The suggested retail price for the devise is $69.95, including the entire first year of phone service and only $29.95 each year after.
I'm not among those who think voice now is a true commodity, like sugar, flour or unleaded gasoline. Most of us can point to instances where we use one form of voice rather than others, to communicate with different people, with whom we have different relationships, in different places, about different things.
A unit of one true commodity is literally interchangeable with a unit of that same commodity produced or delivered by any other entity. Skype video between Asia and North America is not interchangeable with mobile service used locally or within a single nation. Both of those usage modes are different from a desktop business phone using IP telephony between various global locations, or a consumer's home phone used mostly in "inbound" mode.
All of those use cases are different from a Facebook or other web app that is enabled with voice.
Nor are the revenue cases similar. A minute of use on a high-end telepresence system might not cost any more than a simple peer-to-peer Skype video session. But the total cost of ownership is quite different. A minute of mobile voice does not generate the profit margin of a minute of domestic landline voice, in most cases.
That said, it might be hard to find an observer who really believes voice services, overall, are high-margin products anymore. They can be, but the overall trend is towards less margin. A mobile customer with a 400-minute monthly bucket, costing $40,. who only uses 100 of those minutes has an effective cost per minute of 40 cents a minute. That would be a high-margin product.
A user on a prepaid plan with calls to India at one cent a minute would be paying less, after adding in any per-call charges, and depending on the length of any particular call.
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