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Businesses Discover Skype
prostoalex writes "Businesses are starting to pay closer attention to Skype as executives discover that VoIP application can cut the long distance and international call costs. News.com mentions two companies - Aruba Wireless Networks and Ruhrpumpen. The former placed a Skype button on its Web page, the latter put the Skype usernames in its intranet employee directory."
That's pretty impressive. Next thing you know, businesses will be walking and talking.
Aruba Wireless Networks and Ruhrpumpen
Ruhrpumpen. Best company name ever. Bet they have many Blinkenlights.
i think skype would work well in my business place. we use irc now, but that means i have to type :-/
it's about time the people that can really benefit from this technology take note of it. hopefully the savings will be passed down to the consumer?
My employer for eample, will be a hard nut to crack in getting him convinced that VOIP is viable. What should my strategy be?
i recently visited the bristish virgin islands, and saw an insurance company there using skype for internal calls and external long distance.
... corporate executives start to realise it's cheaper to use the internal phone system than calling their employees from their mobile whenever they're both inside the building ;)
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Posting a Skype link on their website is brave, to say the least. It costs no money or effort to call through Skype, so there is nothing to stop any random browser from calling them up just for laughs.
We have a geographically diverse team from (ranging from west coast US, east coast US, South Africa and India). We use Skype for our weekly conference calls. The audio quality is much better than telco lines (most of the time).
All the worlds indeed a
If people used Asterisk Combined with e164.org free lookups the whole process becomes transparent, and people don't have to go out of their way to make "special" cheap/free calls, it can all be done automatically at the PABX/PBX level and all the person thinks is they've made a call, they don't care how it got to the person.
...I'll say it again. Skype rocks. My mother is one of the most technophobic human being alive. When she found out that she could call my sister in Turkey from the U.S. using Skype, and save a ton of money in the process, once I demo'd it for her, she asked me to set it up. NOW they talk nearly every day. There has NEVER been any technical trouble...except for that time she insisted that she couldn't hear my sister...turns out the volume was turned down on her iMac :)
Skype is a great application that can provide you with low cost computer to landline phone calls, or FREE computer to computer. I highly recommend it.
Another "executive" just discovered a half eaten donut in his shirt pocket, but was unavailable for comment due to an all-day catered meeting where lobster thermadore and steamed crab were served on a $40,000 table.
More news as it becomes available.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Now if I could explain why the Skype client tries to connect to lots of shady looking addresses (dhcp/DSL, in various countries etc) when I launch it in OSX, I'm sure I'd give it another try...
Until then, I'll just declare it spyware.
This is insightful...in WHAT universe?
A link with your Skype Username in your webpage is a good move, like using your email or msn contact.
If I want to call help desk support in Europe I can do it.
The problem are the jokes, but we have spam too, right?
ajf
Their phone rates are more expensive than can be had with cheap calling cards. They also seem to charge in Euros which is a 30% premium on already not very cheap rates.
So Skype got its product placed into a news.com(.com!) story, already a marketing coup, and then got that placed on the Slashdot front page (a dubious marketing coup). A couple of tiny businesses are riding Skype. What's the big deal?
--
make install -not war
"Now if I could explain why the Skype client tries to connect to lots of shady looking addresses (dhcp/DSL, in various countries etc) when I launch it in OSX, I'm sure I'd give it another try...
Until then, I'll just declare it spyware.[emphasis mine]"
"But hey, if it looks like spyware to you or you're paranoid, don't use it. Nobody forces you to."
Sounds like that's what he's doing.
The security of the calls placed over VOIP is a concern for many larger corporations. Also, Skype's peer-to-peer model is frowned on by corporations because it uses the PCs resources to facilitate the larger network. I'm not an expert on this stuff, just reporting what I've seen, but it seems like the VOIP vendors need to add security (SSL tunnels?) to the calls by default and allow people to opt out of the peer-to-peer model for a fee... at least if those companies are trying to get the business of large corporations.
but not good for businesses. Skype doesn't offer the "carrier grade" telephony quality/reliability/features businesses are looking for. It's great as a additional line but that's it.
Check out http://voip-info.org/ for a listing of business class VoIP solutions. The best part of something like Skype is outsourcing your communications. You no longer have to be running a PBX in your business. It's what CENTREX was supposed to be.
sig on vacation
voice chat functionality has been in windows/linux for years, Netmeeting (installed by default in 2k/xp), ICQ has voip, MSN has voip, Vonage etc have been used widley yet skype gets all the attention, superior marketing or ignorant webusers who dont realise the free functionality built into their operating system ?
or perhaps its just skype rhymes with hype for a reason
Voice chat is just sooo 90's
Das computermachine is nicht fur geffingenpoken und mittengrabben!!
