Skype over 3G: official

Hutchinson, one of the leading mobile network providers, known as "3" across Europe, and mostly in the United Kingdom announced officially unlimited Skype calls for a flat fee. Skype is just a piece of a broader package named X-Series. This is kind of a breakthrough. Hutchinson probably sees Skype invading mobile phones inevitable, so they decided to jump in as soon as possible to be the leader of that trend. Initially there will be two top of the line handsets supporting X-Series services, Nokia N73 and SonyEricsson W950i.

It will be very interesting to watch it work (or fail). People (myself included) have already been talking for years about Skype on mobiles. But it has not happened so far. Why? There are several very fundamental technical issues giving Skype very hard time. Let us go through them.

• Latency. This is the killer number one. People have been dreaming of Skype over GPRS or EDGE. I even happened to use such setup once. I mean I unintentionally left Skype running on my phone after doing some tests over WiFi, went out, and Skype still maintained my Online status over GPRS when somebody tried to Skype me. I saw him calling I could even pick up the conversation, but we just could not talk.
  Typical real life throughput of 20-40kbps over GPRS/EDGE combined with packet latency in the range of 1000ms or more is just too much for any VoIP to be useful. UMTS is so-so, I mean you can talk and hear the other party, but the voice quality is less than stellar, far from being comfortable, so for typical calls it is too inconvenient to use. It may be just right with HSDPA in low congestion areas, but hey, just right means the level of quality close to 100-year plain old phone conversation...
• Processing power. Skype codecs are extremely processor intensive. Probably this was on Niklas Zennstrom's mind when he said putting Skype on Symbian was challenging. Skype shines on notebooks and desktop PCs, but these machines have at least ten times the power of a mobile device. When you go down to something like a 200MHz ARM-based system, Skype just chokes. It could even bog down a 500MHz Xscale system, so while on a Skype call you could hardly do anything else like checking the calendar or taking notes. I wonder how it really performs on the N73 or W950i. Is it just "I can connect and I think I know what you say" quality or is it something more?
• Handset integration. I hope they have finally cleaned the issue with headphone / speakerphone modes. All the versions I have tried, used only the speakerphone. Kind of strange, especially when you run this on the handset and hold close to your ear. Then when I was on a Skype conversation, traditional mobile calls were coming in as I was free. This situation is very difficult to handle and its proper solution requires a presence-aware mobile network. As far as I know there is not a single one...

There are other winds blowing into faces of mobile Skype users as well. So operators should not panic yet. But with more advanced 3,5G networks coming and more powerful handsets on the horizon (Scorpion based), Skype may become the carrier of choice, turning the current operators into dumb pipe providers. I say "may", as there is a lot of work for them to do, especially in fine-tuning the handset application. Hutchinson believes it will come, so they decided to start gaining experience. Smart move. They will not loose a penny with this initiative and the mobile VoIP experience they will get is priceless.