Disruptive Telephony

After my post yesterday about "Skype for Asterisk" (and the update post) and the potential it allows for SIP interoperability via Asterisk, I've received a few comments that seemed to interpret what I wrote as somehow indicating that the Skype announcement somehow meant that there was new "Skype to SIP" functionality in the "Skype for Asterisk" announcement.

Just to be clear, there isn't any new "Skype to SIP" functionality in the "Skype for Asterisk" piece announced yesterday by Digium and Skype. None.

It is purely a commercially-licensed software module (which most of us speculate will be a binary software module, i.e. we won't be able to actually see the code) that provides two-way connectivity from Asterisk to and from the Skype cloud. Skype users can call into an Asterisk system. Users connected to an Asterisk system can call out to Skype users. Users on the Asterisk system can also call to the PSTN (via what was called "SkypeOut") and receive calls from the PSTN (via what was called "SkypeIn").

That's it. That was the announcement yesterday. Period. End-of-story.

However, the point I was making in my post yesterday was this announcement has the potential to turn Asterisk into a two-way "Skype-to-SIP" gateway. Asterisk - with the "Skype For Asterisk" module installed - could be deployed into a network where it could provide interconnection between Skype users and SIP users.

Let me explain...

ASTERISK INTERCONNECTION EXPLAINED

Asterisk has a large number of "channel drivers" that allow phones and systems to be connected to the Asterisk system via various protocols. These systems include:

• SIP phones, systems and clouds
• Cisco phones and systems (via the SCCP channel driver)
• H.323 phones and systems
• MGCP phones
• other Asterisk systems (via the IAX channel driver)
• the PSTN and legacy TDM systems (using the various hardware channel drivers)

There is also an unsupported UNISTIM channel drivers to go into Nortel systems and various other channel drivers out there. (I know of someone who is using a radio channel-driver to interconnect two-way radios to Asterisk.)

The beautiful part about Asterisk is that you can simply and easily interconnect all these systems because the individual endpoints simply become extensions in the "extensions.conf" file inside of Asterisk. So extensions that use the SIP channel can call in and connect to an extension that uses H.323. H.323 endpoints can call Cisco IP phones. Cisco IP phones can call an IAX softphone (there are some out there). Any of those different types of endpoints can call the PSTN through either hardware cards or through SIP or IAX trunks. Graphically, the pictures looks something like this:

Although perhaps to better depict common scenarios, here's how it could look if you include various options for PSTN connectivity:

DIVING A BIT DEEPER

To dive a bit deeper into Asterisk configuration, when you decide to use one of the various "channel drivers" you essentially perform two steps:

1. Modify the channel driver configuration file
2. Add appropriate extensions or trunk settings to the 'extensions.conf' file.

Now you might be doing this by editing the configuration files directly using your favorite text editor - or more likely these days you are probably using one of the many different graphical user interfaces to do the actual configuration modification. In the end, the config files are being modified in some manner.

For the SIP channel driver, the config file is the aptly named sip.conf and in the file you enter information such as:

• Connection information to a SIP Service Provider if you are doing a "SIP trunk" for PSTN connectivity (username, password, connection details, etc.)
• Connection information to an IP-PBX or application server to which you are connecting via SIP
• Information about the different SIP phones connected to your Asterisk server

Note that you could use the SIP channel driver to connect individual SIP phones to Asterisk; you could connect your Asterisk server to the PSTN via a SIP trunk; or you could do have both SIP phones and a SIP trunk. In fact, you can have multiple SIP trunks. You could connect over to an existing IP-PBX or to an application server that supports SIP. Asterisk is incredibly flexible in the way that you can configure it.

The second step is to configure the extensions.conf file to have use this channel driver. For instance, to make it so that all calls starting with the digit "9" go out a SIP trunk, you might do something like this:

exten => _9.,1,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN:1}@mysipprovider-out,30,r)

(Taken from the voip-info page on sip.conf)

To configure actual phones as extensions, you would enter something like this in extensions.conf (taken from the sample file on an Asterisk install I have around):

exten => 6245,1,Dial(SIP/Grandstream1,20,rt)   ; permit transfer
exten => 6245,1,Dial(SIP/Grandstream1&SIP/Xlite1,20,rtT)
exten => 6361,1,Dial(IAX2/JaneDoe,,rm)         ; ring without time limit
exten => 6389,1,Dial(MGCP/aaln/[email protected])

If someone dials one of these extensions, it would then ring the associated phone. Note that for extension 6245 it will actually ring two different phones. Note also that the phones will have to be configured themselves to register with Asterisk, etc.

Now, Asterisk dialplan creation is an enormous subject in and of itself... but this is the general idea. You configure the channel drivers to support connections to either (or both) service providers or endpoints (phones) using the given protocol. You then configure actual extensions or trunk connections in the extensions.conf file.

SO HOW *MIGHT* THIS WORK WITH 'SKYPE FOR ASTERISK'?

Now we don't have any information yet about how this new channel driver would work... but most all of the channel drivers work in a similar fashion. I would expect that there will be something like a skype.conf file that will let you establish what Skype user names are associated with the Skype For Asterisk module. You will probably need to include the login credentials, any restrictions on access (by Asterisk users), etc.

Separately, in the extensions.conf file, you will wind up probably putting in something like this to enable outbound connections:

exten => _9.,1,Dial(SKYPE/${EXTEN:1}@t,30,r)

Or something like that. Now all calls that start with 9 will go out the "Skype trunk".

