02 July 2004

Skype Under Attack

A much more cogently argued piece from The Register on what is wrong with Skype via David Isen than my rant yesterday. Isen argues that David Mahy is demonstrating "bellheadedness" and goes on to say "the "industry" that will bring VoIP to most of us is the Internet Industry."

I am not entirely sure that the two are disagreeing. The article's introduction says "and focused on the difference between the instantaneous gratification of Skype for private individuals and the safe and efficient enterprise wide VoIP implementations, reliant mostly on the SIP protocol." We are all very happy to pay nothing for personal or small-business calls. Can't see IBM doing the same.

Skype's business model is based on selling VAS. As Mahy points out that is very unlikely "That's missing the point, don't you think? Say a Skype user in India wants to communicate with me in California on a SIP network. He can make a basic call through 2 gateways with international toll charges. Its unlikely that I will see his correct caller ID, and dead certain that we can't exchange IM, video, presence status, or do file transfers. A pair of implementations using SIP could do this for free over the public Internet."

And then we return to the security issue - which has some legs but may be as much about the easy line for journalists as any real concern.

I have seen a number of recent firewall implementations that ban cross-firewall p2p sessions - I think it will be a standard feature in 2005 enterprise releases.

No comments:

02 July 2004

Skype Under Attack

A much more cogently argued piece from The Register on what is wrong with Skype via David Isen than my rant yesterday. Isen argues that David Mahy is demonstrating "bellheadedness" and goes on to say "the "industry" that will bring VoIP to most of us is the Internet Industry."

I am not entirely sure that the two are disagreeing. The article's introduction says "and focused on the difference between the instantaneous gratification of Skype for private individuals and the safe and efficient enterprise wide VoIP implementations, reliant mostly on the SIP protocol." We are all very happy to pay nothing for personal or small-business calls. Can't see IBM doing the same.

Skype's business model is based on selling VAS. As Mahy points out that is very unlikely "That's missing the point, don't you think? Say a Skype user in India wants to communicate with me in California on a SIP network. He can make a basic call through 2 gateways with international toll charges. Its unlikely that I will see his correct caller ID, and dead certain that we can't exchange IM, video, presence status, or do file transfers. A pair of implementations using SIP could do this for free over the public Internet."

And then we return to the security issue - which has some legs but may be as much about the easy line for journalists as any real concern.

I have seen a number of recent firewall implementations that ban cross-firewall p2p sessions - I think it will be a standard feature in 2005 enterprise releases.

No comments: