Deal done. Retail VOIP in the offing? Views later.

eBay has agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA, the global Internet communications company, for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.

Skype generated approximately $7 million in revenues in 2004, and the company anticipates that it will generate an estimated $60 million in revenues in 2005 and more than $200 million in 2006. For Q4-05, eBay expects the acquisition to be dilutive to pro forma and GAAP earnings per share by $0.01 and $0.04 respectively. For the full year 2006, eBay expects the transaction to be dilutive to pro forma and GAAP earnings per share by $0.04 and $0.12 respectively, with breakeven on a pro forma basis expected in the fourth quarter of 2006. On a long-term basis, eBay expects Skype operating margins could be in the range of 20% to 25%.

The acquisition is subject to various closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Full text of news release...

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A BBC story about a family in Guyana that uses Skype.

Duane DeFreitas, an adventurer and guide living in the tropical rainforest of Guyana. ... Out here it pays to be self sufficient: the nearest town is across the Rupununi river and down a gruelling four-wheel-drive track - about three hours away in the dry season, or about three days away in the wet. There's no telephone, no mains electricity, no anything really.

Except, surprisingly, broadband internet access, in all its glory. With a satellite dish outside the house, and electricity provided by solar panels and a current inverter, DeFreitas is possibly the world's least likely internet nerd.

A fascinating comment received today from Telmex in response to our post asking if Telmex is "blocking" Skype and Vonage users. The comment which appears genunine provides both an insight into the challenges growth is putting on infrastructure "we cannot guarantee continuous functioning" and plans for future strategy "we will offer Internet services with a different commitment "QOS" (quality of service), with a SLA mechanism (service level agreements)." The response adds:

In order to support services with "Real time" quality, we need to modify the infrastructure to follow up with these Internet characteristics from beginning to end.

We will acquire the capacity to control the distribution of Internet bandwidth for each user with different types of traffic. Therefore, we need to divide total traffic in different categories and assign a minimum percentage of total bandwidth to each one, under high usage and congestion conditions.

These different kinds of traffic can represent different kinds of users and protocols.

In a Net with these characteristics, the cost for the use of this particular service will be higher than the traditional best-effort transfer. Comment by Concepsion Rivera

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