9 comments for “Martin hops off the VoIP bandwagon, catches train for SS7”
I didn’t exactly suggest that standalone Skype devices is the answer for Martin’s woes. I was making a rhetorical counter point to Pogue’s point that Skype requires dorky headsets.
By the way, Skype’s zero-infrastructure is more of a marketing gimmick and less of a fact. They do indeed seed the network with their own supernodes and previously I had argued that it does not cost much to fully supply the required infrastructure. (http://www.mocaedu.com/mt/archives/000191.html).
Well said. I believe the VoIP world is about to hit a major inflection point where the competition shifts from being based on price to features.
On the voicemail front – yes, there’s tons of room for improvement. For a lot of people, the experience is really broken these days. e.g. On my home phone VM, I press 7 to delete a msg, on my office VM, I have to press 3. And every time I get a voicemail on my cell phone, I have to manually delete the SMS notification my carrier sends out. That’s really annoying. Not to mention all the time I waste dialing in to check a voicemail that ends up being blank.
So Aswath, you’re saying that Skype has no real differentiation? 🙂
But kidding aside, I agree with what you’re saying and have said the same thing myself. I still stand by my point that Skype on a device does not necessarily mean an automatic win for Skype, and that the whole formula that made Skype so successful on a PC platform may, in fact, prevent it from achieving success on a device platform.
"I was unskyping before unksyping was cool"
http://blogofvoipblogs.blogspot.com/2005/04/why-skype-is-no-different.html (which was originally published in VoIP Daily during March 2004)
Try the AdCalls FREE Voip (PC2Phone)
We are running at 92% success rate on completed calls….
www.adcalls.com
I use truphone, www.truphone.com since 6 month on a daily basis, it has replaced Skype completely. I love the call quality and the freedome it gives me … and I love the pricing they offer … I love that I now can now have a unified number for the first time stored in my mobile! truphone seems to be the best service I have come accross since a long time.
I just got a data plan on my mobile. I pretty much do not need my computer anymore since I do so much with my mobile phone. The neatest thing is that I can even watch naughty movies:) It is pretty neat, it’s called Mobile TV. All I do is point my phone to sexoncell.com and they have adult mobile movies in different formats like 3gp movies, symbian, pda or whatever. If you have any other cool sites, please let me know! This one, though, even has a free daily mobile movie.
Something in one of the Skype releases began to interact badly with something else installed on my PC. At boot time, CPU usage would peg at 100% for 10 minutes or more, and the culprit was Skype. After spending a few hours cleaning up the PC, returning to previous versions of Skype, and not being able to determine the issue, it was time to say goodbye.
I had similar quality issues with Gizmo. Now for cheap calls, it’s Jajah all the way. With no PC in the way, there are no worries about DLL interactions and all of that other garbage.
What made Skype work was free P2P telephony that worked. Now the same proposition is emerging everywhere.
I too have a sense that many in the early adopter group have moved on from Skype. Wi-Fi handsets with SIP have proven to me that I don’t need to wait for Skype on the mobile.
Thus what Ken and Alec really allude to is their connections have shifted. They’re also making more use of "mobile" solutions that are more useful to them. Eg Jajah . I’ve done the same.
I didn’t exactly suggest that standalone Skype devices is the answer for Martin’s woes. I was making a rhetorical counter point to Pogue’s point that Skype requires dorky headsets.
By the way, Skype’s zero-infrastructure is more of a marketing gimmick and less of a fact. They do indeed seed the network with their own supernodes and previously I had argued that it does not cost much to fully supply the required infrastructure. (http://www.mocaedu.com/mt/archives/000191.html).
Well said. I believe the VoIP world is about to hit a major inflection point where the competition shifts from being based on price to features.
On the voicemail front – yes, there’s tons of room for improvement. For a lot of people, the experience is really broken these days. e.g. On my home phone VM, I press 7 to delete a msg, on my office VM, I have to press 3. And every time I get a voicemail on my cell phone, I have to manually delete the SMS notification my carrier sends out. That’s really annoying. Not to mention all the time I waste dialing in to check a voicemail that ends up being blank.
So Aswath, you’re saying that Skype has no real differentiation? 🙂
But kidding aside, I agree with what you’re saying and have said the same thing myself. I still stand by my point that Skype on a device does not necessarily mean an automatic win for Skype, and that the whole formula that made Skype so successful on a PC platform may, in fact, prevent it from achieving success on a device platform.
"I was unskyping before unksyping was cool"
http://blogofvoipblogs.blogspot.com/2005/04/why-skype-is-no-different.html (which was originally published in VoIP Daily during March 2004)
Try the AdCalls FREE Voip (PC2Phone)
We are running at 92% success rate on completed calls….
www.adcalls.com
I use truphone, www.truphone.com since 6 month on a daily basis, it has replaced Skype completely. I love the call quality and the freedome it gives me … and I love the pricing they offer … I love that I now can now have a unified number for the first time stored in my mobile! truphone seems to be the best service I have come accross since a long time.
I just got a data plan on my mobile. I pretty much do not need my computer anymore since I do so much with my mobile phone. The neatest thing is that I can even watch naughty movies:) It is pretty neat, it’s called Mobile TV. All I do is point my phone to sexoncell.com and they have adult mobile movies in different formats like 3gp movies, symbian, pda or whatever. If you have any other cool sites, please let me know! This one, though, even has a free daily mobile movie.
Something in one of the Skype releases began to interact badly with something else installed on my PC. At boot time, CPU usage would peg at 100% for 10 minutes or more, and the culprit was Skype. After spending a few hours cleaning up the PC, returning to previous versions of Skype, and not being able to determine the issue, it was time to say goodbye.
I had similar quality issues with Gizmo. Now for cheap calls, it’s Jajah all the way. With no PC in the way, there are no worries about DLL interactions and all of that other garbage.
What made Skype work was free P2P telephony that worked. Now the same proposition is emerging everywhere.
I too have a sense that many in the early adopter group have moved on from Skype. Wi-Fi handsets with SIP have proven to me that I don’t need to wait for Skype on the mobile.
Thus what Ken and Alec really allude to is their connections have shifted. They’re also making more use of "mobile" solutions that are more useful to them. Eg Jajah . I’ve done the same.