Aswath,
Good point re potential to double count. I kept tracking the minutes for the 24 hour period. Call it 36 million for the day. I'm not sure where you get the 1 million calls going on.

In Skype the "users online number" is those that are logged in. Thus it isn't representative of the number of active users or current active calls from what I understand. It's a Kazaa like number.. people on the network. There are dialups and other reasons to log off. Thus the lower the number participating daily the higher the average call time. The on twelve hours is probably conservative..(too long) but then is just a guess. Let's assume it is actually six million users using Skype per day. then the average call time is 6 minutes per hour for 24 hours. That provides a number that is close to two hours unless we are double counting then we are back to an hour which is easier to digest.

Probably means the number logging on is twice the six million. Thus we would still be looking at an average call time per day of well over 30 minutes.

That's where the numbers again become weird. We hear Skype has some 24 million registered users. That doesn't mean active only means they downloaded it and created a profile. Some of these profiles are no doubt double counted users with multiple profiles. The 70 million download number is just bogus and meaningless. Provide a new rev and get more downloads.

So by which ever measure or logic... Skype users (a hypothectical average, the heavy users will go hours) are running up a thousand minutes per month. I suspect it is much higher. So how can mobile operators create a package that enables you and me average to do an additional 1000 minutes or more per month for free?