Wednesday, September 24, 2003

The Register: Skype: putting the hype in VoIP

The Register: Skype: putting the hype in VoIP "Reading interviews with the KaZaA founders and looking at their new web site, Skype we think that their second revolution has a chance of being even bigger than their first. Perhaps it's called Skype to rhyme with Hype.
The idea is to use peer-to-peer networks to give free voice over IP telephone calls to the masses, and not just calls to a special instant messenger-like registry of friends, but to virtually anyone.
The KaZaA founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, are the people working on the project.
If you go to their Skype web site you are greeted with the expression "525,000 downloads and counting." In all the articles about Skype this number has mostly been cited as 60,000
The Web never stands still, although Skype has some way to go to reach the 250 million KaZaA downloads. Does this mean that half a million kids have started their own telephone network without asking anyone?
Sounds like it. What if everyone using a P2P network could talk to everyone else on such a network for free? The revenue reduction that has hit music labels will begin to have the same annually deterioratingeffect on telcos."

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