Article - "skype killer" carrier grade app filter

Fred Heutte aoxomoxoa at sunlightdata.com
Tue Sep 20 01:45:18 UTC 2005


The cover story of the Economist this week (with a typical dollop
of hype called "How the internet killed the phone business") is 
about Skype and VOIP as a "disruptive technology" (in Clayton 
Christensen's sense) that is upending the wireline world but is 
even more of a threat to the mobile/cellular carriers.  

Skype has only a modest presence in the US now but the
worldwide numbers are pretty staggering:

  Sandvine, a telecoms-equipment firm, estimates that there are 
  1,100 VOIP providers in America alone. But the trend is 
  worldwide. IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the 
  number of residential VOIP subscribers in America will grow 
  from 3m at the end of 2005 to 27m by the end of 2009; Japan 
  already has over 8m subscribers today. Worldwide, according to 
  iSuppli, a market-research firm, the number of residential VOIP 
  subscribers will reach 197m by 2010. Even these numbers, 
  however, do not include people using VOIP without subscribing 
  to a service (ie, by downloading free software from Google, 
  Skype or others). Skype alone has 54m users.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4400704

Well, actually projected to have 54 million by December, up
from about 15 million at the beginning of the year.  These are
the growth rates claimed for the net 10 years ago but which we
knew were overblown.  

Of course not all of those "users" go much further than 
downloading something and maybe trying it out.  But obviously the 
Bell business model is dwindling fast and the life of the network 
operator only gets more, um, interesting.

Fred




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