With the availability of an iPhone Skype client with background availability, I wanted to find out, how much it would cost me if I move calls from the regular mobile network over to Skype over 3G.
Doing VoIP over 3G is a non-issue from a political standpoint here in Switzerland as there are no unlimited data plans available and the metered plans are expensive enough for the cellphone companies to actually be able to make money with, so there’s no blocking or anything else going on over here.
To see how much data is accumulated, I hold a phone conversation with my girlfriend that lasted exactly 2 minutes in which time, we both talked. Before doing so, I reset the traffic counter on my phone and immediately afterwards I checked.
After two minutes, I sent out 652 KB of data and received 798 KB.
This is equal to around 750 KB/minute (being conservative here and gracefully rounding up).
My subscription comes with 250 MB of data per month. Once that’s used, there’s a flat rate of CHF 5 per day I’m using any data, so I really should not go beyond the 250MB.
As I’m not watching video (or audio) over 3G, my data usage is otherwise quite low – around 50MB.
That leaves 200MB unused.
With 750KB/minute, this equals 4.4 hours of free Skype conversation. Which is something I would never ever reach wich means that at least with skype-enabled people, I can talk for free now.
Well. Could.
While the voice quality in Skype over 3G is simply astounding, the solution unfortunately still isn’t practical due to two issues:
- Skype sucks about 20% of battery per hour even when just idling in the background.
- Skype IM doesn’t know the concept of locations so all IM sent is replicated to all clients. This means that whenever I type something for a coworker, my phone will make a sound and vibrate.
2) I could work around by quitting Skype when in front of a PC, but 1) really is a killer. Maybe the new iPhone 4 (if I go that route instead of giving Andorid another try) with its bigger battery will be of help.
gnegg 