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Communications The Internet IT

Businesses Discover Skype 194

Posted by CowboyNeal from the catching-on dept.
prostoalex writes "Businesses are starting to pay closer attention to Skype as executives discover that VoIP application can cut the long distance and international call costs. News.com mentions two companies - Aruba Wireless Networks and Ruhrpumpen. The former placed a Skype button on its Web page, the latter put the Skype usernames in its intranet employee directory."
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Businesses Discover Skype More

Businesses Discover Skype

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  • Wow, businesses can read? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:14PM (#11499287)
    That's pretty impressive. Next thing you know, businesses will be walking and talking.
    • The trouble is that business people tend to use credit cards, and that something that Skype is not very good at. Another thing they are not very good at is allowing is his people to avoid paying VAT tax on phone calls. Seeing I'm in Holland and can deduct local VAT, I'm hardly inclined to pay Luxemburg VAT.
      But the main problem remains that anyone using a Visa and anyone in Spain, to mention but a few, can't pay for their SkypeOut... and just to confuse people, sometimes they can and sometimes they can't, us

  • Ruhrpumpen? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:14PM (#11499291)
    Aruba Wireless Networks and Ruhrpumpen

    Ruhrpumpen. Best company name ever. Bet they have many Blinkenlights.

  • about time (Score:3, Funny)

    by ginotech ( 816751 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:15PM (#11499302)
    it's about time the people that can really benefit from this technology take note of it. hopefully the savings will be passed down to the consumer?

    • Re:about time (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      hopefully the savings will be passed down to the consumer?

      Hahaha, you must be new here (Earth).
    • Actually, Skype is about as good as it gets for Skype-to-international landline calls, price-wise.

      What Skype REALLY needs to do is improve their billing systems for SkypeOut calls. If you spend any time on their forums, time and time again you'll see complaints ov credit cards not being accepted, cancelled, etc - even after initially working. Personally, I've not nad any problem using my Visa with them, but pushing people to Moneybookers isn't any way to garner customer trust.

      • Yes, the person that stole my credit card number also has not had any problems using it with Skype. They tried elsewhere (and failed) but apparently Skype doesn't do sufficient verification.

        This is also no way to garner consumer trust.

  • My employer for eample, will be a hard nut to crack in getting him convinced that VOIP is viable. What should my strategy be?

    • Demonstrate to him that it will significantly lower his bills. If you can prove that standing on his head and clucking like a chicken will cut costs, he'll do it with a smile on his face. The way to the boss's heart is and always will be through his wallet.

      • Re:Not for all... (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        But I work for SBC Telecommunications.

      • Re:Not for all... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Nik13 ( 837926 )
        Exactly. I'm about to do the switch to VoIP at home because it will be a lot cheaper. 18$ for the base and 1.9 cents a minute (canadian $), versus > 65$ for limited long distance, and you pay for the whole long distance plan whether you use it or not. I'd have to talk over like 2500 minutes to pay the same using VoIP. And there's a lot of other advantages.

        For companies, costs are much higher. We lease some phone switches from the local telco for over a million a pop, plus the ones we already own. That's
        • We had a glossy in the mail today from Valor Telecom that scored a point for good old POTS. If the power goes out long enough that the battery in your VOIP cable box goes out, how would you call emergency services if you needed them??

          Personally, I'd use one of the three cellphones we have in the house, but not everyone has one.

          To add to the humour, there was also a glossy from Cox Cable, offering to install cable real cheap. We ditched cable (TV & Internet) over a year ago and got DishTV & DSL.

          • We had a glossy in the mail today from Valor Telecom that scored a point for good old POTS. If the power goes out long enough that the battery in your VOIP cable box goes out, how would you call emergency services if you needed them??

            If the power goes out and takes out the power to your PABX how would you call the emergency services? Unless you happen to have a phone that doesn't require any external power that's plugged into your office's PRI line of course... :)

            (Or you could just use your cellphone -

    • Re:Not for all... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:25PM (#11499383)
      Run up a 10 million dollar international phone bill.

    • Re:Not for all... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <chris...travers@@@gmail...com> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:00PM (#11499591) Homepage Journal
      You have to be willing to admit that many people have problems with VOIP. Then you can address the causes of these problems and show that these problems are solvable currently with off-the-shelf solutions.

      The big one that bites people is latency. But this can largely be resolved by traffic shaping at the WAN interface. Note that this requires that the QOS device has ultimate control over all data running in and out of the business, so if you have a firewall, it must be on the firewall or on the WAN side of it.

      VOIP can be a big failure if done poorly as can any IT project. But it is viable today if people give it the attention they might give their telephone systems.
      • Note that this requires that the QOS device has ultimate control over all data running in and out of the business,

        All this means is that the traffic can get tied up somewhere else. What you need is an end-to-end network dedicated to the proper management of VOIP traffic.
        • All this means is that the traffic can get tied up somewhere else. What you need is an end-to-end network dedicated to the proper management of VOIP traffic.

          That is a definite concern, and it is especially so during virus outbreak or other major congestion incident. However, during normal operation it should not be a problem. The real issue is you don't want it to fail when you need it most. So you want to have some sort of backup plan.

    • Re:Not for all... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by FireFury03 ( 653718 )
      My employer for eample, will be a hard nut to crack in getting him convinced that VOIP is viable. What should my strategy be?

      For a start, don't use Skype. It's a bad protocol design which is propriatory. You're far better off building your VoIP infrastructure on open technologies (IAX2 or SIP). Use of open technology is especially a big deal for companies since they're going to want to put in a local PABX, etc (Asterisk does an excellent job here). There is nothing that Skype does that can't already

  • skype in insuranc e (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i recently visited the bristish virgin islands, and saw an insurance company there using skype for internal calls and external long distance.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tibike77 ( 611880 ) <.moc.oohay. .ta. .zemagekibit.> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:17PM (#11499317) Journal
    ... corporate executives start to realise it's cheaper to use the internal phone system than calling their employees from their mobile whenever they're both inside the building ;)

  • Voice-spam? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Posting a Skype link on their website is brave, to say the least. It costs no money or effort to call through Skype, so there is nothing to stop any random browser from calling them up just for laughs.
    • Every time it starts rainin, I get tephone calls from all over the worl. And then I pick the phone up and I hear about 15 different people talkin, but no one can hear me.

      Would you tell me what the hell's goin on with the tephone cumpny??!!

      Now. RIGHT NOW!!

    • And this will kill phones in due course, the same way it is killing email. Email means that the cost of writing a letter to someone is effectively zero, and the result of this is spam. VOIP means that the cost of *talking* to someone becomes effectively zero, and the result of this will be voice spam.

      The solution to both these problems is blindingly simple and non-technical: make it cost a little bit to communicate with someone.

  • We use Skype for international conferences (Score:4, Interesting)

    by richardoz ( 529837 ) * on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:19PM (#11499332) Homepage
    We have a geographically diverse team from (ranging from west coast US, east coast US, South Africa and India). We use Skype for our weekly conference calls. The audio quality is much better than telco lines (most of the time).

  • VoIP (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:20PM (#11499342)
    If people used Asterisk [asterisk.org] Combined with e164.org [e164.org] free lookups the whole process becomes transparent, and people don't have to go out of their way to make "special" cheap/free calls, it can all be done automatically at the PABX/PBX level and all the person thinks is they've made a call, they don't care how it got to the person.

    • Re:VoIP (Score:4, Informative)

      by ajaf ( 672235 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:28PM (#11499396) Homepage
      Asterisk is not as easy to setup as Skype.
      If you have a company with specialized people, maybe you can invest money and time installing Asterisk, for the rest of the people, Skype is the best solution.

      • Re:VoIP (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The original article was on businesses (not general users, which could also be using firefly, fwd or a whole bunch of other services), which in most cases have some form of IT and no doubt paying another company to support their phone system, using Asterisk you can do both with just the IT dept.

      • Re:VoIP (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:42PM (#11499482) Homepage
        If you want to avoid vendor lockin then skype is not a good way to go for business.

        There are a great many VOIP systems out there that proper transparent PBX systems (like asterisk but with the support contracts basically), and they use the open SIP format so you're not tied to a single manufacturer. Does your boss want a crappy USB headeset of a full featured Cisco phone?

        • Be careful of how interoperable you think SIP is (Score:4, Insightful)

          by thpr ( 786837 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @01:11AM (#11500615)
          and they use the open SIP format

          And every single large vendor I've seen short Avaya is performing an embrace-and-extend on SIP in order to properly match the features you can have today in your traditional PBX. Cisco is one of the worst offenders here. To their credit, this is very much like the early days of HTML, where some people were extending it for their own purposes (and no, I never forgave Netscape for the blink tag)... but the world settled out to HTML 2.0 reasonably quick. The vendors are providing the features their customers are demanding, it's just that they have no standard to work with for those additional features.

