Skype for business: mobile options and competitors

Skype in the enterprise? Over my dead body, some telecom and IT managers will say. But don't be too sure your people aren't already using the rogue VoIP service.As we saw last month (Telemanagement March 1, 2007) in the first in this two-part series on Skype for business, 30% of 171 million registered users worldwide say they use the free (or almost-free) Internet phone service to make business calls some of the time. And it's increasingly more than just small business users and unsanctioned use by corporate employees.Skype is slowly evolving into something that might actually make sense as a tool for enterprises. Even if you're a big, rich organization, it's tough to resist free long-distance calling, especially overseas calling, even in an era of rock-bottom LD pricing. And Skype's instant messaging features (presence, text messaging and quick, easy file transfers) offer additional benefits.In the first article, we looked at some of the hardware and software products vendors are rushing to market that make Skype easier and more convenient to use - including gateways that can integrate Skype with a conventional office PBX. This time we look at two related phenomena, Skype on mobile phones, and Skype competitors.Skype AlternativesCompetitors, other free and cut-rate Internet phone services, have been there for some time - including GoogleTalk, Microsoft LiveMeeting and others. But Skype was always cooler, slicker, more popular, and generally offered better call quality. Here we check out two fairly recent entries that might eventually rival the front-runner on all counts.Jajah: Like Skype, Jajah was born in the volatile European telecom market. Unlike Skype, it's not a peer-to-peer (P2P) VoIP service. In fact, it only uses your computer and Internet connection for initial call set-up. You use your regular phone and PSTN connection to talk. There is no software to download or special computer telephone equipment to purchase. So all the security concerns about Skype's firewall-traversing P2P technology go out the window.The company calls Jajah the first Web-enabled VoIP service. Users register for free at the company's website and add contact numbers to an online telephone book. To make a call, you select a contact or type a telephone number in the field provided in the very simple Jajah interface, then click the Call button. A few seconds later, your telephone rings once. You pick it up, hear a message from Jajah saying the call is going through, and then the phone rings at the other end.Most calling between registered Jajah members is free. If both the caller and the called party are in Group A countries (US, Canada, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand) you can even call free to other members' cellphones. If you or the party you're calling are in a Group B country (most of Western Europe, Russia, parts of South America, the Far East, Australia), only landline calls are free. Calls to non-Jajah members and other calls between Jajah members, including to or from countries outside Group A and B (India, China, most of Africa), are charged at rates from 3.1 to about 60 cents a minute.How does it work? Jajah has PSTN gateways in telecom hotels around the world. When you place a call at the website, the Jajah data centre sends a message to the gateways nearest to you and to the party you're calling. They place calls first to you, then to the other party. The call goes over the public Internet between Jajah gateways.For the user, it's a slightly unfamiliar mode of making a phone call - unless you're old enough to remember assisted long distance calls - but requires no learning. In my testing, Jajah very occasionally failed to set up calls properly the first time. Call quality was reasonably good but subject to the vagaries of traffic and congestion on the public Internet - meaning occasional echo and jitter.Since you're using a regular phone, though, audio is never better than PSTN quality. With Skype, which uses wideband codecs, audio is actually better than PSTN quality on a good connection if you're using a computer-telephone headset.Jajah also offers two ways to use the service on cellphones. You can download a small client program that works on many but not all cellphones (yet). Or with some Palm Treo, RIM BlackBerry and Symbian smartphones, you can use a new Web-based interface that works much like the landline service.The company offers other paid services, including very low-cost and easy-to-set-up teleconferencing and call scheduling. Jajah is betting it will make enough money from paid calls and other services to subsidize the free calling. Co-founder Roman Scharf told Telemanagment that even if the ratio of free to paid calls reached 90:10 - and it's a long way from that now - the company can still be profitable.GizmoProject: GizmoProject competes more directly with Skype. It too is a P2P VoIP service that routes calls over the Internet, offers presence, text messaging and file sharing capabilities and uses a softphone client running on the user's computer with a plug-in computer telephone. It's also priced similarly to