The Cult of Skype

I feel a bit like a sane person in a town full of insane people. I don’t get Skype. Oh sure, it “just works” in comparison to certain other things (e.g. SIP behind a NAT device), has good sound quality, lets you make free calls to other Skypers, and lets you make outgoing calls to the PSTN for a reasonable price.

And no doubt the people who make Skype are trying to get Skype embedded in devices not on a computer. Gets people talking into telephone devices.

For me, the vast majority of the people I call are not on Skype, they are on Cingular. If you pay Cingular enough money per month (and I do by a longshot), you can get free mobile-to-mobile calls. Since my mobile service is “good enough” at my house, I can call the vast majority of the people I talk to regularly on my cell phone for free. It’s definately more portable than my computer and will work in more places. Most of the people I talk can’t use Skype. Why? Corporate firewalls, or they’re just not anywhere near a computer at the time.

For any staff member at Voxilla that I need to talk to, I just dial a three-digit extension on my SPA-841. In some cases, it will even ring their mobile phone in parallel with their extension. Who needs Skype in that case?

I guess until I get a critical mass of people that I talk to on Skype (or at least one very imporant person), I don’t see myself joining the cult of Skype. I’ll stick to tried-and-true SIP with PSTN connectivity.