Telepocalypse

Our strange experiences with Skype

Anyone interested in the telecom revolution should by now have heard of Skype. For those just returning from backpacking across Siberia, Skype is and end-to-end encrypted, fully distributed, proprietary, PC-based telephony system.

Now, like all other PC-based systems, it has some drawbacks. You turn your PC off, and while the awful din of hard drives and fans stops, so does your telephony service. Bad luck if you need to call an ambulance, too —- try yelling out the window instead. Turn the volume down on your speakers and you don’t hear the phone ring. Plug your headset in and that turns your speakers off - bad luck if you’re away from your PC and it rings. And so on.

One feature of Skype is the ability to enter extended personal information into its directory. This includes your preferred language. Our multi-national household includes my dear wife, a Lithuanian citizen. Now, you will be excused (by me, not my wife) if you’re struggling to pull your altas off the shelf, because Lithuania is a green and pleasant (if slightly flat) country of just 3.5m people, the great majority of whom speak Lithuanian. A modest Lithuanian diaspora is spread thoughout the world, many concentrated in a few northern US cities.

What does my strange family situation have to do with telecom business strategy? Well, we’ve been leaving Skype running for several weeks now. We only use it in anger to talk to my brother in London (I am in Kansas). But my wife has received a half dozen unsolicited calls — and all from people listing their language as Lithuanian. (I’ve only received one such call, from a 48 year old Swedish woman. I didn’t answer…) The human urge to connect and communicate is clearly strong.

You could argue that Skype isn’t even competing against the PSTN system. It is really, for narrow sub-pupulations, a degenerate version of Friendster and other social networks.

The lesson of this is that the potential value proposition is much, much broader than dial-a-number and talk. The obsolescence of the PSTN will be caused not by cheap traditional voice run over the Internet, but by services the PSTN cannot ever deliver.