Slashdot Mirror
Skype Start-Up To Undercut International Wireless
Mob-Money wrote to mention a Boston Globe article describing a Skype-based startup that is set to undercut the exorbitant fees wireless companies charge for international calls. From the article: "Through a $10-a-year software rental that goes on sale today, iSkoot promises to let people make international calls to other Skype users for nothing more than the price of local air time for the link from their cellphones to their broadband-connected home computers. Just as Internet phone technology has slashed the price of making conventional landline long-distance calls and enabled unlimited calling for as little as $20 a month, the iSkoot technology could put pressure on still-exorbitant wireless international calling charges."
And here we are, the slashdot community thinking Skype is good. Or is it? Skype has a very interesting protocol (or actually, a complete protocol stack). But it is proprietary. Do we actually want to replace the old monopolies with a new one?
What we need is an open source protocol that works just as well. Skype is a great protocol, but it is *not* the way to go forward. Come on guys, it can not be that hard to send (encrypted) voice over UDP. Let's create a nice, extendible (video etc) protocol that uses UDP - at least for the data channels.
Skype is naff because they do not allow SIP clients. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3261.txt The protocol has existed for ages, but Skype are a closed shop - another Microsoft in the making. Dump Skype and get yourself a real VOIP provider that uses SIP.
Move to Japan. The future is already here. Telephone service comes from Yahoo BB (my ISP) but feels exactly like telephone service: you pick up the phone and dial. And you're done. The only way you can distinguish it from regular telephone service is its 80% cheaper (great for long-distance calls back to the States). There are some regulatory headaches (I have to pay the telephone monopoly to be able to receive calls from certain classes of people, costs about $10 a month plus the one-time licensing fee that is a weird artifact of Japan's late-industrializing telephone scheme) but after it was set up its totally seamless. Why should you have to care about protocols for a telephone? Thats like having to program your microwave or flash the firmware on your alarm clock -- these sorts of devices should just bloody work.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.