Skype, well rhymed with “hype,” has come to town. Over the last month or so it seems just about every major newspaper and trade journal has had at least one story on this latest kick in the pants from the folks who brought the world Kazaa. Last time these people planted a good one on the posterior of the music industry and this time they are aiming at a very tender spot in the anatomy of telephonis gigantis (the traditional phone companies).
In case you’ve somehow missed it, Skype is a peer-to-peer phone overlay network that runs atop the Internet. The beta software has been downloaded about 3 million times since becoming available at the end of August. With this software, anyone with a PC running Windows 2000 or Windows XP can talk with other Skype users anywhere in the world, even those behind network address translators.
Skype uses proprietary software and is not supported on any other platforms, nor can it connect to the traditional phone world, where there are some 2 billion phones. Skype says it will support some other platforms in the future and will set up a way to call normal phones and non-Skype IP phones in the future.
The software and service currently is free but new functions such as calling traditional phones will cost money. Skype phone calls use the microphone and speakers in the PC or you can buy a headset. There is currently no way to plug your regular phone into your PC to use Skype.
The company says the voice quality is better than regular phones, as long as you have enough bandwidth – higher dial-up connections are OK as long as you do not try to do anything else at the same time. But using the service over a broadband connection is a better idea.
Some reporters say Skype is right about the quality. I cannot say one way or another because the software will not run on my Macs.
It is hard to say if Skype will be as important in shaping the future of telephony as Kazaa looks like it will be in reshaping the music industry.
Regulators could try to close it down tomorrow, or the cable and telephone companies that bring you broadband Internet services could mess up these services just enough to make Skype calls sound bad. Skype says it had 100,000 simultaneous users by late October but that is a very small drop in the telephone ocean.
The Boston Globe reported that some stock analysts described Skype as “a giant meteor hurtling on a collision course” with the incumbent phone companies. It would take quite a giant meteor. I trust these analysts were not ones who told their clients to buy Enron stock. Other analysts seem to be stuck in the phone industry mentality that says Skype cannot actually work because the Internet does not have any quality-of-service guarantees.
I expect the truth is somewhere in between. Skype and the many other companies that can support “free” phone calls over the Internet will, at the very least, give us pundits something to talk about for a while. Keep in mind that telephonis gigantis is a hard beast to kill – just look at the dead bones of hundreds of competitive local exchange carriers.
Disclaimer: Harvard has museums full of the dead bones of things that failed Darwin’s testing, but the above pundit fodder observation is my own.
Bradner is a consultant with Harvard University’s University Information Systems. He can be reached at sob@sobco.com.
