Fifteen global telcos team to take on Skype - not such a daft idea

By Stuart Corner
Friday, 09 May 2008 05:45

Opinion and Analysis

The most spectacular rumour doing the rounds of telecoms and IT news sites right now must be that 15 of the world's biggest carriers - AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom, NTT etc - are planning to launch their own free VoIP service to compete with, and hopefully destroy, Skype. Does this have any legs?

Well, for a start, its provenance is pretty good: it comes from ThinkEquity analyst Anton Wahlman, who has a track record of prescience. According to blogger Om Malik he "is full of theories that have eventually been proven right," most notably that that Cisco would buy Scientific Atlanta.

Wahlman is suggesting that all 15 participants would offer a common VoIP client that their customers would install on a PC and which would enable them to call free to any one of the subscribers of the 15 participants that was logged on - exactly the same way that Skype works. A mobile client was also suggested.

If you get beyond the initial reaction that these guys are shooting themselves in the foot and think about it, there are many sound reasons for such a move. Number one: the inexorable growth of Skype which is draining their revenues anyway, not to mention other VoIP services which are more akin to traditional PSTN services. Like any network, the more people who are on it the more useful it becomes and with Skype now running at over 300 million registered users it's very useful indeed.

Second there is the rapidly increasing functionality of Skype that brings it more and more into direct competition with traditional phone services: such as last month's release, in beta of a mobile 'thin' client that works on about 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.  This came only days after Skype announcing that it had extended 'unlimited' international calling to 34 nations containing over a third of the world's population.

Skype is truly becoming a force to be reckoned with, but it nevertheless has some significant weaknesses which leave it open to attack, especially from established players such as the big telcos. CONTINUED