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www.voip-news.comBy Paul D. Kretkowski
Skype promises free calls from any PC to any PC, anywhere in the world. Voice quality is generally better than from the publicly switched telephone network although it’s also subject to connection bandwidth and intervening network traffic. You might speak flawlessly via Skype with a colleague 6,300 miles away in Cairo, but a Skype connection to Washington, D.C., might be full of pops and delays.
Loren Abdulezer, CEO of Evolving Technologies Corporation and co-author with Susan Abdulezer and Howard Dammond of the just-released Skype for Dummies, says Skype phone calls are just the beginning of its business usefulness.
“There’s more to Skype than being able to reach someone thousands of miles away. It has created a technology or almost an infrastructure to facilitate virtual collaboration and connection. That’s where Skype really shines.”
Abdulezer speculates on the time saved by writing a “stumped” button into the navigation area of a commercial software program. Press it, and the software not only calls customer support via Skype, but also transmits a user ID, software license number and even diagnostic information. The support rep then gets up to speed by the time he or she answers the call, saving time and money.
“They’re not wasting time wondering, ‘Who do I dispatch this problem to?’”
Skype makes audioconferencing easy, so that up to 10 people can start in a chat, move to an audioconference, and exchange files during the same session.
Just a little further out on the idea branch, the trendwatching blog PSFK notes that Skype-enabled audio and video are already infiltrating business settings, with users recording their Skype conversations and adding the recordings to their blogs as podcasts.
Skype’s technical pluses include robustness in communicating across platforms; ease of use; and APIs that let programmers easily design interactions with or through Skype, which has spawned a very Google-like ecosystem of third-party Skype products.
SkypeOut
Calling a phone (mobile or landline) via SkypeOut costs $14.95/year in the U.S. and Canada for an unlimited number of calls, and even though this cost is about to rise to $29.95/year, it’s still an excellent value compared with PSTN long-distance plans. Overseas calls are currently 2.1 cents/minute and up, while PC-to-PC calls remain completely free.
Skype business accounts let companies purchase SkypeOut or other types of features and allocate them among employees, paying a single fee and gaining a single point of management and auditing.
Benjamin J. Higginbotham of the blog Technology Evangelist complained that his Skype Business account had no voice mail and that he couldn’t tell whether he was entitled to it or not. In the end, Skype responded by comping Higginbotham a year’s worth of consumer voice mail, but doesn’t seem to have addressed this seemingly basic business need.
Nevertheless, he appreciates the flexibility Skype Business gives him to administer the accounts of his other Skype users.
“I can manage a bunch of Skype users, automatically refill their Skype credits, add SkypeIn to their account and manage Skype services among users.”
SkypeIn
Meanwhile, SkypeIn lets users purchase a phone number that customers or other non-Skype users can dial into to reach a Skype user. This makes Skype transparent to people outside your company; they dial a regular PSTN number without knowing it connects with an Internet address.
“For someone in a sales-oriented situation that makes a lot of sense,” Loren Abdulezer says. “I can create a SkypeIn number based in Australia and someone in Sydney or Melbourne can make a local call and I can be anywhere in the world and if I’m on Skype, it will reach me. We can talk for hours and it won’t make any difference.”
And if an employee leaves the company, the business can simply reassign the employee’s business number to someone else via the Skype control panel. Companies can purchase up to 33 sequential numbers at once, lending a professional polish to the company phone directory.
Some have complained about SkypeIn’s reliability, such as Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse. Geddes never received a scheduled Skype call, and only received his caller’s voice mail the following day. (Voice mail does come free with a SkypeIn subscription.) Skype itself admits that SkypeInis not entirely stable but insists they’re working on the problem.
Third Party Callers
Skype has released APIs that third-party providers can use to build applications and try to ride the Skype wave—a process Skype itself actively encourages, according to chief security officer Kurt Sauer.
“My opinion is that it is better to provide good information and let [other] people build the Skype ecosystem.”
Skype-focused third-party products include Skylook, which puts Microsoft Outlook and Skype together; Pamela, which helps organize contact interactions on the fly depending on the recipient’s availability and other contextual factors; Pretty May , which manages more robust voicemail and call recording - and announced a basic call center and IVR functionality in the past week; and WiSPA, which makes e-mail, chat and voice mail accessible from mobile phones.
In the hardware realm, companies like Polycom are beginning to make enterprise-focused aftermarket products tailored to Skype VoIP, such as phones, attendant phones and speakerphones.
Technical Minuses
Skype is a proprietary rather than an open-source technology, creating hesitation among open-source advocates. You’re only as good as Skype’s engineers and customer support—but unlike some open-source VoIP, you’re paying money to have customer support. The phones and e-mail get answered at Skype.
Loren Abdulezer does find a few technical minuses in Skype, such as the limit of 10 simultaneous audioconference users, but adds that some third-party companies, such as highspeedconferencing.com, provide applications enabling up to 500 to audioconference through Skype for free.
Five Reasons Why IT Managers Should Stop Worrying About Skype
Skype advertises its software as completely free of malware, adware and spyware. Enough said.
Bandwidth-hogging can be managed. Several companies make products, such as FaceTime’s RTGuardian, that manage peer-to-peer applications and their traffic, whether authorized or not.
You can lock down Skype at the registry level. Administrators can program Skype not to transfer files, allowing Skype connection and conversation with no threat of corporate secrets walking out as attachments.
Administrators can pass packets through a specific firewall. Administrators can set networks so that Skype audio packets run through different network segments than other network traffic, eliminating the chance that it will affect other company systems.
Skype is encrypted. When Skype users connect, it’s over an encrypted session, whether text messages, audio, video, or file transfers.
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