If you wanted to associate a user ID on the Asterisk system with a Skype ID, you would possibly add something like this:

exten => 6400,1,Dial(SKYPE/danyork,,rm)

Now any calls to ext 6400 on that Asterisk system would go to my Skype ID. You could imagine getting a bit fancier with something like this:

exten => 6400,1,Dial(SKYPE/danyork,,rm)
exten => 6400,1,Dial(SIP/1234,,rm)

which would have the effect of calls to ext 6400 going to both my Skype ID and a SIP phone.

So Skype can just be another way for inbound or outbound calls to enter the Asterisk server - and Skype users can simply be added as extensions on an existing Asterisk server.

Returning to my graphic above (gotta love quick graphics via Skitch!), the picture now looks like this:

The "Skype For Asterisk" module allows two way connectivity into the Skype cloud and also the use of Skype as another mechanism for PSTN connectivity.

SO WHAT ABOUT "SKYPE-TO-SIP"?

The point of my post yesterday was now that two-way Skype connectivity becomes just another channel driver for Asterisk, you have all sorts of interconnection possibilities. As a standalone system, you could connect SIP phones on an Asterisk server out to the Skype cloud.

You can also deploy Asterisk as a "SIP-to-Skype" gateway. You could connect an Asterisk box via SIP to an existing IP-PBX and enable connectivity from that IP-PBX to Skype users. You could even be incredibly stupid (given existing security issues) and connect your Asterisk box directly to the Internet and provide a SIP-to-Skype gateway. (If you aren't aware of the SIP security issues, listen to any of my Blue Box podcast episodes or read the VOIPSA blog.)

If the Skype For Asterisk module delivers the functionality it sounds like it will, there are a whole range of possibilities now available for interconnection between the Skype cloud and other VoIP systems simply by putting an Asterisk box in the middle.

We'll see. All of this is mere speculation until we can actually use the Skype For Asterisk module.

Technorati Tags: skype, asterisk, skypeforasterisk, voip, sip, interoperability

As per usual, Tom Keating gets us more details on the "Skype For Asterisk" beta program I just wrote about... in his update post, Tom explains how it will work:

Well, on an inbound call to your Skype username, both your Skype desktop client rings (if running) and your Asterisk IP phone rings. You can take the call using either your PC's Skype software or your IP phone. Similarly, if someone calls your SkypeIn number, both will ring. Further, if someone dials your corporate auto-attendant, and then enters an extension number, it will still ring both your Skype client and your regular IP phone.

His post discusses how you can assign Skype names to Asterisk call queues and then includes this intriguing text:

When asked how Skype IP-PBX gateway appliances are affected by this announcement, Stefan Öberg VP & GM Telecom for Skype said, "The appliances that are out there now have built their solutions on standard Linux client. They've used the public API on that and basically are running many instances of Skype Linux client. Obviously, that's not the way the Linux client was meant to be implemented. So those solutions are not scalable or reliable to the extend that businesses would want them to be. The difference with this solution is that we've built it together to scale and to be reliable."

If I understand this correctly, this has the potential to be huge! As far as I know, all the existing "Skype-to-PBX" solutions use the rather kludgey solution of basically running multiple instances of the Skype client on the system. Each "Skype trunk" is essentially just a separate instance of the Skype client. As Stefan Öberg indicates, there are serious scaling issues with this approach.

However, this has been the only options developers have had! Skype has not - prior to this (if it works how it sounds like it works) - provided any "back-end API" that would let a system interact directly with the Skype P2P cloud. The only API developers have had is the client API that lets them interact with a local Skype client. So that's how all the "Skype-to-X" products have been built.

Does this mean that Skype has exposed some additional API that is available through this Skype For Asterisk product? If so, this could be VERY interesting...

Kudos to Tom for providing the updated information.

Technorati Tags: asterisk, skype, sip, interoperability, voip, telecom

Does today's announcement of a beta version of "Skype for Asterisk" signal a way to tear down some of Skype's walls? And does this move Skype along toward better SIP interoperability?

The announcement happened out at Astricon today and TMC's Tom Keating had one of the first posts about it - updated with info from TMC reporters who are at Astricon. Both the Digium news release and the Skype blog post highlight these four points that Asterisk users will be able to do:

• Make, receive and transfer Skype calls with multiple Skype names from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware.
• Complement existing Asterisk services with low Skype global rates (as low as 1.7€¢ / 2.1US¢ per minute to more than 35 countries worldwide).
• Save money on inbound calling solutions such as free click-to-call from a website, as well as receive inbound calling from the PSTN throughcreate virtual offices all over world using Skype’s online numbers.
• Manage Skype calls using Asterisk applications such as call routing, conferencing, phone menus and voicemail.

I want to focus on one part of the first bullet. Recall that in my last post about Skype and SIP interoperability I talked about how Skype currently has one-way connectivity via SIP to external SIP clouds. A SIP system can receive calls from a Skype user, but cannot make calls into Skype's cloud. (My employer Voxeo's application platform is one example.) Yet here's the first bullet of the announcement:

• Make, receive and transfer Skype calls with multiple Skype names from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware.

Ta da... two-way connectivity in and out of the Skype cloud.

What's more, because Asterisk is really a telephony platform that speaks multiple protocols, you could easily see the ability to interconnect into other systems... including SIP clouds. Here's a quick graphic showing how it could work:

I changed the color of the arrows to and from the PSTN to reflect the fact that PSTN connectivity could really occur from either the Skype cloud or directly from the Asterisk system. Conceivably you might have an Asterisk system with existing PSTN connectivity (through either hardware cards or SIP or IAX trunks) that only wants to use the Skype For Asterisk channel driver to communication to/from Skype users. On the other end, Asterisk can connect to systems running the protocols of SIP, H.323 or SCCP (Cisco Skinny), as well as whatever other protocols Asterisk sysadmins might add to their Asterisk box. They could be on-premise systems such as IP-PBXs or they could be hosted systems or "clouds" of network connectivity.

Now what is really being announced today is that you can register to join the beta program for Skype For Asterisk. You cannot download the code yet. You can't inspect it to see how it works. All we can do is speculate and sign up to join the beta program (which, it indicates, may involve an NDA).

Still, it's an interesting move and it will be intriguing to see how this actually works.

I'd like to understand, though, how this is or is not similar to what has been offered by Chanskype for a few years now. Is this the same code? i.e. did Skype buy or obtain the Chanskype code or team? Given the lack of any info in that regard in these announcements, I'm inclined to think it is separate code.... but how does it compare?

We'll have to see as the code becomes available. Tom Keating did say in his post that it will not be available as open source code but rather under a commercial license.

In the meantime, congrats to both the folks at Digium and Skype for making this happen - and I look forward to seeing it in action.

Technorati Tags: voip, skype, asterisk, sip, telecom

Should Skype open up it's network to other users? to other networks? Should Skype stop preaching about "openness" when it's network remains closed?

In the middle of last week, there was quite a little storm raised in the VoIP corner of the blogosphere after Andy Abramson published a letter from Gizmo Project founder Michael Robertson critical of Skype's openness after Skype continued to call upon the FCC to open the wireless network to applications. (See also here and this Skype blog post (and this one) for background.) Being at ITEXPO last week, I didn't have the chance to blog about this at the length I felt it deserved until today.

First, for some context, here are some of the blog posts last week:

• Andy in VoIPWatch: Gizmo Project's Michael Robertson Sounds Off
• Phil Wolff asks some pointed questions (of Michael) at Skype Journal: Michael Robertson says Skype should open to Gizmo Project
• Phil posts: Michael Robertson Responds where Michael responds to Phil's questions
• Andy responds: For the Record, Gizmo vs. Skype
• Alec Saunders had a whole cast of characters on Friday's SquawkBox, including Andy, Michael Robertson, Jim Courtney (Skype Journal) and a good number of others.
• Phil posts: A few thoughts on Skype interop tradeoffs

All of it makes for good reading. It's an important issue.

So I guess I'm somewhat of two minds on this issue.... while I agree with some of Michael Robertson's points, I guess I see the whole issue of "Skype openness" as quite orthogonal to the larger issue of open wireless spectrum. I'll write about both issues at some length below.

This is long. Don't plan on reading it on a crackberry or iPhone. Best get a cup of coffee and read it on a laptop or something like that.

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WIRELESS OPENNESS

To put it another way, I completely applaud Skype's letter to the FCC and think that the battle for opening up the wireless networks is probably the preeminent "battle" we who are advocates for an open Internet have before us. The wired carriers are well on their way to being commoditized big, fat, dumb pipes. The telcos started selling "data lines" and then soon the world of IP wound up increasingly removing them from the picture as anything other than a big pipe... and that's not the world they want. They are fighting (and will continue to fight) to retain relevance (and ARPU - Average Revenue Per User) but the IP train left the station a long time ago and the telcos are scrambling to catch up and stay on board rather than just being (some of) the providers of the track.

On the wireless side, not only do the carriers own the track, but they still own the train and they are still driving that train. They control who gets on and off... how fast or slow it goes... what color the train is, etc.

I, for one, don't want that. I want them to give us a solid set of tracks to use... but I want the train to be open to all. I want the wireless carriers to be big, fat, dumb pipes. I want choice. *I* want to be in control.

The carriers naturally don't want to relinquish this control. They see how they missed it on the wired side. They want to keep the wireless walled gardens for as long as they can.

The cracks are appearing... Apple's control over the iPhone and AppStore is a phenomenal crack in the telco walls...... although it ultimately really means exchanging the walled gardens of the telcos for the bright shiny walled garden based in Cupertino, CA. I'm not sure that ultimately is the best for all of us... but it does crack the telco walls. I think Google's Android has more potential... but we'll have to see later this month when those phones first come out.

So with that view, you can expect I applaud Skype's efforts to open up the wireless networks and allow consumers to have a choice of what apps they want to run. I want the *wireless* carriers to be big, fat, dump pipes... give me an IP address on the *mobile* Internet and let me do what I want with it. Sure, the carriers can offer their own services, and maybe if I like them I'll pay for them.... but I want the option to use other products and services - without degradation or prioritization...

To put it another way, I pay the wireless telcos for *dialtone* now. Once connected, I can call anyone and use any *voice service* over the PSTN. I could use someone else's voicemail if I want (like GrandCentral), although the carrier's offering may be more convenient (and is usually free). But I can call anyone on the PSTN and use any voice service I want. The carriers just provide me dialtone.

I want "IP dialtone". I want a Big, Fat, Dumb Pipe.

So... go, Skype, go!

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SKYPE OPENNESS

Yet having said all this, I agree with Michael Robertson that Skype's got its own issues with openness.

I don't like walled gardens. Period. End-of-story.

I don't like telco walled gardens. I don't like Apple's walled garden. I don't like Facebook's walled garden. I didn't like the walled gardens of CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Genie, etc. and I rejoiced over time when the open standards of IP tore down those walls and brought about the Internet (with all of its warts) that we have today. [Tangent: I do worry, actually, that we are retreating a bit back into the walled garden world with things like Facebook and Myspace... but that's another topic I've blogged about.] I can somewhat see some value in walled gardens during the early stages of a product or technology as it reduces the set of parameters/variables and allows the service to be stablized/fixed/improved. But at some point the walls need to be reduced/eliminated. As a security guy, I don't like monocultures... I don't like homogenous systems (where one virus or issue could wipe out the whole system)... I like diversity... heterogenous systems. I don't like single-points-of-failure. I don't like single companies (or small sets) in control. I don't like walled gardens.

I don't like Skype's walled garden.

The PSTN run by the telcos of today does not provide the rich communication experience we want. We need to bypass it and leave it behind and build the massive interconnect of IP communications systems. Players like Skype have a key role in my opinion in building that new infrastructure.

But if we exchange the current PSTN walled garden controlled by the telcos for a new walled garden controlled by eBay/Skype, have we really gained anything?

Sure, it gives us a rich, multi-modal user experience. Sure, it's nice and pretty. Sure, it gives us a central user directory. Sure, it gives us wideband and encrypted audio. Sure, it's cool and all... but it's still a walled garden controlled by a single company.

Ultimately, I would like to see a new voice infrastructure that consists of many different "clouds" all interconnected and able to communicate between the clouds. Skype is one cloud. So are the SIP clouds being run now by various carriers. So are the Voice-over-IM clouds like MSN, AIM, etc. (that try vainly to compete with Skype). So are the various systems being built by vendors all over the place (including all the Microsoft OCS clouds starting to appear within enterprises).

We need to build the interconnect.

Yeah, there are a TON of issues out there that we still need to address to build that interconnect. There's a whole host of security issues... there are billing issues... there are trust issues... there are network plumbing issues. Yes, there are all those issues. But if we are to succeed in ultimately bringing about the rich communication experience we want, we need to make this happen.

And for that, Skype's walls need to come down.... at least a bit.

What we need is that Interconnect from Skype's cloud out to the emerging IP infrastructure. Think about it... Skype right now has a two-way interconnect between Skype's cloud and the cloud we know as the PSTN. It's called "SkypeOut" and "SkypeIn" (or whatever marketing names they are being called now). If you dial my SkypeIn number, you can reach me on Skype wherever I am. From my Skype client, I can call anyone on the PSTN. The two-way interconnect is already there.

So why not offer the same on the IP side?

Because I work at Voxeo and we were one of Skype's original Voice Services partners, I already know that Skype has a massive SIP infrastructure on the backend to do the the PSTN interconnect. Skype users can even dial a specific +99 number and the call goes from Skype's SIP cloud over to Voxeo's SIP cloud... and it works beautifully.

So one half of the interconnect is already there - although only for limited numbers of partners.

But where Skype already has the infrastructure, why not look at making that capability more accessible? What if someone in Skype could just type "sip:[email protected]" and the call would go out from Skype's cloud to the service providers? This could be a new feature as part of the unlimited calling plans, etc.

How many people would use it right now? Probably only a tiny few... today. But suddenly Skype becomes an enabler of the broader post-PSTN infrastructure. New companies can get their services up and running knowing that they can promote them to Skype users and have Skype users get to those services.

Plus, Skype can now connect to all those enterprise VoIP systems being deployed everywhere... so for all those IT managers blocking Skype now but allowing SIP gateways for remote teleworkers using IP phones... Skype can suddenly be that remote softphone being used in the sense that it could connect in to other people on the corporate enterprise system - they just become "sip:" entries in my Skype directory. Skype still is my overall directory and user agent.

And what about the other way? Wouldn't it be great if someone out there on a SIP system could just call something like "sip:[email protected]"? The call goes from their SIP cloud across the Internet to Skype's SIP gateways and into the Skype cloud.

The SIP system user can do this right now... via my SkypeIn number... but they have to use the crappy PSTN. Why not ditch the PSTN and go directly across the IP infrastructure? Hey, maybe some user of a "HD Voice" Polycom phone could call Skype's gateways via SIP and actually wind up talking via wideband audio? (Yeah, okay, I'm probably dreaming on that since Polycom supports G.722 for wideband and Skype uses its SVOPC codec.)

I personally would probably wind up using my Skype client more for a simple reason that I have a SIP IP phone on my desk... but I'm not at my desk all that much. Wouldn't it be great if I could forward that to the SIP URI of my Skype client? (Which I can do now by forwarding to my SkypeIn # but again I'm going across the crappy PSTN.) Or better yet because I have a SIP URI for Skype it becomes one of the various phones I ring when someone calls that number (it's not, now). The number on my business card would then wind up actually going to my Skype client.

Suddenly Skype can be a player in the enterprise "unified communications" market. People don't need Skype-to-PBX gateways or sacrifice chickens and utter weird incantations to get Skype connections working with open source VoIP systems. Skype users can talk to Microsoft OCS systems... or Cisco IP PBXs... or Avaya's or Nortel's or Mitel's or ShoreTel's or... or... or...

What if... even... I could do a SIP invite to make a video call to another system? (Okay, so now maybe I'm really dreaming...)

Suddenly people (like Michael Robertson) have fewer reasons to complain. Sure, the Skype client still uses it's own proprietary protocols and codecs for communication within the Skype cloud... but you can interconnect.

Suddenly Skype is a leader in building the broader overall next-generation IP communications system. Skype's not a walled garden but rather a player in the larger picture.

