China, Skype, Verso and other sins
Fri 25, November 2005 12:16:43Everybody loves Skype, right? Well, everybody, except large Telcos whose already dimming profits face a whole new threat with the birth of free VoIP calls. Maybe even worse than the free computer-to-computer, is the *extremely* cheap calls from computer to real phone numbers.
Now, what would happen if you mix a company that sees a way of profiting from this fear with a giant telecom company operating in a pseudo-free market, with a pseudo-democratic system? You get a Verso-China wedding.
Verso’s working bees have been busy trying to find a way to filter out all Skype network traffic from the rest, in a move to create products that can allow carriers to block this little program from working. An “unnamed” major market player in China is grabbing the idea, and bought a trial-version of Verso’s software.
This is not really new - in fact, China Telecom already prevents Skype from being used to call normal phones, claiming this is illegal.
The general excuse is that these services are a threat to the viability of their business, and their usage is putting a huge load on their network, therefore they have to right to prevent them – and of course, the Chinese law is on their side.
This sounds as ridiculous to me as if you couldn’t use your Toyota car on a highway, because the highway management company had a deal with Ford. But it might be that I’m simply not as an enlightened as the Chinese 
As an end note, a curious fact: Verso claims that there is a lot of “hate” for Skype, because of its business model and usage of the network, but curious enough, they “love” Vonage, and even plan to make profit from selling some of their products.
What was that word again? … ah! yes… hypocrisy.
