IP Democracy: Skype's Mobile Phone Delays

Business Week’s Olga Kharif has this piece on an issue that is becoming a sore point for Skype: it’s inability to work on mobile phones and delays the VoIP provider is experiencing in getting its mobile application to work. CEO Niklas Zennstrom has been quoted as saying the company is running into technical obstacles in getting Skype to work on cell phones, a drawback for the eBay-owned company, particularly now that other providers, such as Jajah, are hitting the mobile market hard.

Not that Skype isn’t already available on some cell phones — those that use Windows Mobile, for example, can use Skype, but that’s only 10% of the market. Plus, most of the world outside the U.S. is far more dependent on mobile telephony that landline or PC-based voice service, so Skype is missing out on a lot of opportunity.

And, as Kharif point out, Skype could charge a lot more than its $.02/minute for calls to mobile or cell phones if users could call from their cell phones; maybe five times as much given that most mobile phone plans now charge at least $1/minute for international calls.

Update: Another big competitor in the VoIP-over-mobile space is Rebtel. Jeff Pulver so happens to have an interesting item about Rebtel today. He says that

Rebtel gets to deliver the call and avoid having any mobile connection charges for at least one leg of the call. This becomes the next phase of mobile disintermediation.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on September 29, 2006 9:35 AM to IP Democracy