Boingo Brings Skype Access to 100,000-Plus Wi-Fi Hotspots

January 6th, 2009 at 10:55 AM - News by Brad Cook

Boingo Wireless and Skype on Tuesday announced an agreement that will allow Skype users to make calls from over 100,000 Boingo Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide via a feature called Skype Access, which will be included in the Skype for Mac 2.8 Beta software released the same day. Skype said the feature will make its way into other versions of Skype "sometime in 2009."

Via Skype Access, users can connect to a Boingo Wi-Fi hotspot and pay per minute only for the time they spend on a call, paid with Skype Credit. Skype Access alerts users to available Boingo hotspots and uses a pop-up box to tell them the price per minute.

Skype for Mac 2.8 Beta offers several other new features, including screen sharing for transferring content to other users, better chat management, mood message chat, easier adding of people to chats, the ability to add contact notes in their profile windows, support for images up to 256 by 256 pixels, and default hiding of avatar images that others may find unpleasant.