Sure, there's a whack of issues involved with doing this. On the technical side, Skype has got to build SIP gateways that could deal with the abuse they would undoubtedly suffer by being exposed on the public internet (like any or all of the VoIP security tools out there). They have got to make sure such gateways don't become a way to inject spam/SPIT into the Skype network. Skype has got to figure out how to package it... potentially charge for it, etc. And they have to deal with all the glorious interoperability issues that come with SIP... as the protocol increasingly becomes an unmanageable accretion of all sorts of crap. (And I say that as an advocate for the SIP protocol.)

Ultimately, I think that's the kind of openness Skype needs.

Skype needs to provide the same two-way interconnect to the evolving IP communications infrastructure (that is almost all becoming SIP-based, for better or worse) just as Skype provides the two-way interconnect to the PSTN.

Build it and Skype would silence many of the critics of Skype's lack of openness[1] and give Skype a (much-needed, IMHO) hype-boost among the early adopter crowd who also plays with all the other emerging tools. It would be a bold move that would also help Skype gain some credibility and recognition within the larger industry. In my opinion, outside of the technical issues it would go far in so many ways in helping Skype grow - and helping the industry grow.

Will Skype get there? Good question...

[1] Not all critics would be silenced naturally because someone would still complain that they can't connect their particular client to the Skype P2P overlay network. Or that they can't connect XYZ hard phone to the Skype cloud, etc., etc. But it would silence many of the critics of Skype as a "walled garden".

Technorati Tags: skype, sip, net neutrality, open, openness, voip, voice, telecom, telecommunications, gizmo, interop, interconnect

Five years ago today, the first public beta of Skype launched, and in a blog post today new Skype CEO Josh Silverman celebrates with "Five Years of Wow". It's a bit of the "Ra-Ra" celebratory kind of post I would expect from a CEO but ends nicely with this:

So, as we celebrate the first five years of Skype, let's raise a toast to the human desire to connect.

Indeed!

Skype has done a great amount to help people easily connect to each other. It's also caused a heck of a lot of disruption within the telecommunications industry. I use Skype daily (Skype ID: danyork) and it has indeed become a significant part of both my business workflow and personal life.

A PERSONAL REMINDER

I had a personal reminder of that the other day when I wound up in a video chat with one of my closest friends who was my best man at my wedding 12 years ago. Although we have spoken in the intervening years, we had not actually seen each other in probably most of 10 years due to living far apart. He and his wife emailed a group of folks that they now had a Skype ID. I added them as a contact, opened an IM chat and wound up calling them... and then moving into video and seeing them both. It was a powerful moment - and a great reminder of the power of Skype to easily connect people.

Like many longtime fans of Skype, I do have concerns about Skype's future direction. It doesn't seem to quite have the "buzz" it once did and I'm still not really sure what the long-term vision is... what does Skype want to be when it grows up?

HOW SKYPE DISRUPTED TELEPHONY

But future concerns aside, I think we should take a moment to celebrate Skype's five year birthday and I want to reflect a bit on some of the ways in which I think Skype has changed telecommunications (some of which we discussed a bit on yesterday's Squawk Box podcast).

Skype arrived in 2003 at a fascinating intersection of multiple trends. First, we as a society were at the stage where we started to get massive ubiquitous 'always-on' broadband connectivity into people's homes (at least in many parts of the world). Dial-up was fading away... cable Internet and DSL were becoming "normal". Second, home computers were becoming more powerful and more multimedia. Third, peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing networks had grown to a massive scale and validated that such a networking approach could be used for serious applications. The timing was perfect for something like Skype to come along and ride the waves.

So what did Skype bring that was different?

• SKYPE "JUST WORKED" - If you look at comments that people make about their experience using Skype, over and over again you see comments along the line of "it just works." More than anything else, I think Skype's simplification of the end-user experience made it the runaway hit that it was. I would suggest that this simple experience is really two parts:

  • SIMPLE USER INTERFACE AND INSTALLATION - Skype provided a drop-dead-simple installation and a user interface (UI) that was incredibly easy to use.

  • FIREWALL TRAVERSAL - Connect your laptop to a network and... ta da... probably 9 times out of 10 (or 10 out of 10) your Skype icon is ready to go. I've often even personally used it as a connectivity check - if the Skype icons show as "online", I knew I had good connectivity. Skype does an amazing job adapting to firewall restrictions and figuring out how to punch holes through whatever firewall it is behind and enabling communication to occur. Yes, it can be blocked, but the simplicity by which it got through made it so incredibly easy to use.

  It should be noted, too, that this occurred cross-platform with versions out for Windows, Mac and Linux (although with not all platforms sharing all features).

• WIDEBAND AUDIO - Skype was the first VoIP application deployed on a large-scaled that used a "wideband" codec (originally iSAC from GIPS, now their own SVOPC) to give a much richer voice experience than traditional telephony. For the first time, many people realized that VoIP could provide better audio quality than the PSTN. After you have used Skype for a while, you rapidly changed your perspective to where PSTN "toll quality", previously the high bar for voice telecommunications, would be viewed as low quality audio. To me this represented one of the most profound yet less visible shifts brought about by Skype.

  Skype's wideband audio also let many of us use Skype as a method for creating podcasts or other recordings with remote hosts. Jonathan Zar and I have used it for Blue Box for almost 3 years. Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson have used it for For Immediate Release for longer. Creating podcasts with Skype has had its own challenges... there have been connectivity challenges and "Skype moments" when audio artifacts are introduced or audio fades in and out... but those can be edited out. The fact is that when the connection is good, it sounds like you and your co-host are in the same room.

