We’re yet to see the real explosion in the use of Skype. It’s right on the verge of its tipping point.

What? You say. It already has 24 million users, and it’s yet to explode?

Well it’s reached 24 million before it’s had a chance to be an added feature in mobile phones. Total worldwide sales of mobile phones reached 674 million last year. That’s just phones bought in 2004, and the outlook is still bright for another bumper year. 735 million is predicted for 2005.

Motorola has already committed to creating a Skype ready phone. The others, Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and LG won’t be far behind. It’ll get its real killer app classification with mobiles using Wi-Fi. In places like the UK, they’ve already rolled out the service to use just that type of device. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed Skype building partnerships round the world at a very steady pace. In February they teamed with Hutchison Global Communications and today they launched the Broadreach agreement. Imagine carrying a mobile phone or PDA anywhere that’ll provide Skype calls.

Mobile phone manufacturers won’t care an awful lot if you use Wi-Fi or GSM, CDMA etc. to make your calls, so long as they sell handsets and also some back-end infrastructure. In fact you’ll find all the big players backing some form of new Wi-Fi consortium to promote the next standard in 802.11.

Next up mobile phone manufacturers will make cell phones their own switchboard. Bugger the network, just route the calls through a neighbours phone or a local internet service until it reaches the destination. True Peer-to-Peer telephony like that predicted by Nicholas Negroponte or illustrated by Cory’s shitting sheep analogy.

A lot of nay sayers complain that Skype isn’t using the industry standard protocols. That didn’t stop Microsoft claiming top spot in consumer software sales. All users want is an easy and barrier free service. They don’t care what protocol it uses. In fact, say protocol to the billions of mobile users and they’ll stare at you blankly.

You might also suggest that companies like Teleo, with the ability to call in to the VOIP service as well as out, are hot on Skype’s heals. Catching up to Skype will be a task, especially when they only provide a U.S. phone number, and charge for even their basic service. Remember, you can get Skype for free and start calling friends using the service straight away. The biggest barrier for net acceptance is setting a fee. Besides, SkypeIn is just around the corner according to Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström.

It’s an exciting time for personal communications. Cheap, ubiquitous voice calling is just around the corner. Let’s hope some moronic governments don’t add it to EFF’s Endangered Gizmo List. Of course some countries could just make it illegal to use VOIP and be done with it.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2005 at 6:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.