Daily Archives: October 17, 2008

Qwest in trouble for early termination fees

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Qwest is in trouble for hurting their customers who have gone shopping for a new broadband provider. According to FierceTelecom, former Qwest customers in Minnesota and Washington (State) have taken Qwest to court in Seattle to challenge its practice of early termination fees for broadband services.

These guys had signed up for Qwest’s Price for Life service and decided life was a little too long. When they cancelled their orders they were charged $200. The Price for Life is really only two years but the customers claim that they didn’t sign a contract.

Skype – is it the killer app?

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I just read on IP Democracy that Skype is on a slow but steady rise. They are running into problems monetizing their services partially because the PC-to-PC calls are free, so it’s hard to make it up in volume. But the PC-to-phone calls do cost money. And the number of subscribers is rising.

I was a big Skype user last year when I was in Ireland. The quality of the calls is not always great – but the price is. But I think the reason Skype is slowing rising is because of Oprah.

Oprah now has guests join them the program via Skype. So now every Oprah fan knows what Skype is – that’s a lot of potential subscribers.

So in my quest for the killer app, Skype is a contender, partially because I like it and partially because with the sign of approval from Oprah I think they’ll have a critical mass of users soon. I have to add that the quality of service is always better on Oprah than it was for me in Dublin.