  I'll never forget a comment left by my friend Martyn Davies to another podcast that I had been part of that had used a traditional PSTN conference bridge. He said the call was good, but "he didn't know if could stand listening to such poor quality audio each week." And that was a "toll-quality" PSTN conference bridge! The bar was raised for those who became Skype users... and now we're finally seeing wideband audio come out in various IP-PBXs and in phones from vendors like Polycom and others.

• SECURE VOIP - As a security guy, you might of course expect me to praise the fact that Skype encrypted all the voice and call control from the start. But more than that, back around the time when Skype first came out, there were a lot of nay-sayers in the VoIP industry who presented the argument that you couldn't encrypt voice or call-control without having performance suffer. That was their argument for why they couldn't roll out encrypted voice. The sound quality would degrade, etc. Skype killed that argument. Skype showed that you could have high-quality voice and have it fully encrypted end-to-end. It was a wonderful way to rebut the audio quality argument (and I used it myself with some vendors).

• P2P VoIP - Until the emergence of Skype, all mainstream systems that included VoIP had been server-based. You had your VoIP client that registered with a VoIP server and communication was all handled by the servers. Skype showed that you could in fact run VoIP over a P2P network infrastructure. Now Skype is not a pure P2P network - there are "enrollment" servers that deal with usernames, passwords, etc.

• VOICE FIRST - While Skype appeared to emerge out of the "Voice-over-instant-messaging" space in that it was very similar to MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, etc., it had one fundamental difference - voice was the first mode of communication. When you double-clicked a name to initiate a connection, instead of IM, you initiated a phone call. In fact to launch an IM chat, you had to right-click or somehow get to the chat button. Voice was the first mode of communication, and so in most people's minds Skype became thought of as a "voice" communication tool versus an IM tool (even though its IM is quite powerful in and of itself).

• MULTI-MODAL COMMUNICATION - Recall that at the beginning I mentioned that I started out with an IM to my friend, which then moved into audio... and then into video. For Skype users that seems to be a fairly common path. I've had calls that have started as IM, gone to video with IM being used as a backchannel to exchange URLs, dropped back to IM only, moved into audio, back to IM... and so on. With file transfer happening in there as well. Now Skype users seldom think about that kind of movement between "modes" of communication. Certainly other clients allowed this before Skype, but Skype made it popular on a mass scale.

• PSTN INTERCONNECTION - Many of the earlier software-based VoIP clients suffered from the basic problem that you could only talk to other people with those clients. Skype rolled out SkypeOut which let you call anywhere for cheap rates. Perhaps in my mind more significantly Skype rolled out it's "SkypeIn" service where you could get a PSTN number associated with your account. In fact, you could get many PSTN numbers in different parts of the world. Suddenly Skype could be how you were contacted by regular callers.

• CHEAP CALLS - Of course Skype disrupted traditional telephony with its "unlimited" calling plans. I mean... the concept here in the US of paying $30 per year for unlimited calls within North America is a pretty dramatic change from our traditional rates. Skype certainly helped lead the further commoditization of voice minutes.

• CHALLENGING SIP AND OPEN STANDARDS - As Skype emerged in 2003, the VoIP industry was slowly coalescing around the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as "the way forward" for voice signaling. But SIP had (and still has) some fundamental problems in that it didn't work well through firewalls, wasn't terribly interoperable and was therefore complicated at times to get working. Suddenly here was this upstart Skype that... (gasp)... used proprietary signaling! Open standards advocates, myself very definitely included, were appalled and knocked Skype for not using open standards like SIP. The success of Skype, though, did give SIP advocates a good competitor... and I think to a degree that has helped. We've seen stronger firewall traversal mechanisms come out. We've seen improved interoperability. Competitors can be good and in the end help make you stronger.

• PERSISTENT CHAT - WITH HISTORY - While I've been writing here about voice, I want to mention one other innovation on Skype's end with regard to IM. The beauty of Skype group chats is that they are persistent and have a readily accessible history. With Skype, group chats can become an always-open-and-available place for discussion. The beautiful thing is that when you shutdown or disconnect from the network and then later reconnect, you automatically rejoin all the chats you were in, but more importantly, you automagically receive the history of what happened in the chat while you were away. This latter part is huge. Persistent group chats with history means that you can be planning a project with a group of people and do it all through a group chat. Go offline to travel or at the end of your day... connect back in hours or days later and automatically receive all the messages that occurred when you were gone. What other IM system does that? None of the consumer services... and not Jabber or IRC. Certainly now we are starting to see services that offer it, especially for inside an enterprise, but it remains a strong advantage of Skype IM.

There are no doubt other reasons that people can suggest. (And feel free to leave a comment with your reasons.) Someone on yesterday's Squawk Box said a key factor for them was that Skype was the best in their opinion for cross-platform file transfer. Someone else mentioned that the vast number of users brought out all these "hard" phones and other devices that "work with Skype". And sure, it's not at all been a perfectly tranquil time for Skype. There have been outages... and audio quality problems... and changing billing plans... and... and... and... Yet in the end I think you'd be hard-pressed NOT to say Skype has had an effect in various ways on telephony and telecommunications as we know it.

WHITHER SKYPE?

