2005-06-08 - Skype expands VoIP services
WASHINGTON, June 8 (UPI) -- Skype, one of the world's fastest-growing telecommunications companies, has launched two new premium services that will expand its Voice over Internet Protocol capabilities into conventional telephony -- although experts doubt the service will challenge that industry sector.
"SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail enhance the basic free Skype and give friends, family and colleagues not connected to the Internet an inexpensive and convenient way to contact members of our global user base," Niklas Zennström, Skype's chief executive officer and co-founder, said in a statement.
"They needed to make the shift to make money," said Patrick Ross, vice president of communications and external relations for The Progress and Freedom Foundation in Washington, a digital-technology think tank.
"Their current model is great at attracting customers, but is not effective in generating revenue," Ross told United Press International.
A free download of Skype allows users with Internet connections to make free VoIP calls to other users of the program. In its first 18 months of existence, the company, based in Luxembourg, claims to have enrolled 41 million users, with an average 150,000 new users joining each day and a total of 118 million downloads of its software.
SkypeOut -- as the company's current premium service offering is known -- has 1.5 million registered users and allows access to traditional telephone lines at an average rate of 2 cents per minute.
Now, SkypeIn will give users a telephone number to receive calls as well. It costs $39 per year and shifts the company from its roots as a peer-to-peer service to a commercial service.
Despite Skype's rapid growth, it may not become a company to rival Vonage, the broadband telephone carrier, or traditional long-distance competitors, according to some industry analysts and even the company itself. Skype only recently created an option for billing its customers through PayPal. It also does not currently offer any live customer support or emergency services.
"There remain questions about the level of service they will be able to provide and the move may also open them up to regulation," Ross said.
"Skype is not a replacement service to traditional telecom companies that offer access to emergency services and function without electrical power. Just as e-mail is free but people still pay for (and use) the fax, we believe that voice calls using Skype's P2P software is an enhanced alternative to other ordinary telephones," Kat James, Skype's public relations representative, told UPI in an e-mail.
Executives at Vonage, the leading telephone-replacement VoIP provider, think the launch will not bring Skype into direct competition with it, because the two companies' business models and services remain different.
"Skype themselves have said they are not a telephone replacement system," Brooke Schulz, senior vice president of corporate communications at Vonage, told UPI. "From our standpoint, our ability to provide services as a telephone-replacement system is our advantage. That's the difference -- ease of use, the ability to port in a number, and no need to change phone behavior."
Skype's business model "is closer to Google than a traditional telecommunications provider," James said. "Skype does not advocate switching to VoIP. We we offer a free and seamless way to adapt modern telephony, but encourage people to keep their traditional phones to access to emergency services."
The need to connect to a computer in order to use Skype may be a barrier to its widespread adoption and ubiquity, Ross noted. "(Technologically savvy users) may want to experiment with cutting edge technology, but by and large the U.S. voice market is quite traditional and would have to be weaned away from older technologies. Consumers want their telephony experience to be seamless."
Arthur Rosenberg, principal analyst with Unified-View, a communications-convergence consulting group in Warrington, Pa., agreed.
"When it comes to end users, the bottom line is the interface," Rosenberg told UPI. "They couldn't care less about the infrastructure involved."
AOL, Microsoft Network and Yahoo! all have announced they would incorporate similar, free, peer-to-peer VoIP features into their respective instant-messaging programs. Some analysts see Skype's premium-service launch as indicative of a larger trend in the telecom industry toward providing a single communications solution.
"The goal is convergence to one device for everything I do," Rosenberg said. "Everyone wants to provide this convergent technology. Bill Gates wants to do it. Cisco and server manufacturers want to do it, and the traditional (telecom) companies want to do it. Skype is just (serving) one element of that by providing cheap VoIP phone calls."
K.I. Marshall is an intern for UPI Science News. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com
Copyright 2005 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
Taken from Science Daily.
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