          Vendor lock-in has been the rule of the day in telecommunications for some time. The question a business needs to ask is whether they can live with the lock-in for a few years, regardless of whether it's using SIP... the standard will have to change in order to play well between vendors. If you're really interested in ensuring that SIP devices work together, make sure to ask your vendor if they participate in SIPit [sipit.net] testing, and their results. This has recently included the base SIP as well as some of the drafts for additional features that may be added... so it helps to ensure the vendor is trying to play by the standards as they develop.

          • A clarification because my first post is poorly articulated: SIP will always interoperate at the base level of function between two different companies' systems, it's advanced features like call waiting or conferencing or other "fun" things that don't necessarily work if you have a Cisco switch and a Siemens phone. To this end, the comment about Cisco being an offender has to do with the number of additional features they have (not bad for features, just must difficult for ensuring they may someday be ava
          • We talked to our phone system vendor a couple of days ago and suprisingly (to me, anyway) she didn't make a case for forklift upgrades to VoIP and actually acknowledged that interoperability didn't exist right now. Given that we have a 61c running 21.xx with 2000 series handsets, I expected a full-blown VoIP sales pitch.

            One thing I found interesting was that she said that SIP interoperability was coming and that Nortel wanted it to come as they wanted to be out of the handset business. It seemed odd give
      • Asterisk is not as easy to setup as Skype.

        It's not as easy, because it's like comparing Photoshop to MS Paint. They're different animals intended to solve entirely different problems. If you want a real communications system, you use something like Asterisk.
    • I hate to say it, but if Skype released proxy software, so that an "exchange" could be held ala Asterisk, I'd be tempted to move my implementation over from Asterisk... More people use Skype than SIP...

      What I'd prefer though, is that someone made a Skype SIP gateway. Would make things a hell of a lot better, especially since I could keep PSTN lines, yet save on conference calling and international rates.
    • You, or anyone, gets Asterisk or whatever else to install and work as easy as Skype, then great. Until then, no thank you.
    • Great! Where can I download Asterisk, run an installer, and make calls in within 5 minutes of deciding to use it?

      I can't? Well screw that.

      This is why Skype will always be more popular.

  • I've said it before... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:21PM (#11499344)
    ...I'll say it again. Skype rocks. My mother is one of the most technophobic human being alive. When she found out that she could call my sister in Turkey from the U.S. using Skype, and save a ton of money in the process, once I demo'd it for her, she asked me to set it up. NOW they talk nearly every day. There has NEVER been any technical trouble...except for that time she insisted that she couldn't hear my sister...turns out the volume was turned down on her iMac :)

    Skype is a great application that can provide you with low cost computer to landline phone calls, or FREE computer to computer. I highly recommend it.

  • Unknown connections (Score:3, Interesting)

    by buserror ( 115301 ) * on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:22PM (#11499356)

    Now if I could explain why the Skype client tries to connect to lots of shady looking addresses (dhcp/DSL, in various countries etc) when I launch it in OSX, I'm sure I'd give it another try...

    Until then, I'll just declare it spyware.

    • Re:Unknown connections (Score:4, Informative)

      by Johnny Doughnuts ( 767951 ) * on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:23PM (#11499372)
      It's a p2p voip application. Those shady looking addresses are your peers.

      Thanks a lot.

    • Re:Unknown connections (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tibike77 ( 611880 ) <.moc.oohay. .ta. .zemagekibit.> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:30PM (#11499409) Journal
      ...that would be the P2P structure of the client/network. Connections between Skype and Kaaza (developer-wise) have never been secret, and even more - they admit the base concept is the same, they just "took it one step further".

      Now, unless you want to have a single server (or cluster of servers) that handle your login, friend's logins, routing between you two and so on and so forth, you'd just have to bear with those "unknown connections" - they're (most of the time anyway) just some other Skype users.

      But hey, if it looks like spyware to you or you're paranoid, don't use it. Nobody forces you to.
      • Well, Skype is paranoid in fact.

        It didn't accept my premium credit card because of my country. It also openly tells it, giving some country names like Spain.

        So, it seems uber spyware developer got paranoid himself.

        BTW, I'd label myself "stupid" giving them a virtually limitless credit card number.

        That, I would agree.
    • I believe that Slashdot article [slashdot.org] from last Friday points to a paper [columbia.edu] that answers your question. Basically clients in the Skype network can become supernodes that are used to route traffic.

