Telepocalypse

Skyperlicious

I’ve noticed that Skype has changed the way my household communicates with the rest of our family. Even though we still have PSTN access to each other, we very rarely use it. We’ve become reluctant to interrupt each other without some form of presence indicator telling us it’s OK. If someone is online, they’re not depooing babies or watching a movie. We talk for much longer, but in a more relaxed way. The PC in our living/dining area has speakers and a webcam — we don’t use headsets. My wife can chat to both her parents at once, not serially. It doesn’t feel like a phone call when your family are chatting with you while you make dinner. When my parents were over in Kansas City, we were sat around the dinner table chomping away, nattering with my brother in London. The whole anxiety that you need to say something meaningful to justify the payment of money to a phone company evaporates.

Some of these things could be done with the PSTN and a speakerphone, but most cannot. We could have done it with earlier VoIP products, but the installation effort was too much. My parents can operate Skype without me having to remote access their PC using VNC to drive everything for them.

The endless association of telephony with the PSTN has had an unintended effect of damaging the vocabulary we use to describe voice communication. The words you use constrain the way you think. Is Skype telephony? I think Bob Frankston nailed the problem of terminology in this article.

I was reading about Skype’s business plans and had an evil thought. A lot of those PCs on the Skype network have a back-up dial-up modem connection as well as broadband connection. If my wife wants to call a friend in Lithuania (usual price from USA: 14 cents/minute), why can’t she just Skype her parents’ PC in Vilnius which would then bridge her into a local-rate PSTN call? Obviously, only nodes that trust you would be willing to let you place calls with their outbound caller ID, but it would totally undermine the economics of long-distance toll calls. The phone company can’t detect it, even if they tried to outlaw it.

The funniest thing is how user-generated content is the ultimate driver of P2P networks, because the users (and not a media company) own the copyright the all the content.