Talk:Skype

Voice over IP

Nice beginning to this article--thank you. I believe that the "voice over IP" part of Skype does not qualify as "instant messaging". Usually, people equate "instant messaging" with text-based chat programs. I mention this because the underlying technology for "voice over IP" (also called VOIP) is considerably more complex than for chat or text-based instant messaging. The article would benefit by carefully delineating this difference. VOIP, for example, has to have special voice compression algorithms that take analog voice signals (with a 3000Hz analog badwidth), digitize them (usually starting with a 128Kbps bandwidth) and compress them into relatively small bitstreams (around 15Kbps might be typical). Some of the good compression algorithms that reach these small digital bandwidths were not, last time I checked, free; instead, there were rather expensive license fees for them. This meant that small companies could not afford to move into this arena as easily. VOIP services also typically need to connect with the Public Switched Telephone Network so that callers can reach some places where VOIP might not be available. I haven't used Skype, so maybe it doesn't connect to the PSTN; maybe it just allows two Skype users to talk to each other directly over the internet. At any rate, I think that VOIP deserves an article of its own, and it should not be directly equated or treated in the article with text-based chat (even if Skype provides that service). The point is, that text-based chat is really a different technology than VOIP and is considerably easier to implement.Pat Palmer 07:16, 19 July 2008 (CDT)