Skype's growth and superior network

Skype is quite a success story. Their story is remarkable, to say the least. Some things do need to be noted. I thought that the growth would be exponential, but the rate seems to have decreased a bit, maybe just a temporary breather for it to become more of a household name. A lot of early adopters have already embraced it, despite their distrust of proprietary software (read: contemporary Open Source frenzy).

Skype is the de facto VoIP standard, and I think that the emergence of even easier to use equipment and more mainstream acceptance will usher even more interest for this telecommunications revolution. The paradigm shift from a server-client based framework to a P2P system heralds an extremely robust network, an Internet within the Internet, so to speak. Scalability and larger userbases will not strain centralized servers (deteriorating quality) but will increase Peers (or nodes, in Skype lingo) and thus improving quality. In economic terms, the marginal cost per extra user is negligible.

Basically it boils down to each user (peer) offering a bit of their connection to relay the conversations of others. If any user wishes to sign off whilst someone else is using their connection, the calling party won’t notice a considerable loss of quality since the call is simultaneously being routed via multiple nodes. For geek info, click here (PDF warning!)

99% of it is in fact P2P, only the login and creation of a username will require authentication on a centralized server. Once that is done, all calls are dealt via Peers. Skype has other services, such as voicemail, call-forward, SkypeIn and SkypeOut. The first two require storage in a centralized server, the latter two require a gateway to and from the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System)
network.

With roughly 210 million broadband subscribers, each with a few users, Skype still has quite a way to go. Competition is also around; gTalk, Project Gizmo, MSN to name just a few. It's going to be exciting!

As for the measurements: These represent the dates when the milestone amounts were reached. The actual amount of online users depends on the time, most users are online around 16:00 CET, not in the weekends.

Date	Users online simultaneously	Days between
29-sep-03	0	-
20-oct-04	1.000.000	418
14-feb-05	2.000.000	117
18-may-05	3.000.000	93
15-sep-05	4.000.000	120
23-jan-06	5.000.000	130