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July 23, 2004

Skype Announces Relationships with: COLT, iBasis, Level 3, Teleglobe

Skype has chosen: COLT, iBasis, Level 3 andTeleglobe as their call termination partners for their SkypeOut service.

Given this announcement, there are a few subtle things to look for:

- It will be interesting to see which (if any) of these service providers are able to terminate calls using the wideband GIPS Codec that Skype users have been using.

Chances are pretty high that at least in the beginning, SkypeOut calls will terminate using G.729a and perhaps G.711. This means that the quality of the SkypeOut calls will sound only as good as any other service provider who offers termination services onto the PSTN.

- Given the international wiretap/E911 requirements of their service provider partners, it will be interesting to see which, if any of the SkypeOut calls still use encryption.

- Based on their selected termination partners, chances are pretty good that somewhere in the Skype Network there is now a gateway that is coverting the Skype protocol to either H.323 or SIP.

Over time, look for this announcement to also help drive additional incremental business / traffic to: COLT, iBasis, Level 3 and Teleglobe as others decide to follow in Skype's footsteps.

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Posted by jeff on July 23, 2004 06:55 AM | Permalink

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Comments

When will Skype get this SkypeOUT service up and running?????????

Posted by: skibare at July 25, 2004 02:39 AM

aw....this is SOOOO interesting.....
Skype said "sip is simply NOT good enough for us" .
see http://skype.com/help_faq.html
So funny to see they have to fall back to sip when termniating to pstn and funnier the way skype slaps its own face..hahahah

Posted by: skyperfun at July 23, 2004 09:27 PM

Based on a LightReading article (http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?site=lightreading&doc_id=56694) it looks like the "gateway" is based on SIP. This is a "signaling gateway" that acts like a Supernode for the media gateway. This is a good news because at least architecturally Skype can interface with other services like FWD.

Posted by: Aswath at July 23, 2004 04:24 PM

Even if they use a wideband codec from Skype to the PSTN gateway, the call will still be downsampled to 8-bit 8kHz at the gateway, so there's no quality advantage over G.711.

Likewise, even if they use encryption from Skype to the PSTN gateway, the call will still be decrypted within the gateway, so it can be tapped at that point.

Posted by: Wes Felter at July 23, 2004 03:58 PM