RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Skype or Hype?

Stuart Henshall summarizes continuing discussion about the Skype service, including a long posting at Blogcritics by TDavid, who introduced me to the "callto" tag that allows emdedded VoIP telephony in Web pages. The debate now is over what Skype is worth, since there is no business model for calling services. Either Skype goes flat-rate or it gets built on spyware, TDavid concludes, because people who use services like blogrolling seldom pay.

Skype is a short burst at the beginning of something big, but it isn't going to be a proprietary application like Skype. VoIP telephony can be--is--built into a variety of applications already. The address book features of Skype, which are Skype-centric, are not hosted by a centralized server, as with blogrolling, so there should be no cost other than continuing development. A P2P system depends on distributed directories. If your peer doesn't know an address, it asks another peer and another until it finds the address--you can see this in the time it takes to propagate a Skype account across the Net. The real challenge is in making a peered system aware of and easily connected to the plain old telephone network.

TDavid writes that Skype is easy to configure through firewalls, and this is true. But I know of four companies that are doing secure IP peering without the need to provision. Essentially, phone companies have tried to retain control of secure layers of the IP stack to justify charging people to use virtual private networks and this gave programmers a target that produced this wave of unprovisioned secure connections. Thus, Skype's facility with firewalls is a short-lived advantage. Additionally, its non-standard implementation of the Session Initiation Protocol seems like a play to corral users that will become a disadvantage as the market develops. As I said the other day, I don't think the service is the default winner by a long shot. The real business model is in linking VoIP to plain old telephones, including 911, which would make a broadband connection into a true phone instead of a closed P2P system like Skype. Stuart Henshall is hosting a dinner to discuss Skype on Wednesday; I can't come down for it, but I'll be listening -- maybe via Skype. Does anyone know if the restaurant where Stuart and gang are meeting has Wi-Fi? Skype me (you'll need to download Skype and install it before clicking that link) if you know.