Infographic: Skype now rules the international phone calling market

According to telco research company TeleGeography, Skype now controls the international calling market, even as more traditional landline and mobile networks continue to grow, as well.

Last year, Skype users made 214 billion minutes of international "on-net" calls (Skype to Skype), up 36 percent year-over-year. Skype's traffic amounted to 40 percent of the entire international telecom market, far and away larger than any other company.

At a growth of 54 billion minutes, Skype outpaced the the whole rest of the industry which grew 35 billion minutes.

While the numbers are impressive, the report does note that public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) (traditional landline and mobile networks) are not going away anytime soon: "The PSTN will not disappear anytime soon. While Facebook has approximately 1.2 billion monthly users, at year-end 2013, the PSTN connected to just over 8 billion fixed and mobile subscribers worldwide."

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 18 Jan 2014 17:08

nonoitall

I find it kinda disappointing that a more open platform hasn't been adopted to fill this role. *Cough*XMPP*cough*

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19.1.2014 02:15 #1

xboxdvl2

skype to skype calls work and are free thats why they are so popular.
If i wanted to call my dad he lives on the other side of the world i can go on my computer and have a chat to him on skype for hours for free or ring him from my mobile and get charged a rediculous amount peer minute.
My landline is a data line now.

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19.1.2014 04:53 #2

nonoitall

I guess it's the technicalities of it that bother me. So many people perceive Skype as something that gives you a unique calling service for free, when in reality, it's proprietary branding, protocol and ads slapped on what's mostly a relatively simple directory service that has truly free counterparts.

The "in-network" calls hit me as a particularly irritating misnomer that Skype and many other VoIP providers use. On internet-based "calling services" where clients connect directly to each other, all calls should be "in-network", whether the client is connected to the same "service" or not. (Of course, if the provider is bridging between the internet and POTS, or relaying calls themselves because of connectivity issues, things are a little different, but that's not the norm for "in-network" calls.) If different "providers" would settle on a unified protocol, there's zero reason why all of these different "services" couldn't interact with each other freely. That's basically how XMPP works; it's decentralized.

I don't mean to say Skype is the devil; I use it myself. But the reason I do is because some of my friends do, not because of any technical merit. It's the network effect. I just wish all these little proprietary networks would be replaced by one free, open one, since they all operate within one network that is essentially free for clients to communicate over (once they pay their internet bills, if any).

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19.1.2014 22:28 #3

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