Skype, despite no advertising, is number one in the North American VOIP business. This according to Sandvine, a Waterloo, Ontario-based company that tracks the VoIP business. According to Sandvine, Skype accounted for 46.2% of minutes and 40% of bandwidth amongst all VoIP providers. Further more, Skype users also account for 35.8% of individual VOIP callers on North American networks. I guess its pretty hard to compete with “free” services.
How scientific is this study? How did they count all those skype minutes and the other VoIP provider minutes to come up with that percentage?
It is hard to believe they have a reliable way to get that information…
James ( http://eurotelcoblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/lies-damned-lies-and-voip-statistics.html ) questions this analysis by suggesting that other statistics counter this claim. As usual, the problem could be potential double counting. For example, it is not clear whether they made sure “relay traffic” is isolated from the count.