Skype, with PC-to-PC calls free and PC-to-PSTN calls charged at discount rates. But like Jajah, GizmoProject has some characteristics that may make it more interesting and palatable to enterprises.It was launched in July 2005 by SIPphone, which operates a SIP-based IP network and also sells its services through other VoIP service providers. The GizmoProject service has a long way to go to catch up with Skype in terms of users - 2.5 million for GizmoProject, close to 200 million for Skype. In other respects, though, it has some clear advantages.Where Skype uses mainly proprietary technology, GizmoProject uses mainly open standards - specifically, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), an application-layer signaling protocol for setting up, routing and terminating Internet phone calls and other IP-based transmissions, and Jabber, an instant messaging (IM) protocol used in some corporate IM systems. (Note: Skype does in fact use SIP for making PSTN connections.)The implications for enterprise users are two-fold. Users of Jabber-based corporate IM systems can add GizmoProject users to their buddy lists and vice versa, and monitor presence information and IM each other. More importantly, GizmoProject users can log on to some SIP-based IP-PBXs, including software PBXs based on the open source Asterisk program, and take advantage of many PBX features.If a caller dialed a company number and keyed in the extension for a GizmoProject user, for example, the PBX would pass the call to SIPphone, which could then terminate it wherever the user was located, as long as they were logged in and had high-speed Internet access. The user could also make four-digit calls to colleagues from a GizmoProject softphone, and exploit other PBX features such as directory, voice mail, call forwarding and conferencing.Another appealing feature of GizmoProject is that, unlike Skype, it does not use members' computers to help route calls. The call connection is peer to peer, but set-up and routing are handled by SIPphone data centres. With Skype, it is theoretically possible for performance on a user's computer to suffer because resources are being commandeered to route other users' calls. SIPphone says that can't happen with its network architecture.SIPphone PC-to-PSTN rates start at 1.9 cents a minute and go up to about 50 cents for calls to cellphones in some countries. Users must buy US$10 credits to use this part of the service. They can also, as with Skype, buy virtual telephone numbers so that PSTN users can reach them on their GizmoProject softphones.In my limited testing, GizmoProject call quality was similar to Skype - variable, but usually acceptable and sometimes outstanding. It uses the same wideband codec technology as Skype (and many other VoIP services), so audio quality can be better than a regular phone call.Downsides for GizmoProject? There are way fewer users that you can call for free, and few if any hardware products - although there are downloadable clients for some Nokia smartphones, including the new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. And it doesn't traverse firewalls as easily as Skype, so may require some network configuration to make it work. IT departments might well view that as a good thing, however.VoIP on your MobileI've already mentioned a couple of ways to get free or lower-cost VoIP calling on a mobile phone - the Skype client on compatible Pocket PCs with Wi-Fi or 3G connectivity, Jajah's mobile client and Web-based services, and the GizmoProject client for SIP-based Nokia N series phones and Internet tablets, which uses Wi-Fi connections.Three companies are focused on putting Skype and/or other VoIP services on mobiles, including two from Canada.EQO: EQO Communications, based in Vancouver, offers free downloadable beta software for over 100 mobile handsets. The software allows users to make long distance Skype-to-Skype or SkypeOut calls from their mobiles so that they only get charged for local or national call minutes by their cellular provider. Skype calls go over the cellular carrier's circuit switched network to a local EQO server and then to a gateway in Vancouver where they're transferred to Skype.The service is free at this point. EQO (pronounced echo) earns money by being a Skype affiliate and getting a share of SkypeOut revenues. It hopes eventually to also earn revenue from cellular carriers and online communities.The Skype service may not be much benefit if you only call in North America and already have an airtime package with low-cost North American minutes. You'll only save the difference between SkypeOut rates and whatever your carrier charges. But if you need to call overseas from your mobile or don't have a good long distance package, using Skype and EQO may yield significant savings.The company is actually more focused on putting IM on mobiles. It has IM client software for more than 400 phones. It lets users connect to AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, Jabber and Skype buddies from a single interface. It works on some 250 mobile networks in 130 countries. The company is also developing social networking software for mobiles and