Skype's unlimited calling to US and Canadian numbers ends Dec. 31, and they've have the next step: The promotion was ostensibly to see whether people would use the service when price wasn't an issue. Sounds like the numbers came in at the level they wanted. The for-fee version rolls out Jan. 1, when $30 per year or less than $3 per month buys you unlimited calls to the US and Canada from anywhere that Skype operates.
This couples with new Skype Wi-Fi phones and plans, like Belkin's phone that will work with Boingo's aggregated hotspot network. The Belkin/Boingo plan is $8 per month for unlimited use of Boingo hotspots in the US and Canada; there's usually a charge in Boingo's network outside those two countries. The Belkin phone can authenticate with networks encrypted using WEP and WPA/WPA2 Personal, too, for calls on your home network.
Add the under-$3 calling plan, and that's less than $11 per month for a Wi-Fi-only phone that could work remarkably like a cell phone. Quality of calls will be the real issue.
Glen, You miss the other points that even make Skype useable:
$25 a year for Unlimited US/CA LD.
$40 a year for SkypeIn Number
$0 a year for Voicemail (Included with SkypeIn).
Call Forwarding: 2.2 cents per minute per call.
And if you read that Unlimited plan "Fine Print", it's not truly unlimited. There's clauses that state that Skype can one-sidedly terminate your contract. It's like Verizon's "Unlimited" dataplan. So take a second look at the contract terms.
[Editor's note: When this piece was written, Skype hadn't set their unlimited US/Canada calling price yet. I don't want to underplay their contract terms, because I found the terms very onerous, too, but I expect in practice they need a very blunt instrument to keep many people from using the same unlimited account. But they should define more particularly what termination term are.--gf]