The news of Verizon's deal with Skype tries to be earth-shattering (good summary here), and in the short run maybe it is. But Apple and AT&T are yet to play their hand in this battle. In the long run, Skype Lite is NOT going to beat real Skype, and the cellular voice channel is going to become pointless. Here are six reasons:
- IPhone 4.0 is expected to allow preemptive multi-tasking (it was always capable of it) and to have "push notification". Skype can run as a background application.
- The 3G network is now opened up to VOIP... and AT&T capacity is improving.
- WIFI bandwith is expanding. VOIP on home broadband becomes more viable all the time.
- Femtocell networks will be here before too long, improving the backhaul problems.
- AT&T can always deploy its own Skype Lite service if the Verizon service is successful.
- The processing power of iPhones is improving. The new A4 processor in the iPad (and eventually iPhone) should make a big difference in Skype performance. Not fast enough for good video, but still fast enough for Skype power users like me.
In the meantime, the big loser in all of these concurrent changes is SMS messaging whose value is attacked by both Verizon and AT&T. In the confusion, Skype messaging has a real opportunity to establish itself as a big player alongside Twitter and Facebook, especially if it gets rich text and html into its chat UI.