DISQUS

VentureBeat: How much will Skype pay EU carriers for the success of its iPhone App?

  • RH · 8 months ago
    The article says Skype "clogs the data channel". Can anyone quantify the bandwidth that Skype uses on a per second or per minute basis for a voice call? It would be helpful to compare Skype to the effects of Youtube or downloading media rich pages like espn.com

    i.e. is this a data usage issue or a substitution of revenue (voice minutes) issue? The article presents both arguments but I'm not sure I understand if the former is true for Skype.
  • matthaus · 8 months ago
    @RH. Carriers usually don't disclose this type of information, so verified quantified data is pretty hard to get. So you can take the statement related to "It goes over WiFi, clogs the data channel and doesn’t do anything for operator revenue" as circumstantial evidence I've repeatedly heard from carrier folks. Carriers seem to dislike Skype for both the data usage and the substitution of revenue issue.

    Still, I've managed to digg up some related numbers around this which I will be happy to share in one of my next posts.
  • Garrett Smith · 8 months ago
    @ RH

    Skype's entire technology is proprietary so exacts are hard to come by (as Matthaus stated). Skype's new wideband voice codec SILK, though, boasts 12 - 40 kb/s.
  • jd · 8 months ago
    Maybe something got lost in the translation but I had a hard time understanding this article. For starters, you lost me with "Skype lets users make calls over their phone data plans". But thankfully backtracked with "except in the US and Germany".
  • matthaus · 8 months ago
    The exact statement is "Skype’s iPhone application, which lets users make cheap or free calls over their phone data plans, is a raging success."

    I'm not doing any backtracking on this, I believe. The point of this article is that the EU bill gives operators more power, including the power to block or charge applications like Skype if they wish so. This is part of a wider trend. My references to the MWC hopefully show that carriers push to get additional data revenue from all the apps we use on our iPhones and G1s. This should ring alarm bells with all the developers which create data-intensive applications.
  • Stephane · 7 months ago
    The big WINNER of the VoIP on mobile is the "SIP"!

    The SIP is an open multimedia protocol. Majority of the VoIP providers (Vonage, Gizmo, ippi ..) use SIP today except Skype who is proprietary.

    Anyone who has a Wi-Fi mobile and a SIP account from any SIP provider, can call for free any customers of any SIP providers. That's the BEST thing of the SIP.

    You can also call international cheaper and get access to a lot of great services.

    Of course, the SIP call can be made from over 3G, but restricted by the cellular provider. Too bad...
  • rajeshrao · 5 months ago
    I'm wondering who will be the first to launch a data only plan without normal voice calls, in which you can do anything you want and only use VoIP for making and receiving calls!