SKYPE - ARE YOU USING IT IN YOUR BUSINESS?

Glad to hear it Aliz.  See you tomorrow.

No Gavin - I don't currently use any add-ons.  But may be in the future.

Looking forward to it too! Very interested in your 4sight as heard lot of good about it on here :)

Hi Aliz

I hope that you enjoyed it.

I sometimes use Skype for coaching, when I can't get to see the person face to face. The only issue is the quality of the timing between sound and picture. If there is a slight delay it can lead to you both talking at the same time, becuase the picture looks like they are not saying anything while the audio is starting.

I've been very fortunate then, because for the most part, I've found the quality both of picture and sound to be very satisfactory.

I get asked a lot what the difference is between my service (which is VoIP) and Skype. So I wrote something a while back to explain it. 

What is the difference between Voipfone and Skype?

There are many very important differences between Voipfone and Skype – things like call quality, reliability, customer service, price (Skype is surprisingly expensive), services & features and technology - but the simple and critical difference between Voipfone and Skype is that Skype is NOT a telephone company and Voipfone is.

Skype is a software application that runs on your PC, not a telephone service. Skype go out of their way to explain that they are not a telephone company; they do not, for instance, provide a telephone number that you can call for support.

What is VoIP?

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is a technology that allows you to make telephone calls over the internet (and other data networks). It’s the next generation of telecoms technology and over the next few years all of BT’s core networks will be converted to it in their 21^st Century Network project. All new PBX (switchboard) equipment is already VoIP enabled.

VoIP is a general description of a technology, the specific technology used by VoIP has now been standardised internationally – this is called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol).

So what is Skype?

Skype is a form of VoIP.

But Skype use its own technology which is secret and will not interwork with any other system or service. The world of telecommunications relies totally on accepted international standards so that any telephone anywhere in the world can call any other – this is not the case with Skype.

Skype is also a peer to peer system - that is, it uses your own PC and all the other PCs with Skype software on it, to carry their calls. Sometimes it even uses your own bandwidth ie your broadband connection to carry traffic for other people over your connection. See ‘Skype Super Node’ to find out more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernode_(networking)

This makes it extremely cheap for them as they do not need to provide their own network infrastructure. But it also means that it cannot control the quality of your calls. Because your telephone call is a real time application which, unlike other internet uses like email and web browsing, cannot be slowed down, Skype is at the mercy of an ever increasingly congested network which can and does interfere with your call.

Skype is a wonderful application which brought VoIP to everyone’s attention and the industry would not be what it is today without it, but it was never designed or even envisaged as a business application or even a telephone service - and it isn’t. 

Why Voipfone is different.

Voipfone uses a form of VoIP called SIP which means that unlike Skype, where calls are sent out onto the open internet and make their best efforts to get to where they need to go, we have a much greater level of control of them. For example. a call going from you to an everyday landline or mobile never enters the public internet, it’s carried over a peered network (a bit like a very large Local Area Network that you might have in your office) straight onto our own network in London and fed directly into the mobile or PSTN networks over our own physical cables.

This all means that call quality is at all times excellent and not at the mercy of the public internet. It also means that you can use all the services that were until recently only available to large companies with private switchboards – extensions, call hold and forward, voicemail and voicemail to email, IVR (press 1 for sales, 2 for Mike etc), call recording and so on. All at extremely low cost – just a few pounds per month.

Thanks Colin for detailing what I said earlier, seriously.

To highlight one point: Skype is surprisingly expensive.  Despite the general user perception it would be free. 
For hobby use maybe, the call to granny in Australia yes, too.  

I don't brush it down, in fact I use it (mainly for chat).  You gotta realise what it really is.

One other little point, Colin. Yes, Sipgate may be German, i.e. for the sake of the argument non-British. But so is Thames Water (Australian), EON (German), the Camembert you eat daily (hopefully French), the car you drive (German if you want to splash out, Korean if you don't), the only remaining online bookshop American, the list ist endless and I don't need to go on. Any reason not to buy these or from these?

Good point re the cost Michael.

I have the international package so I can call landlines around the world for free but as soon as I call a mobile I can sit there and watch my credit tick down at an alarming rate. For mobile calls I use my mobile as it is normally cheaper with call allowances etc

With the exception of camembert, those are multi-billion, multinational organisations, some of which you have no choice but to use. 

VoIP, on the other hand, is best provided as a local (in country) service and, for the first time in the history of telecommunications, can be provided by small, independent businesses. These businesses can generally provide better service than the big boys and also, strangley, better technology because they are more innovative. (And certainly better prices.)

None of this necessarily follows of course  - it's probably easier to be crap as a small company than a large one, but if you find a good small company it normally a far better experience than a large anonymous one. We also find that small businesses prefer to do business with other small businesses - they like the ethos and want to talk to 'real' people.(ie people like themselves :-)

On a technical point, if you use an American company whose network services are also in the USA, your calls are going to be trombning to the US and back again over the public internet. This adds large delays and can and does cause call quality issues.

