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Profile: Skype's Sahel on mobile broadband 'lies', EU regulation and the rise of VoIP
26 Apr 2010 | 12.21 Europe/London
Not embracing calls on mobile devices being routed through the net is not only unfair and against the open spirit of the web, it could undo the social and economic benefits of online communications.
So argues Skype’s European Director of Government and Regulatory Affairs, Jean-Jacques Sahel. He believes that most mobile operators across Europe are quietly fighting a last ditch stand against VoIP because they are concerned about cannibalisation of traffic, accompanying subscribers dialling through VoIP rather than cellular, which could also pose a potential risk to average revenue per user (ARPU).
While he cannot prove it, he believes some networks may be tempted to give a low priority to VoIP traffic and that nearly all are certainly not being as open as they should be about how they handle VoIP. In the UK only 3 is actively promoting its adoption of Skype. For the other four operators, similar to the pattern across Europe, there is no outright opposition to VoIP, which would be illegal after EU telecoms laws were changed at the end of last year. Instead, Sahel believes, there is a spirit of non cooperation.
“If you want to find out how a mobile operator handles VoIP, it’s a nightmare, you have to plough through 60 page long documents to try to find out,” he says.
“It’s really unfair because the mobile operators will say they are selling you unlimited net access but it isn’t. They don’t say that it doesn’t include VoIP unless you’re on one of the more expensive tariffs. It’s ridiculous because then you end up having to pay for it twice. If you pay for unlimited net access on your mobile device you should be able to use it for what you want, not what your operator will allow.”
iPhone app heads up positive moves
Sahel certainly believes that things have certainly started to move in Skype’s favour over the past two years he has worked with the company, thanks largely to EU legislators supporting VoIP. He joined the company from the British civil service at the, then, Department of Trade and Industry where, despite being French born and bred, he had worked for most of his career. In fact, he now has dual French and British nationality.
As if to underline how he believes things are moving in the right direction he reveals that Skype is currently busy working on an iPhone app that will work not just over Wi-Fi, which its current app allows, but also over the cellular airwaves. The new app should be released ‘within a few weeks’ and has only just been made possible after Apple altered its terms and conditions earlier this year.
Skype is also available on Symbian smartphones, although Sahel believes the operators can still be a barrier.
“There is only one UK mobile carrier which appears to not be embracing VoIP, according to its long-winded terms and conditions,” he says.
“We do wonder, though, if there is some degradation of the service or some way in which some operators across Europe are boosting the priority of other traffic. It’s obviously something we can’t prove but we do suspect it and we know that nearly all operators only seem to accept it grudgingly on their top, expensive tariffs.
“It’s really silly because everyone knows the future of mobile communications is over IP, the operators are changing their systems to handle all or part of a mobile phone call over IP so it’s inevitable.”
VoIP increases ARPU
Sahel believes that VoIP, and Skype in particular, is not a threat to mobile operators. In fact, judging by the company’s partnership with 3, he claims the opposite is true.
“With 3 Skype users have an ARPU that is actually 20% higher than non-Skype users,” he claims.
“Far from cannibalising calls, we actually find that people use it for calls they wouldn’t otherwise have made, particularly for international calls from their mobile. Skype is being used for calls which people would otherwise have made from their home or office line, or via Skype on a PC because the cost of using a mobile is so prohibitive.
“However, we find that people who do use Skype on a mobile become more active on their mobile and so they generally buy more additional services, hence their ARPU goes up.”
Mobile bandwidth argument dropped
An interesting point Sahel has noticed which points to a change in direction from VoIP opponents is that mobile bandwidth is rarely mentioned any more.
“Operators used to argue that VoIP is too heavy on bandwidth but that’s just a lie,” he says.
“A Skype call consumes something like 6kb to 20kbp/s and that’s about the same as a mobile web page. When you consider these guys are happy to have streaming on their networks, and my iPhone certainly came with YouTube installed, then it seems ridiculous. So that argument seems to have disappeared.”
The year ahead will be an interesting one, Sahel predicts, as such arguments have quietened down and the work of planning how EU will be enshrined in to UK law begins. With an Ofcom consultation on mobile and VoIP expected later in the year, a process likely to mirrored by other regulators across Europe, he believes that operators which were always going to have to embrace VoIP at some stage will have to do so, only perhaps a little sooner than they had ideally liked.
