Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecomsMobile, Roaming and Social Media

I decided to sit back and watch the reactions to Microsoft’s purchase of Skype before I made any comment, well done Om for gazumping everyone.
Firstly, a couple of interesting points
1. Microsoft paid around $1000 per customer (imagine Facebook at that kind of valuation)
2. A lot of sites reported that Google and Facebook were in the ring, I [...]

I have never been a huge Skype fan believing that people speak on phones rather than computers and that 5 billion is a much more interesting number than 28 million. I am though a fan of a new application called Viber which appears to be taking the world of telephony by storm. Friends who would be [...]

I have written about voice over 3G quite a lot in the past, its also been covered by an amount of people that I really respect in the the telephony community.
I have been “Test driving” it today with 5 by 9 quality calls to Jim Courtney in Canada, James Cotter in Prague, Jeb Brilliant in [...]

I work with a bunch of guys who constantly slag me off for talking about the hottest new thing, they generally give me a hard time about “twitter” “foursquare” and a whole bunch of other apps so you can imagine I was a bit slow to introduce them to Chatroulette.
Well you can imagine my surprise [...]

I can’t believe we are back here again in a discussion regarding Apple blocking voice over 3G.
Voice over 3G is an appalling standard, it just doesn’t work without massive compression.
If any iPhone user runs a standard ping test I would be shocked to see ping times of under 100ms, in fact I have just [...]

It seems like the rumours that I have been hearing for the last five to six weeks have been confirmed.
Skype has been sold.
Reuters are quoting two sources this morning confirming that the purchaser is a group headed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.
Whilst the price being mentioned is around $1.8 billion I believe that this will [...]

Dan dropped me a line on this earlier.
“Skype 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X provides screen sharing, WiFi access, chat features and Twitter-like mood messages”
My initial thought was “wow, incredible, at last two industry leaders Boingo and Skype get it together”
Then I happened to read through Dan’s post and came to
Probably the largest “new” feature [...]

Whilst Skype generally isn’t my cup of tea, its reach is huge, I was looking at a few rankings this morning and thinking huge congrats must be due to my friends at Jajah.

Then I happened to take out Truphone and add Skype to the inquiry, results below kind of bought me back to reality.

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Crunchgear Rockstar John Biggs tipped me off today to the launch of VoxOx a new product by Telecentris

This is a sure fired winner, call quality is excellent for a start and far outweighs the sometimes “come in rubber duck” quality that I experience on Skype.
All sign-ups at VoxOx get a free two hours worth of [...]

This is a real serious development for the Fring team lead by my buddy Boaz Zimmerman,an email from Gil Regev yesterday asking me to test had to be ignored for 24hrs due to travel, I posted today that the iPhone was going under the hammer for a Samsung Omnia i900 but this has earned it [...]