They've launched Skype, which they claim is the first Internet phone service to use peer-to-peer software. In just its first week of availability, 60,000 people downloaded the free Skype software. Other voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, such as Vonage or Free World Dialup (FWD), needed several months to attract the same level of interest.
Just as they shook up the music industry by creating Kazaa, the pair now wants to rattle the cages of traditional telephone companies. In an interview with CNET News.com, Friis discussed the coming challenges for VoIP, what Skype actually means (nothing, as it turns out) and a possible regulatory backlash against VoIP providers, among other issues.
Q: Why are the creators of Kazaa going into VoIP?
A: After Niklas Zennstrom and I did Kazaa, we looked at other areas where we could use our experience and where P2P technology could have a major disruptive impact. The telephony market is characterised both by what we think is rip-off pricing and a reliance on heavily centralised infrastructure. We just couldn't resist the opportunity to help shake this up a bit.
How long did it take to come up with the Skype software?
Skype has been in active development for about six months. It took less time to develop Kazaa -- about four months -- but we think we've come up with a better piece of software this time.
What's a "Skype"?
Skype does not mean anything. It just sounds good, and the dot-com domain name was available. We hope people will start saying, "I'll Skype you" instead of "I'll call you," which means "I'll call you without paying any rip-off per-minute charges and with superior better-than-phone quality."
Where does Skype fit into the VoIP landscape? Do you want to be a primary phone service like Vonage or Net2Phone?
Skype is addressing all the problems of legacy VoIP solutions: bad sound quality, difficult to set up and configure, and the need for expensive, centralised infrastructure. No one has seriously addressed these problems before, and this is why VoIP has never really taken off.
Talkback
Hi Ben,
Thanks so much for the excellent Skype article. I hope there's a way to preserve the link to it for a few months because I just posted a HTML address link to it in the new Yahoo! discussion group, "SkyPe Voice Over Internet Protocol Software." Here's a link to this new discussion/self support group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SkyPe-Software/
Imagine how overwhelming the computational task will be for decoding just 1000 simultaneous Skype voice phone calls with 256 bit encryption. Surely this won't be welcomed by national security agencies accustomed to performing mass voice to text conversion on "private" phone calls, then applying text interpretive algorithms to select those most interesting for human review. With enormous concealed government budgets, security agencies have seemed to be gaining on their goal of breaching personal privacy by electronic communication, given the sustained 18 month per computational power doubling rate. But Skype's very design appears to have made that goal almost unreachable. Wide adoption of Skype would cause the flow of 256 bit encoded traffic to undergo many doublings within a few months.
My Skype calling name is the easily remembered "lovelearn" should you ever want to chat. Obviously I don't want that referenced in any widely read articles or this new interest could dominate my time responding to calls.
I'd be delighted if you'd join this group and give it a boost by mentioning it where it seems fitting. It would be wonderful to have one or two of the Skype team principals join so they could occasionally field questions. We'd be happy to run any information gathering polls addressing questions about which they'd like to have user feedback. As soon as this new group appears in the listings, which requires human review and approval, I expect membership will grow rapidly.
All the best to you and thanks for your consideration,
John
(Please do not post my full name as I prefer to retain some privacy. I started one other newsgroup, Audi-VW-Diesels which now has 531 subscribers and over 14,000 archived messages. I'm certain this new Skype group will rapidly exceed that membership number.)
Excellent! Phones are becoming more and more fuctional. It seems that capabilities are being added everyday. I'd like to see high fedelity audio playback soon. I know it's coming.
Joel
<a href="http://Longboarders.org">Longboarders Organization</a>
I have allways wondered who was the person or persons who was putting these hundreds of blank dummy downloads on the Kazaa P2P system. I found out recently the film industry hires companies to put these blank downloads on the internet so as to discourage people from sharing movie files. Is there any way to tell a good movie from a bad movie before you download it.