At TheFeature:
With 52 million downloads and counting since its commercial launch in August 2004, Skype [is] estimated to carry 25% of annual VoIP traffic (as counted by TeleGeography), or the equivalent of 4% of total international traffic worldwide. The impact of Skype and other VOIP applications could put a serious dent in mobile operators' revenues.
4% of total international calls! Astounding growth, if true. I wonder how they came up with this figure. And "serious dent" is a "serious understatement"!
Another company highlighted in the article:
Established in 2002, Nimcat's objective is to provide P2P telephony to small and mid-size businesses with less than 100 extensions at a low cost. Put simply, employees can buy a Nimcat-powered phone, plug it into their company's existing LAN, and make calls to colleagues throughout the enterprise.
Nimcat's focus, for now, isn't on replacing operators. "We're not out to change the carrier space. What we're changing is the enterprise," explains Marc Gingras, Nimcat's VP of product management. "Communication between branch offices of a company is direct and takes place through what we call the nimTUNNEL, which is similar to a VPN connection, saving businesses a ton of money in long-distance and roaming costs."
May a thousand Nimcats flourish.
Another more radically innovative company:
Popular Telephony's Peerio P2P technology targets large enterprises, and ultimately seeks to create a parallel network on top the IP network of Peerio-enabled devices that would allow communication between users without the need for call-controlling servers, switches, proxies or gatekeepers. "Information in the network is stored everywhere because it's stored nowhere, says founder and CEO Dmitry Goroshevsky. "It's distributed, so there is no bottleneck."
I was wondering how these guys made money. Their website says they licence their technology to semiconductor and communications companies. So I wonder whether this means that users of the Peerio phones pay only for the data traffic generated during calls.
Moreover, I imagine that the cost of each call goes down and quality improves as the P2P network gets bigger. Does Peerio benefit in any way by the P2P network of Peerio users growing bigger? (I don't mean the benefit of having a more visible brand; does a bigger network benefit Peerio or the phone manufacturer or data service provider directly?)
Adding to this discussion: what I like most about VoIP is that software is a key ingredient. This means that:
- Adding new features and gee-whizzes is easy. Equally important, modifying, disabling and customising them for individual users is just as easy.
- Up-front costs are very low as compared to conventional phone networks. No physical infrastructure --> no time or money spent on building towers and laying cables.
- Entry barriers are low. In many ways, starting a software company is easy. ("Starting", not "running" and definitely not "successfully running"!)
- They can be implemented on PCs/laptops, PDAs and cellphones, not just the telephone instrument we all know. Apart from the convenience and cost savings this offers (throw the telephone in the bin), think about the various ways one could use the features present in computers to help make phone calls more productive. (Sounds a little abstract, I know. I'll expand later.)
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