British Council-Web telephony

Transcript of the podcast

…Presenter: Now over to Liz Crew of our business news team

Liz: Good morning. In 2005 eBay surprised the world of e-commerce by buying the VOIP company Skype for more than 4 billion U.S. dollars. eBay will offer its online buyers and sellers a facility to talk directly with each other before the deal is done. This large purchase put the spotlight on the hidden world of internet telephony. Here with us in the studio is Paul Carr, an expert on the telecoms sector with Lynch and Smith, the investment analysts. Paul, what’s happening in the telecoms sector

Paul: Well VOIP has been around for some time, though until Skype arrived on the scene it was rather techie and not that user friendly. Skype now claim 75 million customers globally

Liz: How was it that I missed out on Skype? I hadn’t heard of the company until very recently

Paul: Well, following the example of The Body Shop Skype have never advertised, all their promotion was achieved by word-of-mouth recommendations, I guess none of your friends are into technology

Liz: You’re right, they’re not. Obviously, apart from my case Skype have been very, very successful

Paul: Definitely, their service is very user friendly to download and install and the pricing system they use is also very straightforward and easy to understand

?Liz: Do they have any competition

Paul: They do. In the UK, for example, the retailers Tesco and Dixons have launched their own VOIP services, British Telecom has its own service too, of course

?Liz: Can I make VOIP calls anywhere

Paul: Well, calls are made from a PC either to another PC connected to the Internet or to a regular landline number. One or two countries such as Saudi Arabia actually block Skype and other VOIP traffic, this happens in some countries where there area still monopolistic national telecoms companies. In the U.S. some bandwith suppliers block VOIP traffic, this doesn’t stop calls but can reduce the quality of the call

?Liz: In the U.S.? Why do they do this

Paul: Well the bandwith suppliers say that VOIP traffic uses up too much of their bandwith

Liz: Thanks for this. Now we must move on, before we do, any other developments in the telecoms area

Paul: Watch out for the impact of super bandwidth supplied by fibre optic cables. These cables will supply on-demand high definition TV – no-one knows yet what sort of impact this will have on traditional delivery methods .. Once again the Internet is turning business models upside down

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