Skype = 8 % of international calls

Today I called 37 minutes with India. In fact it was a “social call” with a former colleague who lives there. Would I have called him if it hadn’t be a free Skype call? Certainly not.

Several bloggers or journalists comment on the new statistics of TeleGeography on calling. For instance David Meyer on ZDNET.
TeleGeography mentions that “not all of Skype's traffic is a net loss for international carriers”. My call to India was clearly one of these!

Some TeleGeography numbers concerning 2008:

• Cross border telephone traffic: 384 billion minutes
• Skype international traffic: 33 billion minutes
• Total: 417 billion minutes
• SkypeOut (Skype to landlines): 8.4 billion minutes

Skype itself says it provided 65.5 billion Skype to Skype minutes in 2008! If we believe those numbers, half of the Skype to Skype calls are international conversations!

The growth of Skype is quite spectacular!

• 2005: 2.8% of international calls
• 2006: 4.4%
• 2007: I didn’t find data, but let us suppose 6%
• 2008: 8.0%

I have to admit that the news concerning Skype is definitely positive the last months! I am curious to see the first quarter results!