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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."
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.
It's a p2p voip application. Those shady looking addresses are your peers.
Thanks a lot.
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.
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
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.
I believe that Slashdot article from last Friday points to a paper that answers your question. Basically clients in the Skype network can become supernodes that are used to route traffic.
i'm having a "similar" problem. complete cisco VoIP, whenever the stateful firewall is enabled and someone on the LAN uses FTP the phone system crashes.. cisco is "working on it" and we're considering sending the system back to them.
Our company has been using skype for most internal and external communication (-email) since BETA .97
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.
Then maybe your company needs a traffic shaper, or needs to reconsider their bandwidth needs. Layer 7 traffic shapers exist that will examine the type of traffic and prioritize it according to set rules. Packeteer Packetshaper, Allot NetEnforcer, I think, for a few.
"Ruhr" is a river in western Germany which has a large industrial area around it the Ruhrgebiet.
"Pumpen" is pumps.
They sell industrial pumps. Makes perfect sense for a German.
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
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? ;-)
It really depends how VOIP is set up.
If you are a company with multiple sites connected over a WAN or VPN, the traffic between sites will already be encrypted so the portion of the pipe that is used for voice is encrypted too; sure if someone breaks that ALL your data is going to be accessable
If however you are a company with staff working form home or in client offices, skype could still be used by connecting to a VPN.
Security only becomes an issue when communication occurs between an insecure terminal and company offices
However, having said that, Voice is never really going to be cracked these days. Its much easier for a script kiddie to grep for a load of credit cards than listening to a real-time voice conversation for juicy information.