VoIP service providers

Skype (now a division of Microsoft) 47 million simultaneous users on 8 May 2014

Rebtel (http://www.rebtel.com/) 20 million users [Rebtel 2013]

Comcast XFINITY® Voice 10.3 million (as of 4 November 2013) [Trefis 2013] and 11.2 millions (as of 31 December 2014) [Comcast 2015]

Slide Notes

Rebtel, “About Us - What we do”, 2013.08.30, http://www.rebtel.com/en/About/ Links to an external site.

Alex Goldman, How The FCC Killed VoIP, Internet Statistics: Blog Archive, 2011.02.06, http://net-statistics.net/wordpress/2011/02/how-the-fcc-killed-voip/ Links to an external site.

[Trefis 2013] Trefis Team, ‘Comcast’s VoIP Business Grows, but Mobile VoIP is a Threat -’, Trefis, 04-Nov-2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.trefis.com/stock/cmcsa/articles/208598/comcasts-voip-business-grows-but-mobile-voip-is-a-threat/2013-11-04 Links to an external site.. [Accessed: 04-Aug-2015]

[Comcast 2015] Comcast, ‘Comcast 2014 Annual Report on Form 10-K.’ 27-Feb-2015 [Online]. Available: http://cmcsk.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-15-68526 Links to an external site.

Transcript

[slide30] And of course, one of those players was Skype now a division of Microsoft that in the 8th of May in 2014 had 47 million simultaneous users. For which, how much capacity did they have to provide? Zero. What a deal. And bill em all. Here in Sweden, a company that's been fairly successful has been Reptel. What do they do? Anyone use them? Their model is really very simple. Let's say you have a friend in Beijing who you like to talk to. What do you do? You go to Reptel and you say, I would like to have a phone number that is a local number in Beijing. And they give you a phone number which now your friends in Beijing can call and all they pay for is the local call. They then take that call, tunnel it to you, and deliver it to you here in Stockholm. You're very happy because, hey, my friends and I can talk at low prices and they don't have to pay for long distance calls. What a deal. What does it cost Reptel? Well, they have to build these backbones. No. Because they go and rent capacity that other people have already built, the interconnects between Beijing and Stockholm. So they can rent that capacity very cheap. They need to provide a gateway in Beijing that connects to the fixed operators there and will take the calls and now put them into their end of the tunnel. And they need to do the reverse of that here. Comcast XFINITY® and others.