hopes eventually to integrate all three - IM, VoIP, social networking - into one client.EQO's strengths lie in the breadth of handset and mobile network support and, according to its own claims, the ease of downloading and setting up client software. But it does have one acknowledged flaw. The user's desktop Skype client must be running and logged in to use the service. Buddy lists and other Skype data are "propagated" from the desktop client to the EQO client.It means that if your PC crashes while you're travelling or you forget and turn it off, the service won't work. Todd Heintz, VP of product management, says the Skype client will remain a beta product until the company has completed development on a work-around to this problem.Talkster: Toronto-based Talkster is the Jajah of mobile VoIP. Its browser-based service, launched in December as a beta offering, works with GoogleTalk, GizmoProject and MSN Messenger - but not Skype. As with Jajah, no downloads or special equipment are required. Talkster works with any browser-equipped mobile phone. Users can call PSTN numbers, including other cellphones, and IM softphones.They use the Talkster Web page to initiate calls. In some cases, connections are completed with a local cell call to a nearby Talkster gateway, which then patches the call through to the called party over the company's IP network. Talkster has gateways so far in 23 countries. In other cases, the Talkster Web page signals a gateway further away, which then calls the user back. Either way, Talkster patches caller and called party together much as Jajah does.For users outside North America, especially in Europe, this will mean significant savings on cellular long-distance and roaming charges, the company says. North American users will see savings mainly on international calls which, as with EQO, will be charged as local or national calls. Calls to IM buddies, at least during the beta period, are free.The current beta program is intended as a proof of concept for a more fully-featured enterprise offering, due to be introduced in the spring of 2007. The enterprise service adds IM management capabilities that will, among other things, allow network managers to capture mobile IM text and voice conversations for archiving - a significant issue for US companies that need to comply with new corporate governance and privacy regulations.Talkster will sell the service through channel partners. It has no interest in "chasing the market for the two-cent call going to one cent or to zero," says the company's chief operating officer James Wanless. "That is not a good business opportunity for us or anyone else."iSkoot: iSkoot, an American company, offers free downloadable client software for 13 mobile handsets - Motorola Razrs, Nokia N and E series phones and some Palm Treos - with more to come. It also has an application service provider (ASP) offering for carriers, which it has already sold to Hutchison 3G in the UK. iSkoot chairman and CEO Jacob Guedalia says the company expects to announce another "major" carrier customer before the end of 2007.The directly downloadable software lets users place Skype calls to buddies and to SkypeOut numbers (assuming they have a SkypeOut balance). They can also receive calls from Skype buddies on their mobile, but only if they've set up the handset to receive calls and have a SkypeOut balance - incoming calls are charged against SkypeOut credits with iSkoot.To place a call, they use a small-screen version of the standard Skype interface. It goes out as a regular circuit switched call - incurring normal carrier airtime charges - to a regional iSkoot point of presence (POP), and from there goes on to the Skype Internet voice network. iSkoot has POPs in 50 countries. As with EQO, users will save the difference between the cost of a national call, plus SkypeOut charges where applicable, and the cost of a long-distance call.With the ASP service, users can only make and take calls to and from Skype buddies. This is an artificial constraint designed to make the service palatable to carriers, but may change in the future or with some carriers. Guedalia is careful to say that this is the way "the current offering" works. Since users pay normal airtime charges for Skype calls, he argues, carriers will see net additional minutes from iSkoot-using customers. The assumption, presumably, is that those customers will make relatively low-cost Skype calls where they would balk at a more expensive long distance cell call.ConclusionDoes all of this mean that Skype - or one of it's competitors - is now ready for enterprise prime time? Probably not. But carefully controlled use of these services could save significant money, especially where international calling is involved.And as instant messaging makes further inroads into the enterprise - as young people brought up with the technology continue to flood into the work force - the kind of presence, text messaging and file transfer capabilities that Skype and GizmoProject enable will be in increasing demand.

Skype for business: mobile options and competitors

News | April 2, 2007

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