You could've hired me.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/28/0 013234
One thing that occured to me is the possibility that a malicious user could exploit this (like any other nifty technology).
I'm not VoIP guru, so do you have any idea what are the critical points/areas of Skype or VoIP for that matter?
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
I am sitting in a hotel room in Chennai, India talking to my girlfriend back in Phoenix .... for free (yes ... I have a pretty girlfriend and I can type and talk at the same time.) We use the Vonage broadband phone at home, and I have installed the Vonage SoftPhone on my PC. All calls, anywhere in the world, to another Vonage phone from my PC are free and don't count against my minutes. I can call into conference calls for work for free because they are toll-free numbers, again from anywhere in the world with a decent Internet connection. Calls to non-Vonage phone are inexpensive if I go over my minutes, which I haven't done in 6 months.
Before I installed the SoftPhone, my mobile stopped working after a week and Cingular can't get it to work again. I called the office and talked from the hotel for 100 minutes. The cost ?? $500US.
VoIP is the way to go. The commercial offerings are cheaper than land lines and have more features, plus the portability and usability are awesome.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I am always happy to see an original idea catch on, but I think the bigger story is VoIP in general, especially the ones (vonage, cable co's) that make it look and feel exactly like the service people are used to - plain 'ol telephone service.
I made the prediction that VoIP would be obsoleted by drops in traditional telephone service, but I was wrong. Basic phone service, with minimal long distance service, still costs $50+ here.
My company switched to a VOIP solution a few months ago.
Now, when our server crashes, our phones go out.
Sweet.
The biggest problem right now is that Skype may not be integrated into the local PBX. But the Skype people seem smart and my guess is they will come up with something soon.
Siemens itself seems to have an eye on them.
13-4=54/6
My company doesn't pay for personal phone calls for business trips of less than a week. My cell phone doesn't work out of the country. Foriegn hotels charge an arm and a leg per minute for calls... so Skype was perfect to call home to my wife. It sounded great all the way from Brussels, Belgium back to Ohio.
Now that I have Skype on my wifi-enabled PDA, I'm in heaven.
OK, so it's a peer to peer voice chat program. Fine. How is that any better than the voice chat available in IPARTY, or Visual IRC, or AIM, or dozens of other apps? Why is sending audio over a P2P network any better than sending it directly from my computer to yours with plain old TCP/UDP?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
It puts the Skype button on its webpage, or it gets the hose again.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
I thought it was vaiable, untill I discoverd that it was made by the guys that brought us kazza... it's all well and good untill the spyware comes...
No. Buy pork bellies.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
To call a friend somewhere else in India (that is an STD call), I pay Rs. 5 per minute. With Skype, I need to pay Rs. 10, so where is the profit?!
For just a second there I thought you had said you had a wife-enabled PDA...I was almost afraid to ask the details.
skype uses a cheap trick of routing calls between users through other user's computers (turning them into supernodes). a number of people, I included have experienced hearing others speak through my computer. This is inspite of skype's claim to the contrary.- blog/skype-security.asp.
check this out http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/voip
A casual search on the net will reveal a lot more.
The problem is not something that can be fixed with a simple patch. there will be more problems in the future too.
The primary problem with using skype for business and carrier grade work is that it's protocol is not public. we don't know how it works, we don't have any assurance that we are not being heard by skype guys as we talk.
The purpose of all philosophers was to impress women
I guess this is find for small to medium companies but many large companies are already turning their calls between international offices into VoIP calls if they aren't already.
Our company has been using skype for most internal and external communication (-email) since BETA .97
Perhaps *now* the FCC, etc. will think long and hard about VoIP regulation as a telco, now that businesses are learning of it. One can hope.
C|N>K
And every single large vendor I've seen short Avaya is performing an embrace-and-extend on SIP in order to properly match the features you can have today in your traditional PBX. Cisco is one of the worst offenders here. To their credit, this is very much like the early days of HTML, where some people were extending it for their own purposes (and no, I never forgave Netscape for the blink tag)... but the world settled out to HTML 2.0 reasonably quick. The vendors are providing the features their customers are demanding, it's just that they have no standard to work with for those additional features.
Vendor lock-in has been the rule of the day in telecommunications for some time. The question a business needs to ask is whether they can live with the lock-in for a few years, regardless of whether it's using SIP... the standard will have to change in order to play well between vendors. If you're really interested in ensuring that SIP devices work together, make sure to ask your vendor if they participate in SIPit testing, and their results. This has recently included the base SIP as well as some of the drafts for additional features that may be added... so it helps to ensure the vendor is trying to play by the standards as they develop.
