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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
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.
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.
...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.
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 ?? $500US.
VoIP is the way to go. The commercial offerings are cheaper than land lines and have more features, plus the portability and usability are awesome.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
You have to be willing to admit that many people have problems with VOIP. Then you can address the causes of these problems and show that these problems are solvable currently with off-the-shelf solutions.
The big one that bites people is latency. But this can largely be resolved by traffic shaping at the WAN interface. Note that this requires that the QOS device has ultimate control over all data running in and out of the business, so if you have a firewall, it must be on the firewall or on the WAN side of it.
VOIP can be a big failure if done poorly as can any IT project. But it is viable today if people give it the attention they might give their telephone systems.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
My company switched to a VOIP solution a few months ago.
Now, when our server crashes, our phones go out.
Sweet.
My company doesn't pay for personal phone calls for business trips of less than a week. My cell phone doesn't work out of the country. Foriegn hotels charge an arm and a leg per minute for calls... so Skype was perfect to call home to my wife. It sounded great all the way from Brussels, Belgium back to Ohio.
Now that I have Skype on my wifi-enabled PDA, I'm in heaven.
Exactly. I'm about to do the switch to VoIP at home because it will be a lot cheaper. 18$ 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
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.
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
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.
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.