By Torben Nyhuus, Aalborg, Denmark

The contest to acquire market shares on the growing VoIP market is at full pace. The market is;

• the VoIP calls,
• the internet access,
• the devices.

VoIP calls:

Skype is reaching out to new customer segments. With Jubii and Skype in new cooperation!

(Jubii was the first and is the most successful web portal in Denmark, visited by 2.5 mill users monthly. DK has 5 million inhabitants.)

The Danish internet portal Jubii has commenced a cooperation with the world's most popular provider of IP-telephony, Skype. The new cooperation is a cobranding strategy, which shall broaden the knowledge of Skype in Denmark, and in return be a new source of income to Jubii.

The idea is to get Skype out to Ms. and Mr. Smith, using Jubii to reach them and fight the somewhat nerdish stamp on Skype. Skype can now be downloaded from on Jubii and Skype is expecting a Danish success making telephony free. In return for this exposure Jubii gets a part of the SkypeOut revenue generated.

Microsoft building our VoIP backbone!

Microsoft bought Teleo and is now co-operating with MCI to let users, as a start, make calls from PC to fixed line and the mobile/cellular net.

Google, Yahoo, and AOL have been on VoIP for a while.

Access:

Old and now privatised Telco’s: Broadband access is still being sold at too high prices; you still must pay for a phone line to be 'allowed' to pay for ADSL/DSL, that’s even with a three-party ISP, double charging. The privatised Telco’s and governments are still happily milking the cow together! Did they make a secret agreement? For how long? Was this international, European/EU wide? The necessary legislation is postponed (Government/MP’s claim further examination needed) to the fourth quarter 2006 in Denmark, this on an already five year old issue. No wonder that TDC can keep a 70% market share on broadband.

Mobile prices:
Are mobile prices being squished from 3G (UMTS) and the lowered fixed line prices?

In the mobile area, discount sales of cards are now starting in the Aldi shops in Germany. Aldi is a low price supermarket chain spread out over Europe with 4000+ shops alone in Germany. This is a big stick in TDC’s discount EasyMobile (purely internet based), launched 4 months ago, gaining 15,000 customers. EasyMobile has already lowered their price from 16 -14 € cent as a response to Aldi's 15 € cent.

Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest telephony company, responded with a full page ad to counter Aldi, which began its service on Thursday. … T-Mobile will have to provide something to keep customers. Aldi has been one of the driving forces behind retail change in Europe's largest economy.

by TMCnet

Aldi is also selling IT hardware, recently a Wi-Fi SIP phone (200+ €) for Hotspots and your other access points.

Devices:

Kirk and RTX companies are joining up to get global market shares together on both Wi-Fi and DECT.

Kirk Telecom, who already has an 8% market share in North America on 2.4/5 GHz DECT products and a 100+ years of telephony history behind it is being sold to US SpectraLink, known for its Wi-Fi Netlink products.

RTX and Kirk Telecom are long term co-operators, both Danish companies. All three are VoIP ‘players’, more on this Monday.

And when are we going to see new Skype devices? The long promised Wi-Fi phone is not yet seen. Accton and Skype and their WIFI phone -Skype Journal.

The WiFi phone prototype. Share Skype, the Skype blog, lists 34 preferred partners but Accton is not among them!?

RTX is soon launching a VoIP standalone SIP phone before a Skype one. Is the eBay takeover delaying Skype getting the certification process going on new (kind of) products and making better room for non-Skype ones? Is Skype on public Wi-Fi hotspots not significant?

Which new players will join in, will they be late? Will even new IP markets be opening during the next year?

Free yourself from Skyping on the PC. I like going cordless with Skype. I've used a bluetooth headset with limited range, and more recently the DUALphone now finally available in the US. This is one of the most sophisticated cordless / combination internet and standard landline phones on the market today. The DUALphone lets you take and make those important Skype calls from a regular handset. For many that's really cool. It's been customized to provide ready integration of Skype features into the handset.

In my case it is good to get up from the PC from time to time. Plus not everyone or every call requires you to be tied to a desktop session of chat and screen sharing. Sometimes it's easier to walk around.

So what do I like best about the DUALphone? It's not the sound - that is very good. Not the changes in presence status or buddylist on the handset; it is more basic than that. I can still answer my PC with my headset without resetting anything. The DUALphone is smart enough to know when it should change the sound settings and point the internet call to the handset. Thus pick it up and it becomes active. Decide on the next call - to take it on your PC, no problem.

In my experience that is pretty unique. Communication is becoming multi-modal and devices must know when they are desired and when they aren't. Plus everytime I get a Skype call now, the phone rings. That gets over the missed calls I have when I leave a headset plugged in and can't hear it ringing.

Installation

Plug in the USB cable, load the software, let it sit for a few minutes and all your Skype buddies will appear on the handset.

After that you can scroll though them, watch the frequent updates as online status changes are reported (I turned the beep for that off quickly and would quite happily turn that feature off altogether).

I quickly found that scolling though the whole list to make a call was not effective. I have 268 buddies currently. However pushing a number provided alpha proximity very quickly and it was then just click to call.

You can also do simple things from the handset like setting your Skype Status.

The rest of the functionality? It sits well in your hand. It's got good range and it looks and acts like the phone you are used to. You can set Internet dialing to remember country codes, etc. As with all new devices it takes a little time to work out all the features. It's worth the time.

In the 'it could be handy department', you can add additional handsets to the initial basestation. Up to 4. Then your whole house could be DUALphone activated. It would cost! For the initial base station and phone the price of the DUALphone-US site is $139.99. Expect it to soon be in a store nearby.

I found one area where the software needs an update. The DUALphone doesn't integrate with Skype VoiceMail. There may be a missed call notification, however there is no way to listen to new voicemails over the phone. Similarly there is as yet no way to initiate a voice message from the handset (sending a VM to another Skyper without ringing). However, that is not the fault of the device, it just requires further developments in the SkypeAPI. Get the phone now and I'd expect a software update will provide this additional functionality in a future release.

Lastly, where do I think the DUALphone fits in making a handset choice for Skype? That may be a little dependent on the quality of your current cordless phone and how sensitive your ears are to trying to retain that Skype audio clarity. (See technical details.) If most of your calls are Skype to Skype and you have to have a traditional handset then this may be the one for you. If the majority of your Skype calls are using SkypeOut then you may be better served at a lot lower price by a device like UConnect, which will turn your old cordess phone into something similar. However, your old cordless phone is unliley to provide the same level of sound quality. If you want Skype on a phone today, go and get it.

Check out other reviews:

• Engadget
  
• Gizmodo
• Om Malik on demand

RTX America Inc, located in San Jose, CA announces the availability of the DualPhone in the US.

Move up to 300m away from your PC and make Skype™ and SkypeOut calls. See who’s online with one push of a button on the handset. It’s a cordless Skype™ phone and ordinary landline phone in one.

Price point is $139.

Thanks to our SJ man, Torben Nyhuus, in Denmark for this story.