INTERNET
Skype signs with four carriers
26-07-2004
by Craig Liddell
European VoIP company Skype Technologies has announced partnerships with four telecoms carriers that will make the company's offerings more widely available.
On Friday, Skype announced agreements with COLT, iBasis, Level 3, and Teleglobe to provide call termination services worldwide. The agreements pave the way for SkypeOut, a soon-to-be-launched pre-pay service that allows people to call any telephone number in the world from anywhere in the world using the Skype software.
While terms of the agreements were not disclosed, Skype's CEO and co-founder, Niklas Zennstrom, was quick to praise the announcement as a key element in the company's strategy.
"These companies are visionary in recognising that terminations to the legacy public telephone network can be expanded with the advent of Internet telephony and the global proliferation of broadband," he said. "We will now move quickly and offer SkypeOut calls to landline and mobile phone numbers around the world."
Put simply, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) uses the protocols of the Internet to make voice calls via telephone or computing device. To now, Skype has only distributed software that allows people to make calls via a computing device, rather than telephones.
The company's new SkypeOut service is now available in test form.
Created by Zennstrom and Janus Friis, founders of peer-to-peer (P2P) company Kazaa, Skype has been downloaded more than 17 million times since its launch in August 2003, according to the company.
Since that time, the company has moved rapidly to develop its VoIP offerings. In June 2004, Skype announced a new partnership with US-based headset maker Plantronics to combine the use of high-specification headsets with the phone service.
Plantronics is to bundle software made by Luxembourg-based Skype with its USB-compatible headset for computers and PDAs.
In April 2004, the company went mobile with PocketSkype, free beta software that allows users with a WiFi-enabled PDA to make voice calls when in a hotspot. This creates the potential for PDAs to become mobile phones.
Meanwhile, Zennstrom said of the carrier agreements, "we carefully evaluated our options and chose companies that give us a good global reach across the US, Asia and Europe and will provide a balance of trust, competitive pricing and quality-of-service for SkypeOut users."
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