Slashdot Mirror
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 would be the P2P structure of the client/network. Connections between Skype and Kaaza (developer-wise) have never been secret, and even more - they admit the base concept is the same, they just "took it one step further".
Now, unless you want to have a single server (or cluster of servers) that handle your login, friend's logins, routing between you two and so on and so forth, you'd just have to bear with those "unknown connections" - they're (most of the time anyway) just some other Skype users.
But hey, if it looks like spyware to you or you're paranoid, don't use it. Nobody forces you to.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
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.
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.
You have to be willing to admit that many people have problems with VOIP. Then you can address the causes of these problems and show that these problems are solvable currently with off-the-shelf solutions.
The big one that bites people is latency. But this can largely be resolved by traffic shaping at the WAN interface. Note that this requires that the QOS device has ultimate control over all data running in and out of the business, so if you have a firewall, it must be on the firewall or on the WAN side of it.
VOIP can be a big failure if done poorly as can any IT project. But it is viable today if people give it the attention they might give their telephone systems.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I tried Skype at work and it was not only completely unusable, it was almost physically painful at times. Packet loss must have been running at 80%.
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)
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?
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.
My employer for eample, will be a hard nut to crack in getting him convinced that VOIP is viable. What should my strategy be?
For a start, don't use Skype. It's a bad protocol design which is propriatory. You're far better off building your VoIP infrastructure on open technologies (IAX2 or SIP). Use of open technology is especially a big deal for companies since they're going to want to put in a local PABX, etc (Asterisk does an excellent job here). There is nothing that Skype does that can't already be done with open technologies - look around and you'll find plenty of SIP/IAX to PSTN gateways that you can use, and you can set up Asterisk to do least-cost routing amoungst several of them. It's worth noting that VoIP is very worthwhile if you have multiple physically separate offices, work-from-home users, etc.
http://blog.nexusuk.org