Skype calls to the US and Canada will be free through the end of the year. The eBay unit move is a step toward increasing its North American user base and better competing against IM/voice services from Yahoo, AOL, and others, as well as Vonage, which just launched its IPO.

This service is called Skype Out, wherein a Skype user initiates a P2P call from the user computer to a regular phone number. The call is routed to a Skype server that switches the call from the Internet to a local telephone exchange where the call is treated like a regular local phone call. Skype originally started as a pure P2P voice service that was strictly over the Internet.
Skype had about $60 million in sales last year and expects that to increases to $200 million in 2006.