Competition for Skype

It was bound to happen. The model is just too darn attractive. Other companies were going to enter the p2p VoIP business, it was just a matter of time.

I just finished talking with the founder of one such company about his company and product -- John Jarvis of LitFiber told me that they are just a few weeks away from a beta release of their new p2p VoIP product iTALK 2U.

John claims that the sound quality in their product is significantly better than what Skype can achieve due to a significantly better codec that his team has built from the ground up. Even more interesting is the way he is approaching the market though -- he has built his product to be H.323 compliant.

Compliance with VoIP standards means that users of his product should be able to connect to any other VoIP infrastructure that supports the standard. This is a terrific competitive advantage over Skype's current closed architecture approach and should really transform the game. With this product, any of the companies that have made VoIP investments will be able to leverage the p2p VoIP phenomenon using LitFiber's product.

I eagerly await the release of the download...

Anyone in their garage can now be a telephone company...

Jim Kohlenberger blogs on VoIP
Excerpt:

VoIP has decoupled voice from the physical infrastructure itself. Now it can go independent of who your physical provider is. Of course, this challenged incumbent interests in that regard. Because of this decoupling it has allowed many new things. Microsoft build SIP (the protocol) just like HTML (http) and FTP, SIP is a protocol. Anyone in their garage can now be a telephone company for the entire planet. In shopping e-commerce you can get a voice rep. You can do online voice conferences. Included in game boxes and game consoles where kids use VoIP to communicate. Used in instant messaging. Star-trek type communicators are now used in Hospitals (Wi-fi based). All sorts of other things. Skype. Free World Dialup. Metcalf’s law: value of Internet goes up as you can talk to more people. New companies are broadband VoIP providers. Vonage, 8x8, etc. Plug in a regular phone to IP network and make calls. All types of new services are possible. Right now they look like regular telephones because that is what we expect. Many things are possible in the future. Question is how do we get there? How do we allow them to flourish so these new services can be made possible?

COMMENT:
On : 3/25/2004 7:27:06 AM Joshua Ruihley (www) said:

The "Jim Kohlenberger" post on Smart Cog isn't actually a blog posting by Jim. The post is of my notes from his presentation at the Internet Commons Congress yesterday.