07 April,2009 07:27 AM IST | | Balaji Narasimhan
Some traditional companies don't want you to use Skype on mobiles because this will hurt their revenues
For quite some time, the only way you could get any work done at all was through the phone and the phone companies loved it because they were laughing all the way to the bank. Butu00a0the modems and phone companies didn't like it because you were using it to send e-mails to your cousin in America at the price of a local call instead of making an international call but there was nothing that they could do about it.
u00a0
But now, from the phone companies' point of view, comes the most galling attack of them all people are putting stuff like Skype on their mobiles. Since this represents an additional loss of revenues for the phone companies, they don't like it at all and so they are actually blocking such applications on their phones.
Silly attitude
It all started when T-Mobile, the wireless unit of Deutsche Telekom and the exclusive carrier of Apple's iPhone in Germany, prohibited customers from using Skype on the iPhone. This irked the Voice on the Net (VON) coalitionu2014which includes IT industries heavyweights like Microsoft, Intel and Google who are crying foul because this limits consumer choice.
In fact, VON has taken up the issue with the EU and said that this is limiting consumer choice.
Way to go
In some ways, the phone carriers are acting in a childish manner, but one finds it hard to blame them beyond a point. After all, if you are going to use Skype to make a call on your mobile to another mobile user who also has Skype then you are not paying any money to your mobile company. If enough people start doing this, then chances are high that such companies will soon go out of business.
But that said, it would be criminal to disallow people from getting the best possible option at the lowest cost.
And Skype, being a child of the Internet era, essentially spells freedom. After all, as users will argue, if we can get free e-mail from companies like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, and free knowledge from sites like Wikipedia, why can't we also get to make free phone calls?
No easy answer
There is going to be no easy answer to such questions because both users as well as phone companies have their own points of view. But companies that try to stand in the way of change are going to find the going tough.
This will be because of three reasonsu2014firstly, users want it, and so they will get it. Secondly, entities like the Department of Justice in the US and the EU in Europe are capable of forcing the carriers to do this in the interest of consumer choice. And finally, there are powerful companies in the VON coalition who can make this happen.
In the light of the above, phone companies should either find alternatives, or be prepared to go the way of the telegraph.
QUICK TAKE
>>Phone carriers don't want users to make Skype calls on mobiles
>>The VON coalition is not happy about this
>>The EU has been requested to look into the matter
Did you know?
>>Alexander Graham Bell, the father of the first practical telephone, felt that this invention of his was an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study
>>The idea of the telephone dates back to 1844, when Innocenzo Manzetti first mooted the idea of a speaking telegraph
>>The rotary dial on phones dates back to May 1927
>>In December 1947 W Rae Young and Douglas H Ring, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones
>>In 1948 Phil Porter, a Bell Labs engineer, proposed that cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centres and have directional antennas pointing in three directions
Source: Wikipedia
