to Skype calls so it will only cost you the megabytes that you are using. You can also do video conferences, instant messaging, send text messages to mobile phones, transfer files, etc.

Only real draw back of using Skype in PNG for the wantok on the street apart from an internet connection would be the ability to have access to a credit card. But now with the introduction of Bank of South Pacific's Visa debt card it would make it more viable for wantok's to pay for top ups of their Skype accounts.

I know as a fact that some of the large mining companies in Papua New Guinea are already using Skype to communicate. For example one of the mines that has a very remote site uses Skype to communicate the weather details so that helicopters that fly in and out of their site are aware of the weather forecasts in the area.