So if you do a traceroute to sipsorcery you'll see that their servers are in Dallas and that they have many routers and networks between you and them:

Traceroute has started…

traceroute to sip.sipsorcery.com (67.222.131.147), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets

 1  10.10.140.1 (10.10.140.1)  17.060 ms  8.819 ms  10.073 ms

 2  brig-core-2b-ae6-715.network.virginmedia.net (80.3.65.161)  10.356 ms  9.203 ms  11.919 ms

 3  popl-bb-1b-ae14-0.network.virginmedia.net (213.105.159.157)  15.634 ms  14.388 ms  13.427 ms

 4  popl-bb-1a-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net (213.105.174.229)  13.730 ms  13.647 ms  13.926 ms

 5  195.50.91.69 (195.50.91.69)  21.900 ms  39.568 ms  18.047 ms

 6  vl-3603-ve-227.csw2.london1.level3.net (4.69.166.153)  20.461 ms  24.578 ms  24.872 ms

 7  ae-56-221.ebr2.london1.level3.net (4.69.153.129)  19.392 ms  17.276 ms  18.261 ms

 8  ae-44-44.ebr1.newyork1.level3.net (4.69.137.78)  86.653 ms  84.100 ms  84.312 ms

 9  ae-10-10.ebr2.washington12.level3.net (4.69.148.50)  92.231 ms  97.386 ms  100.642 ms

10  ae-1-100.ebr1.washington12.level3.net (4.69.143.213)  92.335 ms  91.095 ms  100.339 ms

11  ae-6-6.ebr1.atlanta2.level3.net (4.69.148.105)  106.285 ms

    ae-3-3.ebr2.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.137.121)  123.352 ms

    ae-6-6.ebr1.atlanta2.level3.net (4.69.148.105)  116.222 ms

12  ae-63-63.ebr3.atlanta2.level3.net (4.69.148.241)  105.957 ms  105.496 ms  104.829 ms

13  ae-7-7.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.134.21)  124.993 ms  124.506 ms  124.920 ms

14  ae-83-83.csw3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.151.157)  131.425 ms  126.245 ms  123.804 ms

15  ae-3-80.edge3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.145.136)  124.620 ms  122.616 ms  124.246 ms

16  colo4-dalla.edge3.dallas1.level3.net (8.9.232.74)  124.433 ms  123.530 ms  125.002 ms

17  72.249.128.110 (72.249.128.110)  124.857 ms  123.800 ms  124.522 ms

18  sip.sipsorcery.com (67.222.131.147)  132.443 ms  124.978 ms  123.364 ms

There's a lot of places where that can go wrong and the round trip delay is between 250 and 350ms - or a quarter to a third of a second; that's enough to be a little annoying on a call and if it worsens through congestion at a node, it will become unusable.

Sipgate's servers are in Germany which is close enough not to normally cause a lag problem - they achieve a ping of 20ms or so, which is fine. But they do have quite a lot of routers and networks between you and them which not ideal.

But Sigate is also a small company, so my objection to them is mainly jingoistic - or patriotic, whichever you prefer ;-)

Since this discussion has wandered away every so slightly (sorry Vanessa) from Skype and has become somewhat techie in content (sorry again to non-techies), may I interject a small point about SIP. SIP is, as stated Session Initiation Protocol. It is involved solely in the setting up and tearing down of any phone/video call, so delays of a second in the SIP phase are perfectly acceptable. The voice or video traffic is usually carried using RTP (Real Time Protocol) and does not necessarily follow the same path as the SIP messages. Sipsorcery, for example, makes it absolutely plain they do not have any involvement in the voice traffic itself.

To get back to the OP, I do use Skype and I encourage domestic customers to use it because it is free for them to keep in touch with distant friends and relations and, unlike other VoIP phones includes video pretty much as standard. Not mentioned previously there is at least one alternative to Skype - ooVoo, which I have been told is superior to Skype.

Well we're way off topic now, but for some of us it's quite interesting (well, maybe just me and Brian :)

What sipsorcery seem to be doing is quite cool. A bit like Skype, they're not a telephone company or even a telephone service; they're not even a SIP provider. What they have is a set of software tools that if you have the technical nouse, you can use to connect together various providers - a telephone number provider, a SIP provider and a PBX provider (this last they can do for you through a third party called Anvevo).

As you say, a simple VoIP call would normally allow its RTP to route directly to the other party but, if a VoIP company provides anything more than simple VoIP calls - such as a full PBX service - their RTP is sent through their own network like the signalling. But in sipsorcery's case, they don't do that for various reasons. Doing this has some advantages (notably bandwidth useage) but also has other implications which makes some more complex services difficult or impossible. It also  requires that the SIP provider does things in a compatible way for them - but like I say, it's quite interesting.

Interesting for a VoIP geek that is,  but it's not a something I'd like to recommend to an everyday business user who just wants plug and play services that work without fuss and s/he can call to get help.

Hi Guys

I'm so glad that I've prompted you to enjoy yourselves talking technie but you've seriously lost me now! 

Sorry!

To get back to your original post. Despite owning a VoIP company, when my son was in Japan we communicated using Skype - particluarly its brilliant video call software. Free video calls to Japan (or anywhere) is fabulous for seperated friends and families.

I wouldn't dream of using it for business though. For business I want a physical telephone that's on when my PC is off - just like a normal phone, I want a whole raft of other services like, call divert, voicemail to email, extensions, music on hold, IVR etc etc I want someone to call when things go wrong and I want to know that my number won't just disappear if Skype lose interest. (A couple of years ago Skype dumped their UK numbers and we had to rescue many of their customers).

There are other things too but it seems like I'm just knocking Skype, which I don't mean to do; it's just not a business product and was never designed to be.

Vanessa has already stated she uses Skype in a business environment and, from my own experience, I totally agree it's a very effective tool for "face to face" communication. Despite never having been designed as such. As long as we accept it is what it is, a free tool.