Word from Skype marketing: The total number of registered users is now over 196 million. At any given moment, you can see how many users are online, which has been around the nine million mark.

I have a completely different reason to be happy about Skype being ported to the N800: Skype works.

I suppose that most of you live in the US, and use the sip either at home or on Internet cafe. Under those conditions indeed sip works and is a better choice than skype.

Under other conditions, the view is quite different. For example, I have travelled in Asia, Australia and New Zealand lately. I thought I could use gizmo to phone back home on decent rate (just wifi access fees).

SIP is blocked in most hotspots. Purposefully. Wouldn't your know it: most hotspots in tourist places have been bought by telcos, and grouped in networks. And telcos don't like free competition... For example in New Zealand: you can get a card to use wifi in hotspots all around the country from NZ telecom. Not really cheap, but much cheaper than cellphone roaming charges. Except that you can't phone using SIP, because NZ telecom won't let you. And good luck trying to find an hotspot you could use outside of Auckland which is not operated by NZ telecom.

Hotels with wifi access are coming to the same conclusion: let people use their room phone instead. In all fairness, I sould say that if more than one customer starts to use SIP on the hotel router, things won't work very well. Anyway: bye, bye SIP.

It's not only NZ, you'll find the same story everywhere. For example, I live in Germany. T-online bought about all start-up wifi networks two years ago. Only Vodafone has a decent competing network. Both are telcos, say bye bye to sip. Skype works, and the reason it is not that easilly blocked is because the protocol is secret, of course. It's trivial to block an open protocol. As much as I like open source, I have to realise that this is a weakness here.


Now, talk about phoning at home, on you own router. Wouldn't you know it? Telcos have understood that SIP is competition, and they've found a very creative way to kill it. For example in France, everyone knowadays uses a "freebox". It's a wifi router you get from orange (ex France telecom). It comes with an "internet phone". Looks like a good offer.

Except that this "internet phone" is SIP, and orange won't let other SIP networks call their SIP phone for free. Except that this "internet phone" is SIP, and grabs the SIP ports (of course). Try to use SIP on a computer connected to the router, and it won't work (of course). It could work, if you are computer literate enough to let your SIP client use non-standard ports and to configure the router firewall accordingly. Most people don't know how to do that. Skype does that automatically.


Nokia had a brilliant idea with the 770 originally: make a wifi phone, using SIP. Except that roaming with SIP is less and less possible. Now they try Skype. I can understand that.

Wow, interesting.

@Jerome: A very good summary of the situation.

What's really needed here is that we all start to push harder for network neutrality, that's not only about charging differently for different services, what's really important is to get written in stone that it's illegal to cut off competition. Which is, in fact, illegal in many other segments. If telecoms can't be neutral then they should not be allowed to own any network services, they should only be allowed to own the physical infrastructure. Cables. Not what's running on them. In other words, "behave, or..!"

Basically, exactly what you're trying to sell as an advantage is Skypes main disadvantage: It is not a good internet citizen. It does not use well defined ports. Actually, it hijacks the existing infrastructure in a very impolite way. Again, while you might enjoy this as long as you benefit from it, you have to ask yourself: "What if everyone did that?"

It is a good thing that the owner of a network has control over what's happening. He is legally responsible (in most countries) and he wants to provide a certain user experience for all of his users. Now if you build a hotspot for your customers to surf the web and read their mails, you need to calculate the amount of bandwidth you'll typically need for all of them to surf at a decent speed. Good. Now one of these customers tunnels his filesharing traffic over port 80, uses Skype and does a number of other things the network wasn't designed for... As long as it's one customer, it'll probably go unnoticed (except that there might be legal implications). But if everyone does it, you'll run into troubles.

My experience is that many hotspots don't block SIP for the reason that they don't want VoIP. They simply block everything thats not needed for surfing and mailing. I usually can't chat (IRC), can't do filesharing, can't use instant messaging .... So I don't believe you can't do SIP because they want to block VoIP. If they really, really wanted to block all kinds of VoIP, they'd have to start with Skype simply because it's popular (there are ways to do this, although its more complex than blocking a port).

So the bottom line is that with Skype "works everywhere" translates to "abuses network infrastructure". I wouldn't dare to sell this as a good thing, let alone as an advantage.

I can't stress fully how much I disagree with benny1967. It's turning the whole thing upside down. If the transport layer (which is what the hotspot or other AP is laying down) should start sensoring all the traffic then where should it stop? It's like a road. You can't and you shan't try to keep control over what's transported, but you can impose speed (bandwidth) limits: Add speedbumps where deemed necessary.

And as for blocking SIP: There's no doubt that when telcos block SIP it's because it's a competitor, not because of bandwidth, legal issues or anything else. It's about killing competition, full stop. There have been enough actual cases described in the media the last year to support this conclusion.

In fact there's laws to enforce just what I said: If I run a hotspot, it's my legal duty to do as much as I can to make sure nothing illegal will be done by its users. A reasonable means of doing this is blocking certain websites and ports that are known to be risky. (And this is what people do when they run hotspots.)

Even if the legal situation might be different in other countries, it's still my hotspot. I can do whatever I want. I can block the whole web except bible-related sites. I can make it available only for email an block http completely. Whatever I want - or whatever I need to do (an increasing number of access points have to follow corporate security guidlines; their admins hate Skype for what it forces them to do).

I never used a hotspot that was run by a telco. All I can say is that whenever I can't use SIP, I cannot use any other "exotic" services like IRC or such, many times I can't even ping a public server from such a network. So I have no reason to believe its a "no-SIP-policy". Its probably more of a "web and mail only"-policy. But, of course, this may vary with other hotspots.

Oh, and speaking of competition or "killing competition": If this is your concern, don't use Skype. Skype kills competition.

That last paragraph just shows that you don't really get it. Skype competes with their _product_, while telcos that blocks SIP (or other VoIP. Really. This has been in the press _everywhere_!) cuts competition by removing competitor's access. Telcos that do this don't _want_ to compete. This is in fact against the law in some countries (if they can't keep their roles apart they are not allowed to mix them), and should be in more.

EDIT: Note that I'm talking about publicly provided networks, if you want to provide some free access to passers-by from your home network then by all means you have the right to block anything you want.

OK...

Yes, we're talking about 2 strategies here, both of which can kill competition effectively, but on a different level.

Have a nice day. If you have a N800, enjoy Skype... it's ab Benny1967-free zone.

Sorry about the 'don't get it', btw. Bad wording on my part, pls. ignore everything before 'Skype competes with..'. My point was the two strategies, as you say, and indeed I (and some lawmakers some places, fortunately) consider the 'cut off' strategy illegal and unfair.

As for enjoying Skype.. I'll do my best! As I've said elsewhere I would still have preferred an open Skype if that could be possible. If the SIP-blocking and all that disappeared we could all concentrate on getting the best open products on the market.