Determining Saving on Cost of Skype Calls

Look at your most recent phone bill, or bills, as maybe you have both a regular phone and mobile phone. Or better yet, if you still have them, gather several months’ worth of bills. From your itemized list of calls, pick out the 10 most expensive calls.
Now go to the Skype Dialing Wizard at www.skype.com/products/ skypeout/rates/dialing.html, and for each call you have chosen, enter the telephone number and note down the per-minute call rate that the Skype Dialing Wizard gives you. An example of how to get the per minute call rate for a specific number, using the Skype Dialing Wizard, is as shown in the following figure.
Next, round the call duration of each of your chosen calls so that they’re expressed in whole minutes. For example, round a 45-second call up to 1 minute, and round a 5-minute, 25-second call up to 6 minutes. Now multiply these whole-minute call durations by the corresponding SkypeOut call rates you obtained from the Skype Dialing Wizard. Compare these totals with the actual cost of each of the calls on your phone bill. If your calculated numbers are less than your actual numbers from your phone bill, you would have saved money using Skype. And, provided your calling habits don’t change much, you will most likely save money if you use Skype in the future. It’s as simple as that. Keep in mind that there’s no concept of local, long distance, interstate, or international calling in Skype. All call rates are global rates, in the sense that a SkypeOut call rate for a particular destination is good when dialing from anywhere on the planet. If you make a lot of local, toll-free calls—calls that are not itemized on your regular phone bill—then making these calls using Skype will cost you money. Toll-free local calls become toll calls when dialed from Skype. This should be factored into your cost-saving calculations. To estimate your cost of local calls if you were to fully switch to Skype, estimate your monthly minutes of local calling and multiply that number by the SkypeOut rate for your locality (country code plus area code). There’s nothing stopping you from keeping a regular phone for local calls and switching only your long distance and international calls to Skype.