In this work Sahel argues that the SamKnows' technology which powers Ofcom's performance benchmarking reports in the UK could be put to good use monitoring mobile broadband connections to allow the upcoming debate to be focussed on reliable third party figures rather than supposition.
So argues Skype’s European Director of Government and Regulatory Affairs, Jean-Jacques Sahel. He believes that most mobile operators across Europe are quietly fighting a last ditch stand against VoIP because they are concerned about cannibalisation of traffic, accompanying subscribers dialling through VoIP rather than cellular, which could also pose a potential risk to average revenue per user (ARPU).
While he cannot prove it, he believes some networks may be tempted to give a low priority to VoIP traffic and that nearly all are certainly not being as open as they should be about how they handle VoIP. In the UK only 3 is actively promoting its adoption of Skype. For the other four operators, similar to the pattern across Europe, there is no outright opposition to VoIP, which would be illegal after EU telecoms laws were changed at the end of last year. Instead, Sahel believes, there is a spirit of non cooperation.
“If you want to find out how a mobile operator handles VoIP, it’s a nightmare, you have to plough through 60 page long documents to try to find out,” he says.
“It’s really unfair because the mobile operators will say they are selling you unlimited net access but it isn’t. They don’t say that it doesn’t include VoIP unless you’re on one of the more expensive tariffs. It’s ridiculous because then you end up having to pay for it twice. If you pay for unlimited net access on your mobile device you should be able to use it for what you want, not what your operator will allow.”
iPhone app heads up positive moves
Sahel certainly believes that things have certainly started to move in Skype’s favour over the past two years he has worked with the company, thanks largely to EU legislators supporting VoIP. He joined the company from the British civil service at the, then, Department of Trade and Industry where, despite being French born and bred, he had worked for most of his career. In fact, he now has dual French and British nationality.
As if to underline how he believes things are moving in the right direction he reveals that Skype is currently busy working on an iPhone app that will work not just over Wi-Fi, which its current app allows, but also over the cellular airwaves. The new app should be released ‘within a few weeks’ and has only just been made possible after Apple altered its terms and conditions earlier this year.
Skype is also available on Symbian smartphones, although Sahel believes the operators can still be a barrier.
“There is only one UK mobile carrier which appears to not be embracing VoIP, according to its long-winded terms and conditions,” he says.
“We do wonder, though, if there is some degradation of the service or some way in which some operators across Europe are boosting the priority of other traffic. It’s obviously something we can’t prove but we do suspect it and we know that nearly all operators only seem to accept it grudgingly on their top, expensive tariffs.
“It’s really silly because everyone knows the future of mobile communications is over IP, the operators are changing their systems to handle all or part of a mobile phone call over IP so it’s inevitable.”
VoIP increases ARPU
Sahel believes that VoIP, and Skype in particular, is not a threat to mobile operators. In fact, judging by the company’s partnership with 3, he claims the opposite is true.
“With 3 Skype users have an ARPU that is actually 20% higher than non-Skype users,” he claims.
“Far from cannibalising calls, we actually find that people use it for calls they wouldn’t otherwise have made, particularly for international calls from their mobile. Skype is being used for calls which people would otherwise have made from their home or office line, or via Skype on a PC because the cost of using a mobile is so prohibitive.
“However, we find that people who do use Skype on a mobile become more active on their mobile and so they generally buy more additional services, hence their ARPU goes up.”
Mobile bandwidth argument dropped
An interesting point Sahel has noticed which points to a change in direction from VoIP opponents is that mobile bandwidth is rarely mentioned any more.
“Operators used to argue that VoIP is too heavy on bandwidth but that’s just a lie,” he says.
“A Skype call consumes something like 6kb to 20kbp/s and that’s about the same as a mobile web page. When you consider these guys are happy to have streaming on their networks, and my iPhone certainly came with YouTube installed, then it seems ridiculous. So that argument seems to have disappeared.”
The year ahead will be an interesting one, Sahel predicts, as such arguments have quietened down and the work of planning how EU will be enshrined in to UK law begins. With an Ofcom consultation on mobile and VoIP expected later in the year, a process likely to mirrored by other regulators across Europe, he believes that operators which were always going to have to embrace VoIP at some stage will have to do so, only perhaps a little sooner than they had ideally liked.
In this work Sahel argues that the SamKnows' technology which powers Ofcom's performance benchmarking reports in the UK could be put to good use monitoring mobile broadband connections to allow the upcoming debate to be focussed on reliable third party figures rather than supposition.