Hop 255

Google Earth

Google Earth  looks like fun and there are some great 3D images here.

Wavigo

Hot on the heels of Jajah comes Wavigo's announcement that they can also bridge telephony with Skype. This lowers barriers for Skype's competitors as they effectively lose their first mover externality advantage as per yesterday's post. Wavigo's services are a first step toward looking like what I immagine a Google or Yahoo service would include with additional information services seamlessly integrated. Its not enough to make me switch (not least because of availability of Skypeout) but if I was selecting a new VoIP provider there is less reason to automatically go with Skype.

Here is the Wavigo pitch:

Users of Wavigo can now seamlessly link to Skype users for both instant messaging (IM) and voice calling. This is in addition to Wavigo’s existing all-in-one instant messenger facility to simultaneously use YAHOO!, MSN, AOL and ICQ. Wavigo also provides SMS-text messaging, file transfers/sharing, news, sports, weather, stock feeds, an advanced internet and travel searching facility and a full featured multi-media player as service features.

Jajah

Jajah - a new VoIP provider? There are so many these days that I don't bother to record them but this one claims to be able to bridge communications with Skype. If true, and no mainstream source is reporting this yet (Broadband reports is circumspect), that is quite something.  A large part of Skype's lead is in externalities (i.e. they have 40 million or so users that can only call each other and the PSTN and the next largest provider (YahooBB!) probably has a tenth of that number.  But if a new entrant can innovate with new features as well as leverage Skype's customer base by enabling their users to call Skype's users then it is a whole new ballgame. One of the main barriers to market entry falls by the wayside. Jajah would still have to prove itself capable of this but, if so, it is the type of development that would have me selling Skype to Google or anyone else fairly quickly. Then again Jajah's website is distinctly odd so they might not be doing much of interest at all.  To be watched.

TeliaSonera Pricing Change

Wow!  TeliaSonera's announcement that it is discarding the per minute rates for telephony in Sweden came as no real surprise. The real surprise is that they are including calls to mobile networks in the new per call pricing structure. This appears, on the face of it, to be huge departure from how mobile networks, in countries with calling party pays, have charged for fixed to mobile calls. The main obstacle to doing this in the past has been the high per minute termination charges. Also of interest is that it applies to traditional telephony instead of trying to offer special deals to VoIP users while maintaining PSTN pricing. Telia, as it was called before the merger with Sonera, has always been a leader among the incumbent pack but this is quite something. The mainstream media has not yet picked up on this but James Enck , as often is the case, wrote up the announcement very quickly.

Point Topic Broadband Stats

Tim Johnson and Haroon Butt have put out broadband data from PointTopic for end 1st quarter 2005. They put the global total at 164 million subscriber lines at that date. Earlier end 2004 data from OECD with rankings and time series, for the 30 countries covered, is here.

Telco bypass and skype performance stats

More telco bypass going on here with Mint. Meanwhile over at the Skypejournal they cover an updated feature which allows users to see the performance of their Skype connections.  It would be useful if Skype could aggregate an average and provide these data by country. It would help inform those cases where telcos are claimed to be degrading the performance of Skype. It would also provide an interesting indicator of overall comparative net performance by country

Analysys on Broadband Availability

Analysys has done an interesting report benchmarking the availability of high speed broadband. As might be expected Korea and Japan come off looking best. This would have been more pronounced had the study placed comparative data together, in charts, for speeds higher than 8 Mbps. The lack of 8 Mbps service is notable in Ireland and Germany. The report doesn't have much to say on Australia but quite a bit on Canada. The weakness of the report is the lack of sources for data that goes beyond the traditional strength of Analysys' telecoms experience. And some of the results are questionable in the format they are presented such as the adoption of VoIP by Irish businesses as a percentage of broadband businesses in that country (and then showing Ireland in the lead). In addition comparing end 2004 broadband penetration with data labeled 2004 for things like ecomm expenditure is, at this stage, dubious at best. Not only are there very little comparable data but the National Statistical Offices would, for many of the countries in the study, not have reported these data yet. Even where they have published 2004 data, such as Eurostat, it is from surveys undertaken in early 2004. For a mature technology such gaps don't matter much but for broadband the difference in penetration and impact could be substantial.  If they used private sector data then a source would have been useful.

KPN and VoIP

Ovum is reporting KPN's latest VoIP offer in the Neterlands. I think their take on it is fairly good and it might be an indicator of things to come in the way telcos charge for a basic set of services.

KPN and VoIP

Ovum is reporting KPN's latest VoIP offer in the Neterlands. I think their take on it is fairly good and it might be an indicator of things to come in the way telcos charge for a basic set of services.

VoIP: Bringing disorder to the market

A couple of stories on the web today about disgruntled telcos trying to block Skype. One at Skypejournal where they confirm Oman is blocking access to Skype's website. As commented before this is likely to be futile as Skype's program can be emailed, friends and family can top up Skype-out accounts for expats and users can always go to services such as anomymizer. Meanwhile while the rest of the world is trying o think up ways to sustain, at least some, public phone boxes, China Netcom is trying to shut down their growth. Apparently small entrepreneurs are using broadband connections and VoIP to offer the passing public inexpensive calls from kiosks. The less than US$0.02 per minute rate sounds like they are using Skype. China Netcom says the kiosks bring "disorder to the market". An alternative view would be that the VoIP kiosks bring competition and public service.