Skype Impacts International Carriers
VoIP firm Skype claims that it is threatening telecom operator revenue by grabbing a 12 percent share of international calling minutes, making it the largest provider of cross-border communications in the world.
“Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far,” says TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert. TeleGeography, says that international telephone traffic growth has slowed to “only” 8 percent in the past two years (growing from 376 billion minutes in 2008 to an estimated 406 billion minutes in 2009), but VoIP growth has accelerated.
Skype’s on-net international traffic (between two Skype users) grew 51 percent in 2008, and is projected to grow 63 percent in 2009, to 54 billion minutes.
Skype has also enjoyed millions of downloads of its ‘Skype for iPhone’ software on Apple’s App Store, while Skype’s VoIP client has previously been embedded on smartphones from Nokia as well as 3’s Skypephone.
Not all of Skype’s traffic comes at the expense of phone operators though. Skype’s paid-for SkypeOut service, which allows users to make calls to standard telephones, generated about 12 billion minutes of traffic in 2009, and Skype relies on other wholesale carriers to connect this traffic to the telephone network.
Truphone today adds to the list of innovative ways users of its iPhone and iPod touch applications can make and receive free international calls through its partnership with Voxbone, a provider of free +883 iNum numbers. Through the partnership, customers can now make and receive free mobile VoIP calls via other iNum service providers, including Gizmo5, Jajah, Rebtel, and others.
Apple is rumored to have a new iPhone that operates on the Verizon CDMA network, with support as well for the European GSM and HSPA standards. It’s rumored to ship late in second quarter, with LTE support in June 2011. Verizon, like AT&T, is charging more for data and less for voice.
Google Voice is what Fortune’s Apple 2.0 columnist Philip Elmer-DeWitt has called “the universal telephone number and voice mail system the telcos should have offered us years ago.”
With Google Voice you keep an existing mobile number or choose a new one. A new number allows you to manage your different lines by having just a single number for all your phones.
Both users who keep existing numbers and those opting for a new one can personalize voice messages depending on the caller. You can also have voicemails transcribed and sent to you as email as well as SMS to your mobile.
Google may not be providing the connectivity between callers, the way local phone operators AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and others do, but it decouples your phone number from a carrier in the same way that your email address is no longer attached to your Internet provider. The result: it weakens customer loyalty to any particular phone company, says Forrester’s Golvin.
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