The unlimited plan resolves everything. I use Skype to talk to people all over the world on average of 5 hours per day. Works great, integrates with Outlook, and is rock solid. Here's hoping their current technology issue doesn't cause them to go out of business.

well.. with skype you don't haveto spend any extra money if your phone supports skype.. you can just download and install it and it doesn't cost you anything so basically you can do computer to cell calls for free also.. as long as your cell has wifi or.. oh and one more thing with skype.. you can call from regular phone to skype number :) .. so it's basically from cell to comp :D (I usually like google but I'm starting to get scared of it.. as extremely well pointed out.. they(google) are collecting information). oh and how secure is google voice? you know that USA gov isn't such a big fan of skype right? :D and you know why? It's really simple.. they can't listen in what youre talking :D

The "noisy" Donahole has to somehow compensate for his pouring the eBay marketplace down the toilet, a result of all of his bad decisions, of course.

What better way to compensate than to try to squeeze a few more pennies out of another area, and drive those consumers away, too.

I'm afraid there will be no more performance bonuses for this greedy, unscrupulous, disingenuous bunch of incompetents.

The only real questions are, can eBay's board suffer further reductions in revenue and the consequential savage further reduction in profit, and can this "turkey" Donahole possibly survive another Xmas?

that's depressing to hear that, just went prices are going down for services such as Vonage, this goes up. with a new plan vonage is offering you can get unlimited calls to 60 countries (including India as mention in the article) for just $25 a month.

menting.. and with google thing you can call from your computer to regular landline and/or cell? anyhow i think they are doing this because ebay pushing them to make more proffit.. or something.

you're right. I dont think that google voice can do pc to phone calls without using a 3rd party program. i've gotten so used to using skype (and now google voice) to make international calls using my cell phone that i totally forgot about the pc to phone portion.

As you said, you can install Gizmo on your PC and call from GVoice's web interface to your Gizmo's 747 # then basically it does a conference call for free with any landline/cell phone in USA. You can also call from any basic landline to your local GVoice phone # and then make a long distance call (in USA) for free.

Google Voice was def worth the $25 I spent (well spent 3x) buying these GV invites on eBay a month or two ago hehehe... same as I did for Torrent Leech invite ($60 on eBay) -- well worth the money hehehe as well as the Torrent Leech quarterly donations I make that absolve me of the need to keep a 1:1 ratio... ;) Now ya know it's not that hard to reach the 250GB cap Comcast put in place a year ago...

You paid for a google voice invite? I had one since the grandcentral service, but all my friends and family signed up on their site and got an invite within 2 weeks. I guess if you can't wait, you can go to ebay and buy it, but it's free if you have a little patience.

Anyway, on the original topic, most people are switching out of skype to gizmo because of the free phone calls with google voice, so the price increase on skype will only encourage more people to abandon them. It only sweetens the deal that gizmo is open source and sip protocol.

wondering why they are doing this when google voice is gaining steam.
I know that for my international calls, I use google voice now, since google doesn't (yet) charge a connection fee, and their per-minute charge is the same as skype.

Skype right now has probably 10,000 times the number of BETA Google Voice users, so for now they can charge whatever they want as long as it's still competitive -- don't gotta be the cheapest -- can be best/better audio quality and ppl will still choose ya. I'm sure they started charging this BS connection fee while taking full note of their very competent competitors such as Gizmo... They are basically shaking off the 1-min-call customers in favor of 5+ min customers to whom they can eventually give CHEAPER per min rate than anyone else. Connection fees basically encourage you to spend more...

When GVoice goes out of beta phase, then Google may decide to charge money or replace that notion with "short" 10sec voice ads every 5 min chat hehehe or who knows how else (they'll come up with something). They're already transcribing your voicemails so I see the next step as picking up words from your ACTUAL CONVERSATION such as "what should we get mom for her birthday next week?" and play a nice ad within 5 mins "be a good son and buy your mom an Amazon Kindle with 20 of her favorite magazines/newspapers/authors!". Hmmmmm this reminds me my mom's birthday REALLY is coming up in a few weeks...and I *do* wanna get her a Kindle -- lets see if my rich siblings will pitch in. ;)