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:

• Hertfordshire 17th Nov
• UCE Birmingham 21st Nov
• Derby 23rd Nov
• Nottingham Trent 25th Nov
• Leeds Metropolitan 29th Nov

• Manchester Metropolitan 1st Dec
• Liverpool John Moores 5th Dec
• Liverpool 7th Dec
• Central Lancashire 7th Dec
• Northumbria Newcastle 13th Dec
• Newcastle Upon Tyne 15th Dec

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.