New skype fair usage policy

Skype has just changed its fair usage policy (http://skype.com/legal/terms/fair_usage) and added the 50 numbers per day rule for outbound calls.

Calls to phones and mobiles and Skype To Go* calls are included in your subscription subject to a fair usage limit of 10,000 minutes per user per month, with a maximum of 6 hours per day. Also, no more than 50 different numbers in total can be called per day. If your subscription includes more than one country, then this is the total amount of minutes allowed per month on your account, and is not a separate limit for each country. Once these limits are exceeded Skype will charge normal rates and a connection fee for any additional minutes used. Subscriptions are for individual use only. Each subscription is to be used by one person only and is not to be shared with any other user (whether via a PBX, call centre, computer or any other means).

For heavy outbound call usage, it is recommended to switch account once the limit is reached. Obviously, your actual cost per line will be $2.95 times the number of accounts used. For a line that’s making 500 calls per day, the actual cost is $29.5 per month. It seems Skype need to provide another kind of subscription plan for business use. We recommended you directly post your comments for such plan to skype public forums.

The regular per minute cost is $0.021 for calling US and Canadian landline and cell phones.

With the new cost, for heavy users, the per line cost for Skype is now more in line with the per line cost for landline (local + long distance unlimited calling) or Vonage ($35 unlimited calling). The drawback for using landline or Vonage is that you have to use voice modems.

Can Voicent swich skype account automatically

No, Skype does not offer the auto sign in command through its programming interface.

However, starting from release 6.4.1, and with Enterprise edition, the gateway is capable of starting an unlimited number of lines. Each line can link to a different skype instance. At any given moment, the maximum simultaneous calls are set to the number of licensed lines. For example, if you have a 4-Line system, and you start 10 lines with the gateway, the gateway will then use all 10 lines for calls, but at any given time, will use at most 4 lines. With this “line rotation” feature, you can avoid switching account during the broadcast.

So if we get 10 lines of skype with a 1 line Voicent enterprise license, and load up 500 calls for the day, once the one line is done calling 50 calls, does it then go to the next line without doing anything manual?

Yes, there will be no manual switching once you started 10 lines with 10 different skype accounts.

The gateway rotates to a different line once it finishes a call. It will not wait till it is done calling 50 calls. For example settings mentioned above, the gateway uses line 1 to dial the first number, once it finishes, use line 2 to dial the second number, … If you have exactly 500 numbers to call, line 1 will call row 1, 11, 21, 31, … 491, and line 2 will call the next 50 numbers in the list.