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The plans allow customers to make unlimited calls to a single country of their choice for the £2.25 fee; calls to 20 different European countries for £3.39 a month; or calls to 24 countries worldwide, including US mobiles, for £7.99 a month.

Skype says there's no obligation to sign up for lengthy contracts, although it's dangling the carrot of a 33% discount to customers prepared to sign 12-month deals.

As ever in the ill-defined world of the internet, unlimited doesn't actually mean unlimited, with Skype applying a fair use policy of 10,000 minutes per month. Considering that's around five-and-a-half hours per

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day, you'd have to be talking the hind leg off a donkey to come anywhere close to that limit.

Only UK landlines beginning with 01 and 02 are included in the call plan.

The monthly subscriptions are a clear attempt to derive more regular income from the faltering VoIP service. Last year, Skype's owner Ebay admitted it paid too much for the company when it bought it for $4.3 billion in 2005.

The move plunges Skype into direct competition with BT and the mobile networks, which often include a generous amount of "free" calls with their monthly subscriptions. Research shows that customers rarely consume their allotment of "free minutes" on mobile contracts, which poses the question of why they would pay Skype for extra minutes?

"This move is a natural step for Skype," says the company's vice president and general manager of telecoms, Stefan Oberg. "Skype was founded on the principle of making free voice and video calls available to people all around the world. And now we're making it even easier for the Skype community to call their friends and family who are not yet on Skype."