A report in the Rocky Mountain News claims Skype has 400,000 simultaneous users. Given they also claim 8 million downloads, that’s a five percent usage factor and likely means somewhere between 1 and 2 million of the people who downloaded the free P2P telephony service are really using it. That’s a SWAG on my part. Now, given propensity for people to convert to pay from free it will be really interesting to see what the uptake is to Skype Out. My guess is about 5 percent, which means 20,000 users will be in the early phase.
A more interesting and very insightful analysis about Skype’s partner analysis comes from the ultimate VoIP guru, Jeff Pulver. Pulver, who has held Interops and Bakeoffs long before they were in vogue points out reality an what is possible, especially with codecs (that effect voice quality) and termination (that’s how the calls get to PSTN and Cellular phones).
If you read through Jeff’s post and think it through, Skype is about to be is a front end, to service providers (like Level3’s) VoIP terminiation services and way stations to get on their network. While the real benefit to users with Skype, and others like them, is the free P2P technology, and their creation of multiple networks access (can you spell no cost roaming). That’s the real play for all of these types of softphone players (i.e. Peerio444, Stanaphone, etc.). Giving the end user access, finding the network for them, then terminating the call.