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."

Comments

Re:Unknown connections

[tibike77]

...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.

International VoIP

[johnlcallaway]

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.

Re:Not for all...

[einhverfr]

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.