A clarification because my first post is poorly articulated: SIP will always interoperate at the base level of function between two different companies' systems, it's advanced features like call waiting or conferencing or other "fun" things that don't necessarily work if you have a Cisco switch and a Siemens phone. To this end, the comment about Cisco being an offender has to do with the number of additional features they have (not bad for features, just must difficult for ensuring they may someday be available and interoperate with others' equipment)
Read the links you reference, it looks like the problem is third party software SAM - not Skype. It even says in the 'known bugs' that an incoming SAM call will be routed to the same sound card as a currently active outgoing Skype call.
It's not going to take long before all the black fiber gets put up for use. I see long distance rates for POTS dropping too. They seriously need to drop the taxes on POTS to make it more competitive.
hdr_bg.slashdot.jpg
If you didn't notice, they have a special header image for Slashdot users. I thought it was rather cute.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
I'm not sure why anyone would ever consider using technology from a company like Skype when even if the solution was open source many would question the motives of the organization. Now, in adition to the potential problems with Skype in terms of security and spyware there is a very good free choice from XTEN and sipphone.com availble at no cost with full NAT support and using open technology. In addition, those people who start using the X10 softphone can continue to use it when they add lines via other providers and/or buy minutes from Sipphone.com or even better when the company moves to a local vo/ip system liek Asterisk. I would like to see anyone tell me a single advantage of Skype over an X10 based system using sipphone.com for free calls. Skype has been well sold and hyped - that is all. All you IT people should know better, ever tried to get rid of Kazaa from a Windows machine?
Phriend or Phoe? Phucking phreak...
Read this section of Skypes EULA:
...do you still want to install this software? No spyware? Sure...not YET! When it's grown enough they will put spyware in Skype. There are open standards and open source. Businesses should use *, not Skype.
2.4 Third Parties. You acknowledge and agree that the Skype Software may be incorporated into, and may incorporate itself, software and other technology owned and controlled by third parties. Skype emphasizes that it will only incorporate such third party software or technology for the purpose of (a) adding new or additional functionality or (b) improving the technical performance of the Skype Software. Any such third party software or technology that is incorporated in the Skype Software falls under the scope of this Agreement. Any and all other third party software or technology that may be distributed together with the Skype Software will be subject to you explicitly accepting a license agreement with that third party. You acknowledge and agree that you will not enter into a contractual relationship with Skype or its Affiliates regarding such third party software or technology and you will look solely to the applicable third party and not to Skype or its Affiliates to enforce any of your rights.
#find
That's pretty impressive. Next thing you know, businesses will be walking and talking.
Yeah, but they'll still keep shitting...
Granted, they are closed-source and won't show you their implementation, so you can't check it yourself. But I guess some security is better than none, isn't it? ;-)
The only situation where the P2P network is used for audio data is when you've got a local firewall that is so restrictive that any direct connection to your system is filtered out.
My Skypehead friend has been urging me to try it out for 3 months. I just dont like the feeling of wondering whether I should have it on or not (ie be accessible or not). Just brings up bad memories of another friend of mine who kept insisting I get ICQ back when its user numbers were under 100k. Never did find a need for ICQ. /Then again he (Skypehead) started me on Firefox 10 months ago so have to give him that.
I personally tried both and gnome-meeting is just as functional, it also supports IP to phone and video, with the added bonus of netmeeting compatibility and not using a central server to transport the data (allows offices to block with firewall and naturally harder to intercept).
So why on earth skype and not gnomemeeting?
Recently, a friend of mine moved offices and got his business cards reprinted. Instead of the average numbers (Office, Mobile, Fax), he now has Office, Mobile, Fax, Skype and MSN contact details listed there.
.PDF file.
.PDF to this email address, with the phone number of recipient in the subject line.
Whats more, is that his Office number is actually a VoIP number with a provider we have here in Sydney. Also, his fax line doesn't actually go to a fax, but rather a service that forwards the fax digitally to his email inbox as a
If he wants to send a fax, he simply emails a
Talk about a digital office. It also means that he can do business with his laptop and a internet connection.
- Skype just works. I configures itself automatically for any kind of firewall setup. X-Lite can be made to work for most kinds of firewall, but you'll have to do that on your own if your firewall is the least bit restrictive.
- Skype uses an amazing set of codecs. Voice quality on Skype is just superb. Now I know that you could probably use these same codecs on your Softphone as well. If you could get your hands on them. And patched your softphone. And got your VoIP provider to patch his software. Or used direct connections only and got all of your friends and family to use patched softphones.
- Skype has very low latency. On a residential DSL line, local QoS is not an issue for either Skype or SIP phones. But all SIP VoIP providers I know have latency issues, adding several hundred milliseconds.