  • Nice move (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ajaf ( 672235 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:25PM (#11499382) Homepage
    A link with your Skype Username in your webpage is a good move, like using your email or msn contact.
    If I want to call help desk support in Europe I can do it.
    The problem are the jokes, but we have spam too, right?

  • Phone rates (Score:3, Informative)

    by thammoud ( 193905 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:26PM (#11499387)
    Their phone rates are more expensive than can be had with cheap calling cards. They also seem to charge in Euros which is a 30% premium on already not very cheap rates.
    • In a year of having a long-distance relationship and calling France all the time, I never once found a calling card cheaper than about four cents a minute that didn't totally screw me over with hidden fees. Do you have any pointers?
    • At least you could buy.

      Their paranoid CC processor REJECTED my credit card because of my country. YES country.

      Their help about it certainly gives one country name, "we don't accept credit cards from certain countries like Spain" Meaning? No explanation. I guess my country and Spain are blocked as crooks?

      I wouldn't post this message unless I had a reply from their customer service.

      It looks like a -real- garage company, beware.
      • I'm inclined to call bullshit on the above: I have a colleague who's been using it for some time - he introduced it to us. Guess where he lives - Spain.
        • I have read it on the "error" page where it declines my credit card.

          I am not speaking about PC to PC communication, I am speaking about paying them for low rate phone calls.

          As I learned who founded it, I am not giving my credit card again just to paste some text to you, sorry.

          Call it whatever you want.
          • I am not speaking about PC to PC communication, I am speaking about paying them for low rate phone calls.
            The sheer arrogance and stupidity of someone who tells me what I'm thinking about. He uses it for the phone too (office in France, relatives in Austria) - I work with the guy I'm talking about, you don't, so STFU.

            You - down there in the hole - shall I bring you another shovel?

            • Waiting for story becoming old so nobody will care to moderate and using it to reply like "STFU" is too plain low.

              http://www.moneybookers.com/ [moneybookers.com]

              Ask them and have fun with your commissions from Skype. I seem to hurt your business since no need to be that rude while replying to a post. /. quality getting low every day...
  • The security of the calls placed over VOIP is a concern for many larger corporations. Also, Skype's peer-to-peer model is frowned on by corporations because it uses the PCs resources to facilitate the larger network. I'm not an expert on this stuff, just reporting what I've seen, but it seems like the VOIP vendors need to add security (SSL tunnels?) to the calls by default and allow people to opt out of the peer-to-peer model for a fee... at least if those companies are trying to get the business of lar
    • Security is definitely a concern for some people, which is why SIP is not an easy solution for internetworking. Skype, however, does public-key encryption of all communication (both voice and text), which should alleviate the problem somewhat. See http://www.skype.com/help/faq/privacy.html [skype.com] (near the end of the page).

      Granted, they are closed-source and won't show you their implementation, so you can't check it yourself. But I guess some security is better than none, isn't it? ;-)

    • It really depends how VOIP is set up.

      If you are a company with multiple sites connected over a WAN or VPN, the traffic between sites will already be encrypted so the portion of the pipe that is used for voice is encrypted too; sure if someone breaks that ALL your data is going to be accessable

      If however you are a company with staff working form home or in client offices, skype could still be used by connecting to a VPN.

      Security only becomes an issue when communication occurs between an insecure terminal

  • Good for home (Score:3, Informative)

    by NetStatic ( 86649 ) <alex...boroda@@@gmail...com> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:38PM (#11499463) Homepage
    but not good for businesses. Skype doesn't offer the "carrier grade" telephony quality/reliability/features businesses are looking for. It's great as a additional line but that's it.

    Check out http://voip-info.org/ [voip-info.org] for a listing of business class VoIP solutions. The best part of something like Skype is outsourcing your communications. You no longer have to be running a PBX in your business. It's what CENTREX was supposed to be.
    • but not good for businesses. Skype doesn't offer the "carrier grade" telephony quality/reliability/features businesses are looking for. It's great as a additional line but that's it.

      That's highly debatable. Companies usually run up insane phonebills for international conferences and whatnot: not only does my company save a lot of money with Skype, but voice quality is generally a hell of a lot better. Intercontinental analog lines often suffer from all sorts of lag and distortion, but since Skype is di

  • International VoIP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by johnlcallaway ( 165670 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:53PM (#11499547)
    I am sitting in a hotel room in Chennai, India talking to my girlfriend back in Phoenix .... for free (yes ... I have a pretty girlfriend and I can type and talk at the same time.) We use the Vonage broadband phone at home, and I have installed the Vonage SoftPhone on my PC. All calls, anywhere in the world, to another Vonage phone from my PC are free and don't count against my minutes. I can call into conference calls for work for free because they are toll-free numbers, again from anywhere in the world with a decent Internet connection. Calls to non-Vonage phone are inexpensive if I go over my minutes, which I haven't done in 6 months.

