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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."
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
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
If you want to avoid vendor lockin then skype is not a good way to go for business.
There are a great many VOIP systems out there that proper transparent PBX systems (like asterisk but with the support contracts basically), and they use the open SIP format so you're not tied to a single manufacturer. Does your boss want a crappy USB headeset of a full featured Cisco phone?
Exactly. I'm about to do the switch to VoIP at home because it will be a lot cheaper. 18$ for the base and 1.9 cents a minute (canadian $), versus > 65$ for limited long distance, and you pay for the whole long distance plan whether you use it or not. I'd have to talk over like 2500 minutes to pay the same using VoIP. And there's a lot of other advantages.
For companies, costs are much higher. We lease some phone switches from the local telco for over a million a pop, plus the ones we already own. That's major $$ if you ask me. Add leased lines and local lines, and the bill is that much higher (especially we already pay for a OC3... plenty to add some VoIP traffic).
You could use some cheap asterix boxes (especially if you compare to the price of leasing a PBX), but then again there's the price of replacing the phones (can be rather costly, do the math). Replacing all the infrastructure would be expensive at first, but after that, going with some cheap VoIP provider for outgoing calls would cut a LOT into monthly bills.
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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