- Skype encrypts calls. Using non-WPA WLAN access to lead a SIP conversation with X-Lite leaves you open to easy sniffing by everybody in range. Skype just uses public key cryptography (albeit closed-source) to prevent sniffing. X-Lite depends on your SIP provider to do encryption on the WAN side, which none of those available here in Germany provide.
- Skype has a clean interface. It is available for Win, Mac and Linux, and it's pretty well integrated into all of these. I don't own a Win machine, but I've used X-Lite on a Mac and its interface is unuseable. It's the most atrocious port to OSX I've ever seen. X-Lite is not available for Linux. And worse, having looked around for quite some time, I know of no good Linux softphone for SIP.
I will advocate open source soft and open standards wherever possible. But for VoIP, I'll stick with Skype, for the moment. Its performance is just too good not to use it.Back when I was at the university, a student in the distributed systems lecture asked the professor about voip. This was in 1997, so the prof replied: "Why would you want to do this? Use the phone." The student said that this would be much cheaper, like a local phone call. The prof said that the university pays something like DEM 1 million per year for their internet connection. If the student used voip, this would just shift costs.
I've often wondered about why voip can be cheaper. At the very least, when you're using the phone, you're paying for what you get. When people are using voip, this will still use the bandwidth, but you are shifting costs onto everyone else (at least onto the backbone providers).
Can someone point me to a study that voip is really cheaper (more efficient) than conventional telephoning?
Lars
Just you wait until Microsoft's VoIP options come out. Although not fully announced yet, I have a friend who is the Asia-Pacific Product Manager for MS VoIP. It is expected to be announced/released within the next 6 to 12 months.
It will be a seperate server box that will integrate into Exchange and Server 2003. Imagine having your hundreds of business contacts on your Outlook. You have a headset and select "Call" from within Outlook. Even if thye number is external, you will be connected to them.
Also consider this. You have a Pocket PC or a Windows Smartphone with a Bluetooth headset.You work in San Francisco but you are in New York for business. You stop at Satrbucks and connect wirelessly to the company VPN/Exchange server. You can now make and recieve VoIP calls from your Pocket PC. Very cool. Very real. I have seen it in action. Just you wait.
They say that their calls are encripted end-to-end. If you are sure of what you are saying, then someone could sue them. :)
But I do not think you are sure
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid!
We've run Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/ for about a year now and when we relocated our offices decided that Verizon wanted too much for long distance. I signed us up with Broadvoice http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Broad voice and configured our phone server to send all long distance calls out over our 1.5 MB DSL line. It's been PERFECT! I did have to upgrade our Asterisk to the latest tarballs, because my older CVS version couldn't register with Broadvoice though. Dirt cheap long-distance.
If Skype is truly P2P, how can they track Minutes of Use (as posted on their Home page http://www.skype.net/?
I've not read the analysis paper by Columbia University (referenced in one of the other comments, link not handy to me just now...), so I might have missed it. But I suspect that Skype is using its Global User Directory to track presentity for "in call/out of call" situations, and calculating time spent "in call" as MOU?
Does this mean that it two Skype users call one another, Skype is double-counting MOU?
Or is that MOU figure just SkypeOut traffic (which is billable and trackable...)?
Anyone know the anwer? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
We talked to our phone system vendor a couple of days ago and suprisingly (to me, anyway) she didn't make a case for forklift upgrades to VoIP and actually acknowledged that interoperability didn't exist right now. Given that we have a 61c running 21.xx with 2000 series handsets, I expected a full-blown VoIP sales pitch.
One thing I found interesting was that she said that SIP interoperability was coming and that Nortel wanted it to come as they wanted to be out of the handset business. It seemed odd given the prices that even 2008s command these days, but I guess unless you churn your handset designs frequently it doesn't take very long for the secondary market to deeply undercut a vendor's pricing.
Hmmm...did the moderator not understand the point that I was making that the telecomm industry is no longer a growth industry due, in part, to developments like Skype?
Or was the moderator to0 obtuse to understand that the "In completely unrelated news..." header was tongue-in-cheek?
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
no one can call you to complain about the server crashing.
When I saw this thread last night, I was in the middle of a Skype conference call with my business partners. One is in Australia, one is in Phoenix, one is in Washington, and I'm in Florida.
Skype is exceptional. It's not perfect when you push it as far as we do -- once in awhile someone will start to break up -- but about 90% of the time there's only a one second delay (or less) and the sound quality is crystal clear.
And the price is right, of course. We've had $1,500 phone bills, but Skype is free.
Brian MacKay
Game Guides Online, CTO
http://gameguidesonline.com
You, sir, are elegance incarnate.