by Lee Dryburgh.
I took some pictures of the Skype marketing team in action near Torrington Place, London. 
One of their flyers reads "Death to the don't-make -me-open-it phone bill", "...you can say goodbye to phone bills that would scare a small island nation".
Another piece of marketing literature they were handing out included
marketing for the 6000 UK WiFi hotspots from The Cloud. This was interesting for me because it was what I would term co-branded.
For those interested, a photo of the offer is 
here.
I can not help but wonder if Skype somehow plan to tackle Google in the access market by partnering up with ever more WiFi providers. Such a competition between two huge providers of free telephony combined with WiFi access could make very interesting play.
Here are their future dates (two days in each location) that the Skype marketing team will be visiting:
Somehow seeing "Skype people" on the streets was somehow good and somehow something of a concern. On one hand it was amazing to watch demographic sectors (primarily old ladies) that I believe would not even try Skype if you informed them taking the 
free packages away with a degree of excitement at the prospect of free calls.
But on the other hand it made Skype feel somehow like a cheap call provider such as OneTel. I just hope that instead it is being used to spread the word, get people on board using what they understand (simple telephone calls) and at the same time kick in more exciting services and business propositions to the end user.
If a picture can speak a thousand words, take a look at the 
picture of the phone booth outside the building that housed the Skype marketing lot. In all the years I have watched the booths, I have only saw one person use the Internet booth. I guess it was yet another telco mistake to roll such booths out across the UK.
Lee Dryburgh is a hands-on telco engineer who also dreams about the future of telephony as part of a doctorate at the University College London. He looks for others' thoughts on the future of telephony at MyDoctorate.com.
Guest post by Lee Dryburgh, University College London.
A couple of
weeks ago I slumped into my office chair with fairly depressed thoughts
in relation to telecoms. I had been startled as a kid by wide area
communications, in particular telephony. 
With a cheap handset I could
transcend space seemingly to anywhere on Earth by dialling a digit
string. It was with no surprise that upon university graduation
(computer science) I began working in telecoms (writing SS7/C7 protocol
decodes). Since then I have been fairly well remunerated by every major
telecoms vendor (with the exception of Ericsson) and by a string of
operators, both cellular and fixed line around the world for my
technical services. Not only has the income been good but I have had
the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of technology for the best
part of my work life. It was with this in mind that I sat depressed
with the thoughts of telephony becoming a freebie application
like email; 
the resulting drop in operators and their respective
vendors, the subsequent drop in demand for people like me and the
lustre drop surrounding telephony. I had only just began to wonder if
there was some hope in terms of maintaining a good financial lifestyle
in telecoms and whether something would keep up the lustre when my Skype client began to ring.
I answered and it was an eight year old kid I did not know. He talked at me about Skype, Teamspeak, chipping Sony PS2s, P2P sharing for obtaining games and so on. I waited for social graces such as informing me who he was and why he was calling me as I was not even in Skype-Me mode. This did not come. So I asked if his father maybe wanted me and he seemed confused at my question. He got further confused by my questioning to obtain his motive for calling me. I eventually got his message though – he was calling because he can and this is now normal.
Fast forward to today. I was sitting in a lecture at the University as part of the requirement for my engineering doctorate in telecoms. The lecture was meant to be on telecommunications and Internet convergence (yawn, this is nearly 2006 not 1999/2000). After repeated ramblings on Class A-C Internet addresses, dial-up Internet discussions using PPP in Windows 95/98, the lecturer moved onto access networks. He had just finished saying that operators would continue to exist since somebody must pay for the infrastructure, in particular the access part when my RSS reader pulled a headline from a few days back claiming Google would be offering free WiFi access in a second city.
Closer to lunch he stated that he did believe that Skype would not be a success because if it pinched operators they would simply block it. This is such nonsense (in free, democratic countries) that it is not even worth my time spitting out chars to disprove. As we came out of class and left the building, there were street teams handing out free Skype handouts – headphones, CD and 30 minutes of breakout calling (Skype-to-PSTN). On returning after lunch I heard a student bring it up with him and I heard some kind of half-hearted mumble that nothing is free. Of course I do not disagree, I just happen to think that the lecturer's position as CTO of a small operator may not pay for his retirement. Operators (particularly outside of the US) are failing to align themselves with the dramatically changing landscape (beyond good apps I know the operators will not deliver, it is a question of ecosystems and dynamically slicing money out of transaction chains).
In the afternoon he stated he thought 3G may win out against WiMax and touted IMS but could not list any applications for it. IMS is pushed as the intelligence (preceding it is IN, which was a telco failure) for the new IP converged multi-service network. It was only yesterday he was rambling about ISDN and then ATM (B-ISDN), failed operator lead converged multi-service networks. This got me depressed again, but maybe another omen will appear tomorrow! Lets see.
Lee Dryburgh is a graduate student at University College London and blogs his adventures in telecommunications technology at MyDoctorate.com.