This past Monday, Skype unveiled a new service designed to coax business users into trying Internet telephony, and increase the company’s revenue by competing with the big phone companies for the business communications market. Skype representatives say that at this time of economic uncertainty, small and medium-size businesses can save a bundle by integrating all of their phone, texting and IM needs and communicating via the company’s online network.
The new program, Skype for SIP, allows business users to set up extensive communication networks via the company’s voice over IP protocol, and taking advantage of industry-standard PBX communications setups. Like the consumer Skype accounts already available, the new business accounts would allow you to call any existing Skype user at no charge for a computer to computer call. Other calls would be billed at about two cents per minute according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
While Skype has had a business division for some time, the Company has not aggressively pursued business users in the past — perhaps because they lacked the infrastructure to handle more advanced business communications configurations, including SIP and PBX protocols.
Claiming that the new service will allow businesses to stay connected for a relative pittance, Skype is making a big push to attract companies to its new service. The company already has a strong following among consumers, especially those who travel often. Being able to place computer to computer calls for free, and even free video enabled calls, is a strong selling point for Skype. Additionally, the Company’s rates for calling landlines and mobile phones around the world are competitive with most of the “big boy” networks such as AT&T or Verizon.
The company now claims over 400 million registered users worldwide; however the clear majority of these users place only free calls through Skype, seriously undermining the business model for the company. Skype hopes to be able to keep the computer to computer calls free, while supplementing their income by enticing new business users to sign up for the new SIP service.
In the past, reliability has been a big issue with Skype, and the voice quality of Skype calls has sometimes suffered because of the massive amount of bandwidth necessary to maintain their peer-to-peer calling network. But the company claims that new infrastructure developments have been put in place to make the new Skype business service as reliable as any of the traditional telephone networks.
