Skype In Chile: Historic RedVoiss Partnership
This is good. The clout of a VoIP telephony service Skype, large international company teaming up with a local VoIP provider is a step in the right direction to firming up Chile's steering away from the third world route advocated by Spanish-owned Telefonica, which would have it that nobody could use its lines to offer cheaper service, monopolization that itself is illegal in Telefonica's country of origin.
I wrote an article in the Santiago Times when the landmark VoIP ruling took place. At least something works here. It seems a poignant irony that 3,000 people were killed, 30,000 tortured in a "war" against "Marxism", in defense of a free market economy, when the final result is dysfunctionalism similar to soviet Russia. Nearly two decades after the end of the "liberal" dictatorship, the stranglehold on the market in the telecom sector is hardly broken, but the first-world VoIP ruling against Telefonica is a welcome sign of (hopefully) thaw.
Another hopeful sign is the slap on the wrist my friend Colin wrote about, dealt to Chilean cell phone company Claro, which reported all its late-payers to Equifax (illegal), plus 13 people who weren't even customers. It's a funny story and I'm glad to see Colin's doing well over there at Business News Americas. Disclosure: Colin's a really nice guy but I think I fell out of favor with him after Chileno became Chile's Favorite Blog. He told me that there were a lot of good Chilean bloggers doing important work in the blogosphere, and I'm sure he's right. However, he couldn't directly contend the title placed upon this blog (I was surprised as you) and so by the looks of it I remain, devotedly, Chile's Favorite Blog.
Anyway, I'm not exactly sure why Chileans would need RedVoiss to offer them Skype's solutions, especially when SkypeIn is now available for Chileans directly via Skype. SkypeIn is the service that allows you to have a normal phone number. I use SkypeIn. I have a "415" San Francisco number and friends, family and colleagues in the US call me, paying local rates, and leave messages or talk with me directly while I am in Chile. I could be anywhere in the world, for that matter. It's awesome, it's incredibly cheap, and you should pick up your credit card and buy it now.
I suppose it's because RedVoiss offers products and solutions for call centers and businesses, stuff that one simply can't get just by downloading Skype software. One other advantage might be that Chileans, like people in many parts of the world, don't really buy things online at all. If they go through RedVoiss, they can probably just walk down and pay the bill in person at their local ServiPag or whatever.
You, however, have no excuse. I know you have a credit card. Whip it out and download SkypeIn right now.
One other thing, I wanted to follow up on that Santiago Times story I wrote where I also cited a Chilean study proving the astronomical cost of broadband in Chile. Well, last month the BCC reported an international broadband internet price comparison. A fascinating study, showing how in Japan I'd pay $0.22 for a megabit per second. I pay about 60 bucks for the same in Chile. Chile wasn't studied, but by this measure it'd rank worse than Mexico. Turkey is the worse. But that's Turkey, man.
Anyway, Leo Prieto's blog FayerWayer notes the beginning of what, to me, looks like a slow-as-usual facade for the government to "look into" improving the inflated price of broadband service in Chile. They'll "study it" for three years while the telecom monopolies continue to screw over Chileans and impede digitization, and then they'll make some recommendations and in the meantime nothing will happen.
Again, don't pretend like this is an excuse. You're reading this blog, you've got broadband internet, a credit card, and you're friends and colleagues WANT to call you for cheap, by dialing a local number, so give them a break for Christ's sake and download SkypeIn.
Skype is an awesome company which, by teaming up with RedVoiss, is cranking up the hairdryer one more notch as it blows onto the glacier of Chile's telecom monopoly. Despite the global warming analogy, this is a good thing. So what are you waiting for???
Download SkypeIn Now.
I wrote an article in the Santiago Times when the landmark VoIP ruling took place. At least something works here. It seems a poignant irony that 3,000 people were killed, 30,000 tortured in a "war" against "Marxism", in defense of a free market economy, when the final result is dysfunctionalism similar to soviet Russia. Nearly two decades after the end of the "liberal" dictatorship, the stranglehold on the market in the telecom sector is hardly broken, but the first-world VoIP ruling against Telefonica is a welcome sign of (hopefully) thaw.
Another hopeful sign is the slap on the wrist my friend Colin wrote about, dealt to Chilean cell phone company Claro, which reported all its late-payers to Equifax (illegal), plus 13 people who weren't even customers. It's a funny story and I'm glad to see Colin's doing well over there at Business News Americas. Disclosure: Colin's a really nice guy but I think I fell out of favor with him after Chileno became Chile's Favorite Blog. He told me that there were a lot of good Chilean bloggers doing important work in the blogosphere, and I'm sure he's right. However, he couldn't directly contend the title placed upon this blog (I was surprised as you) and so by the looks of it I remain, devotedly, Chile's Favorite Blog.
Anyway, I'm not exactly sure why Chileans would need RedVoiss to offer them Skype's solutions, especially when SkypeIn is now available for Chileans directly via Skype. SkypeIn is the service that allows you to have a normal phone number. I use SkypeIn. I have a "415" San Francisco number and friends, family and colleagues in the US call me, paying local rates, and leave messages or talk with me directly while I am in Chile. I could be anywhere in the world, for that matter. It's awesome, it's incredibly cheap, and you should pick up your credit card and buy it now.