What next? As I said at the beginning, many of us who have been long-time Skype users wonder where it's really going. It has seemed a bit rudderless since the eBay acquisition and has seemed to drift from vision to vision (or simply not had one). There have been opportunities that have been missed to truly turn Skype into a "platform". As Phil Wolff mentions in his great post today at Skype Journal, Skype isn't even really in the race to "talk-ify" the web. (Although I don't necessarily agree with Phil that Ribbit is the answer - I view them as just one of many players in the space (including my employer) - but I agree with his point that what they and others do is a sign of the future of voice.) There have been various features that were launched in what seemed a half-baked way. (Skype Prime, anyone?) There's been management churn and all the other fun of a company growing up.

But Skype's got a new CEO now, and he's only been there 5 months, so to a degree we have to wait and see where he points Skype. Regardless, the fact remains that Skype has changed the way we think about voice communication over the Internet.

Happy 5th Birthday, Skype! I'm looking forward to seeing where the next 5 years take you!

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, voice, telecommunications, telecom, telephony

I realized today that although I wrote that Skype's Mark Bartlett would be joining a Squawk Box conf call back on Friday, June 20th, I never followed up with the link to the show.

That discussion about the Skype 4.0 beta is available from Saunderslog.com. I could not participate in the actual call, but it sounded interesting. I'm still not thrilled by Skype's cross-platform "answer", but it is what it is. Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal has a longer writeup about the call which covers some of the main points of the call.

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, skype 4.0, squawkbox

Will Skype's new Skype 4.0 user interface simplify the experience and brings in masses of new users? Or will it annoy and alienate the longtime (and often paying) users of Skype?

As a Mac user perpetually left behind in Skype's development process, I can't personally report on the new 4.0 beta which is Windows-only and apparently due out tomorrow, but reports are starting to come out... TechCrunch says "Skype 4.0 Beta: It's All About Video" and Andy Abramson discusses how this might allow future video advertising (and how Skype needs a CTO). I expect we should be hearing from the Skype Journal folks soon as well.

In watching Skype's three Daily Motion videos about the release, I had these quick thoughts:

• The Skype window now covers the full screen. Instead of having a separate window for your contacts, separate windows for each chat (which we Mac users have had collected together in a single chat window with a "drawer" for some time) and a separate window for each call, it's all in one window. While I can see this being a benefit for new users, as someone who has been using Skype for now... what?... 3 or 4 years? I have to say that I like having separate windows! Especially on my Mac where I use Spaces on Leopard and do have different Skype windows in different windows. My initial reaction is that I do definitely hope that the full-screen mode is an option, i.e. there's an advanced setting or something that lets us maintain "classic Skype" look and feel.
• Multi-modal conversations are better integrated. - In the past, you could have a video conversation and separately have a Skype IM chat going. These were two different windows and so you of course had the issue of having to keep track of those two different windows. While I was personally okay with this as I often work with two monitors and could put the video into full-screen mode on one and keep the chat on the other monitor, Skype has made this simpler by having a "Show Messages" button that makes your video smaller and brings the IM chat window underneath in the same full-screen window. I can see this making sense.
• It is all about video. The TechCrunch headline is accurate... my sense from watching the videos is that Skype 4.0 is really all about video. The new "Video Call" button does let you initiate a video call in a single click, versus the current way of making the call and then clicking the video button (or configuring Skype to automatically launch video). I agree with TechCrunch, though, that it is puzzling that Skype's video is still only one-to-one when there are so many others out there offering multi-party video chats.

I've included the three videos below that you can watch for yourself. The TechCrunch article also has some additional images and slides. I'd also watch Skype Journal's site as I know they'll have more details soon. Windows users will apparently be able to download the beta sometime tomorrow at http://www.skype.com/go/download-beta/. (We Mac users will just have to continue to whine... or, do what I'll probably do and fire up a Windows virtual machine to try it out.)

Skype is having a briefing tomorrow which I expect will be all about this, so I'll look forward to hearing what they have to say. I've heard some rumors (including from Andy's article) that the Skype 4.0 beta wipes out previous settings, so I'll be curious also to see if others write about those experiences (and provides another incentive for me to try it out in a VM). I'll also be curious to see how well Skype balances "simplifying" the user experience for new users while maintaining the functionality that "power users" have come to expect. It's a tough balancing act and it will be interesting to see how Skype does.

In any event, the new Skype 4.0 beta is here for Windows users - if you give it a try please do leave a comment and let me know: what do you think?

Technorati Tags: skype, skype4, voip

That's the question raised by Om Malik in "Global Telcos Plotting a Skype Rival?" and will be one of the topics of discussion on tomorrow's Squawk Box podcast. Om starts:

AT&T, in conjunction with some 10-15 incumbent telecom carriers — British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and NTT among them — is plotting to launch a Skype competitor, according to a research report issued this morning by ThinkEquity analyst Anton Wahlman.

And goes on from there at some length into the theories, timeframes and capabilities of the rumored network. While I haven't had time personally to contribute directly to the conversation, others have:

• Tom Keating dismisses this as utter hogwash and pure speculation
• Jim Courtney (Skype Journal) sees this as much ado about nothing
• Andy Abramson notes the connections to GSMA and ITU
• Eric Lagerway thinks it could be exactly what the industry needs but that the telcos will probably screw it up
• Carolyn Schuk believes that we'll see this skype-killer from the telcos about when elephants fly
• Dameon Welch-Abernathy (PhoneBoy) says the carriers need to get back to their roots (and embeds a great 1980 Bell commercial)
• Alec Saunders doubts the carriers can do it and thinks the things he said four years ago are now coming true

What do you think? Please join us on tomorrow's Squawk Box[1] (May 8, 2008) at 11am US Eastern time to discuss/debate the matter. (Or, if you can't join us, feel free to leave a comment here.)

