But despite all this traffic, voip in general and Skype more specifically have forced prices and margins down and so “old-school” telcos are registering more traffic, but cashing almost the same as they did the year before or maybe even a little less.

On the other hang Skype, only five years since launch is now the largest provider of international voice communications on the planet, controlling the 8% of all traffic of this kind. Free is always nice but even Skype’s paid-for ‘Skype Out’ service – which lets users make calls to standard telephones – is on the rise , generating 8.4 billion minutes of calls in 2008.

So since the competition in the telco market is becoming more intense on all fronts, old-school providers will have to learn new tricks to stay in the game.