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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.
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?
... 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.
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
Demonstrate to him that it will significantly lower his bills. If you can prove that standing on his head and clucking like a chicken will cut costs, he'll do it with a smile on his face. The way to the boss's heart is and always will be through his wallet.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
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.
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.
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
Run up a 10 million dollar international phone bill.
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.
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
Das computermachine is nicht fur geffingenpoken und mittengrabben!!
You could've hired me.
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 $50+ here.
You have to be willing to admit that many people have problems with VOIP. Then you can address the causes of these problems and show that these problems are solvable currently with off-the-shelf solutions.
The big one that bites people is latency. But this can largely be resolved by traffic shaping at the WAN interface. Note that this requires that the QOS device has ultimate control over all data running in and out of the business, so if you have a firewall, it must be on the firewall or on the WAN side of it.
VOIP can be a big failure if done poorly as can any IT project. But it is viable today if people give it the attention they might give their telephone systems.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
My company switched to a VOIP solution a few months ago.
Now, when our server crashes, our phones go out.
Sweet.
My company doesn't pay for personal phone calls for business trips of less than a week. My cell phone doesn't work out of the country. Foriegn hotels charge an arm and a leg per minute for calls... so Skype was perfect to call home to my wife. It sounded great all the way from Brussels, Belgium back to Ohio.
Now that I have Skype on my wifi-enabled PDA, I'm in heaven.
My boss frequently skypes me.
Yet another verbing of an innocent noun.
Exactly. I'm about to do the switch to VoIP at home because it will be a lot cheaper. 18$ 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.
///<sig
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 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%.
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
"Yet another verbing of an innocent noun."
Yet another instance of a noun being changed into a verb.
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.
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.
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?
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? ;-)
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
cause gnomemeeting doesn't have a functional sip client yet, and h323 just blows...
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