[1] Note that to join a Squawk Box call, you do need to have a Facebook account and install Iotum's FREE Conference Calls Facebook application.

Technorati Tags: alec saunders, squawk box, voip, telcom, telecommunications, phone, carriers, skype

Over on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, I have been tracking a security issue in the iSkoot program that was transmitting your Skype username and password in the clear. The post, its comments, and the corresponding links off of it make for some interesting reading.

It also shows the speed at which the blogosphere can react and potentially help sort things out. In the space of about 48 hours, a problem was found, confirmed, identified by the vendor and apparently will be fixed shortly. I'll be writing more about this later today over on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, but for now I'll just say that it's great to see that the problem is being dealt with.

Technorati Tags: voip, voip security, voipsecurity, security, skype, iskoot, symbian, phoneboy

Today's buzz in the VoIP space is certainly Skype's announcement of new "unlimited" subscription plans. No contracts. No connection fees. No per-minute fees. Just a single flat, monthly fee.

The Global Difference

Now on the one hand, this isn't really new to those of us here in North America. We had an "unlimited" plan for all of NA that was good up until several months back when Skype dropped the plan and required everyone to move onto "Skype Pro". However, the big difference this time around is simple:

The unlimited plan is global!

Well, at least "global" in the sense that the 34 countries to which the plan pertains are indeed spread out all around the globe:

Regardless, it's an impressive list and, as Skype's news release reminds us, means you have "unlimited" calling to about a third of the world's population. (This statistic is, of course, hugely helped by the fact that the plan includes China!) So now with your PC, or 3 Skypephone over in Europe, you can now make an "unlimited" number of calls to regular old PSTN phone numbers in those countries.

Goodbye international calling plans!

Given that here in the USA, we've seen most all of the major mobile carriers move to "unlimited" calling plans that allow you to call anywhere in the US, this is definitely in keeping with those pricing plans. Except, of course, it's global.

Other Goodies

Beyond just the unlimited calling, Skype is also offering other "goodies" in the plan. As with most things related to Skype, the Skype Journal team has the best coverage of the announcements and lists these benefits:

• Users can upgrade temporarily -- for instance, a Canadian or American traveling for two weeks to Europe can have an Unlimited World plan for the one month during which the travel occurs.
• All plans include free call transfer (SkypeIn or Skype to SkypeOut) to numbers within the destination countries included in the user's plan.
• All plans include a 50% discount for a SkypeIn number. (or multiple SkypeIn numbers on some plans)
• All plans include voice mail
• All plans include Skype To Go

Jim Courtney's article goes into further detail on all of this and is definitely worth a read.

Redefining "Unlimited"

Of course, I had to laugh at Skype joining into the game played by all the major carriers here in NA known as "redefining the word 'unlimited'". Several of the carriers here in the USA and also in Canada have at various times trumpeted their "unlimited" data plans... which of course were "unlimited" only according to the carrier's definition of unlimited... really something more like:

"Unlimited" = "unlimited calling up to a certain point that our finance folks have determined you start to impact our profit"

The linguistic pedant in me cringes every time I see a "unlimited" plan and I had the same knee-jerk reaction when seeing Skype's announcement. You can see it clearly on their Fair Usage page or in this image with the asterisks net to "unlimited calls":

Now, in fairness to Skype, 10,000 minutes per month is a whopping long time! Basically that nets out to 5 to 5.5 hours on the phone every single day of the month. If you are spending that much time on the phone EVERY day (outside of your work), well... I'd just be amazed. (I suppose there might be long-distance relationships that might come close, but still!) I would expect Skype's major reason for doing this would be to strain out business users that might seek to use Skype for large blocks of calling. I'm sure Skype also does have very real costs that they incur for PSTN termination (although I'm sure they get good rates).

Other Views

Over on VoIP Watch, Andy Abramson notes that an advantage for Skype is that this moves their revenue stream to a more predictable monthly basis (rather than having the cash-flow variability of annual renewals) and also that it allows more flexibility for users to add and delete services.

Mark Evans also had an interesting take today in "The Sexier Story is Growth" noting that the far more interesting point about Skype is their growth:

Consider Skype’s first-quarter results: another 33 million users came on board, boosting the number of registered users to 309 million. Meanwhile, year-over-year revenue climbed 61% to $126-million and Skype-to-Skype minutes rose 30% to 14.2 billion. So, what you’ve got is a high-growth business that will likely have sales of $500-million in 2008.

Indeed that definitely is something to consider. (Jim Courtney also covered the topic here and here.)

Conclusion

In the end, rolling out these new plans is undoubtedly a great move for Skype. With all their Oprah momentum here in the USA and the 3 Skypephone in Europe, they've certainly made some gains. Now they continue disrupting the telecom industry by removing distance from the equation (for the most part). It will be interesting to see over time what this does or does not do to the ranks of subscribers. Regardless, it should be fun to watch as Skype continues to spread.

As for me, the reality is that as more and more friends have moved on to Skype, I honestly have fewer and fewer people outside of family to call on the PSTN. Given that most all the people I call internationally are already on Skype, I may wind up buying the Unlimited US & Canada plan just to be able to call some of those folks out on the PSTN. I mean, at $36/year... or apparently $24/year if you buy before June 1... it's hard to argue against that for "unlimited" calls within the US and Canada. :-)

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, telecommunications