I suppose it's because RedVoiss offers products and solutions for call centers and businesses, stuff that one simply can't get just by downloading Skype software. One other advantage might be that Chileans, like people in many parts of the world, don't really buy things online at all. If they go through RedVoiss, they can probably just walk down and pay the bill in person at their local ServiPag or whatever.
You, however, have no excuse. I know you have a credit card. Whip it out and download SkypeIn right now.
One other thing, I wanted to follow up on that Santiago Times story I wrote where I also cited a Chilean study proving the astronomical cost of broadband in Chile. Well, last month the BCC reported an international broadband internet price comparison. A fascinating study, showing how in Japan I'd pay $0.22 for a megabit per second. I pay about 60 bucks for the same in Chile. Chile wasn't studied, but by this measure it'd rank worse than Mexico. Turkey is the worse. But that's Turkey, man.
Anyway, Leo Prieto's blog FayerWayer notes the beginning of what, to me, looks like a slow-as-usual facade for the government to "look into" improving the inflated price of broadband service in Chile. They'll "study it" for three years while the telecom monopolies continue to screw over Chileans and impede digitization, and then they'll make some recommendations and in the meantime nothing will happen.
Again, don't pretend like this is an excuse. You're reading this blog, you've got broadband internet, a credit card, and you're friends and colleagues WANT to call you for cheap, by dialing a local number, so give them a break for Christ's sake and download SkypeIn.
Skype is an awesome company which, by teaming up with RedVoiss, is cranking up the hairdryer one more notch as it blows onto the glacier of Chile's telecom monopoly. Despite the global warming analogy, this is a good thing. So what are you waiting for???
Download SkypeIn Now.
posted by Chileno @ 5:25 PM
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4 Comments:
The prices you quote don't really make sense. I'm in the bandwidth business, as I run an Internet datacenter in the USA which houses tens of thousands of websites... essentially the "other" end of the typical web connection. Our costs are more like $25 US per megabit. [by the way, you misquote the BBC source and use "megabyte" which is incorrect. Networks are measured in megaBITS per second, not megaBYTES. Two VERY different units of measure ...and neither one has anything to do with speed. Speed is a measure of distance/time, not amounts of data. All networks operate somewhere just under the speed of light, but I'll refrain from my usual pedantic rant about that to spare you all.] The real wholesale price of bandwidth is being paid by the folks throwing the content down the wire to you, the web user. The "consumer" price is in reality being subsidized by other parts of the telecommunications spectrum, as the ISP ("eyeball" networks) end of the business has not really done a great job of making their users bear their actual costs. I'm paying roughly ten cents per megabit at home to my local cable co here in America but I know it costs them a whole lot more than that to provide it.
Just a thought from an industry insider.
--chuck
Chileans LOVE Servipac. Seriously, I do not understand this country's fascination with waiting in line and doing paperwork. Damn tramites.
My Chilean mother in law told me it's good for the country because the more lines we have to stand in means the more people that are employed. WTF????
Chuck, thanks, I changed it to megaBIT. I looked and it didn't seem like it, but did I misquote anything else?
Very interesting, though, about the real wholesale cost I had no idea that was a problem. I seem to remember reading the excuse given by one of the Chilean ISP's for the high price, being like "oh we're so far away from the rest of the world" or something similar that sounded like total BS. One thing I might buy is that they didn't have a big dot com boom that helped lay out a huge fiber optic infrastructure, so it's not as cheap.
Anyway, I'm still confused. If companies in the US are losing money by charging you $0.10/Mbps, they've gotta be making it up in other ways. And more importantly, would you agree that about $60/month for 1 Mbps in Chile is exaggerated, or could be?
Mamacita, that's funny. It's also pretty sad that she believes that. Obviously, people could be better employed in skilled work if Chile cared to invest in that. But it doesn't seem to. Chile isn't about people, it's about raw natural resources. Or whatever, the same people taking your payment in person could do so over the phone.
Another issue is that there's a deep mistrust of using credit cards, online payment. Probably same thing with over-the-phone. I heard that a few years ago there was a TV expose in Chile cautioning restaurant patrons to accompany their waiters to the cashier, in order to make sure they didn't steal the number. Totally ridiculous for a number of reasons, one of which is that you should be able to call in and cancel your credit card, file a police report and not pay for the stolen amount. Perhaps that doesn't work, and so people feel more vulnerable. Remote payments are just not a big part of the culture like they are in the US.
Lastly, your suegra has it all wrong because oftentimes long lines are the result of UNDER-employment. When they know they can get away with it (which is often) stingy companies cut costs by staffing only a small percentage of the cashier booths, and customers get screwed over.
Thanks for the post. I've been looking for a way to keep in touch if I ever make it down there, and this service also looks promising (It's slightly cheaper):
"Get a local number in any of 28 countries, making long distance calls virtually free for friends or business associates!
Call In numbers are billed in 3 or 12 month increments for $12 and $35 respectively."
http://gizmoproject.com/call-in.php
I'm going to try it with friends abroad first...
(I'll post back once I've given it a whirl)
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