    Before I installed the SoftPhone, my mobile stopped working after a week and Cingular can't get it to work again. I called the office and talked from the hotel for 100 minutes. The cost ?? $500US.

    VoIP is the way to go. The commercial offerings are cheaper than land lines and have more features, plus the portability and usability are awesome.

  • VoIP finds it's place (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mr. methane ( 593577 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @09:59PM (#11499589) Journal
    I am always happy to see an original idea catch on, but I think the bigger story is VoIP in general, especially the ones (vonage, cable co's) that make it look and feel exactly like the service people are used to - plain 'ol telephone service.

    I made the prediction that VoIP would be obsoleted by drops in traditional telephone service, but I was wrong. Basic phone service, with minimal long distance service, still costs $50+ here.

  • datapoint (Score:3, Funny)

    by claussenvenable ( 820336 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:03PM (#11499612)
    My company switched to a VOIP solution a few months ago.

    Now, when our server crashes, our phones go out.

    Sweet.

    • Re:datapoint (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kosi ( 589267 )
      Now, when our server crashes, our phones go out.

      Other way round here: the PCs NICs are connected to the phone (Siemens system). When the phone goes down, the network connection is down, too. :-)

  • I've used it when out of the country for business (Score:4, Informative)

    by s88 ( 255181 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:15PM (#11499682) Homepage
    My company doesn't pay for personal phone calls for business trips of less than a week. My cell phone doesn't work out of the country. Foriegn hotels charge an arm and a leg per minute for calls... so Skype was perfect to call home to my wife. It sounded great all the way from Brussels, Belgium back to Ohio.

    Now that I have Skype on my wifi-enabled PDA, I'm in heaven.

  • It puts it on (Score:3, Funny)

    by stimpleton ( 732392 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @11:06PM (#11499978)


    It puts the Skype button on its webpage, or it gets the hose again.
  • I thought it was vaiable, untill I discoverd that it was made by the guys that brought us kazza... it's all well and good untill the spyware comes...

  • now, lets hear what they have been talking about (Score:3, Interesting)

    by afarhan ( 199140 ) <farhan AT phonestack DOT com> on Friday January 28, 2005 @12:11AM (#11500331)
    skype uses a cheap trick of routing calls between users through other user's computers (turning them into supernodes). a number of people, I included have experienced hearing others speak through my computer. This is inspite of skype's claim to the contrary.
    check this out http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/voip- blog/skype-security.asp.
    A casual search on the net will reveal a lot more.

    The problem is not something that can be fixed with a simple patch. there will be more problems in the future too.

    The primary problem with using skype for business and carrier grade work is that it's protocol is not public. we don't know how it works, we don't have any assurance that we are not being heard by skype guys as we talk.

  • I guess this is find for small to medium companies but many large companies are already turning their calls between international offices into VoIP calls if they aren't already.

  • Why not sipphone.com? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jmoody ( 533840 )
    I'm not sure why anyone would ever consider using technology from a company like Skype when even if the solution was open source many would question the motives of the organization. Now, in adition to the potential problems with Skype in terms of security and spyware there is a very good free choice from XTEN and sipphone.com availble at no cost with full NAT support and using open technology. In addition, those people who start using the X10 softphone can continue to use it when they add lines via other
  • Back when I was at the university, a student in the distributed systems lecture asked the professor about voip. This was in 1997, so the prof replied: "Why would you want to do this? Use the phone." The student said that this would be much cheaper, like a local phone call. The prof said that the university pays something like DEM 1 million per year for their internet connection. If the student used voip, this would just shift costs.

    I've often wondered about why voip can be cheaper. At the very least, when
    • POTS reserves a fixed capacity for each call. For example, a 100 kbps line can support a maximum of 5 POTS calls at a time, if each of them requires 20 kbps.

      On the other hand, VOIP only uses up the capacity it really needs (i.e. when somebody speaks and packets are being sent). With the same data rates, a 100 kbps line could support a few more calls, provided not everyone speaks at the same time.

      The effect is a lot more important when you have a complex global system of interconnected networks.

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