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Kazaa founders tout P2P VoIP

Ben Charny CNET News.com

Published: 12 Sep 2003 10:30 BST

Kazaa co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have a new target: the telephone industry.

They've launched Skype, which they claim is the first Internet phone service to use peer-to-peer software. In just its first week of availability, 60,000 people downloaded the free Skype software. Other voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, such as Vonage or Free World Dialup (FWD), needed several months to attract the same level of interest.

Just as they shook up the music industry by creating Kazaa, the pair now wants to rattle the cages of traditional telephone companies. In an interview with CNET News.com, Friis discussed the coming challenges for VoIP, what Skype actually means (nothing, as it turns out) and a possible regulatory backlash against VoIP providers, among other issues.

Q: Why are the creators of Kazaa going into VoIP?
A: After Niklas Zennstrom and I did Kazaa, we looked at other areas where we could use our experience and where P2P technology could have a major disruptive impact. The telephony market is characterised both by what we think is rip-off pricing and a reliance on heavily centralised infrastructure. We just couldn't resist the opportunity to help shake this up a bit. How long did it take to come up with the Skype software?
Skype has been in active development for about six months. It took less time to develop Kazaa -- about four months -- but we think we've come up with a better piece of software this time.

What's a "Skype"?
Skype does not mean anything. It just sounds good, and the dot-com domain name was available. We hope people will start saying, "I'll Skype you" instead of "I'll call you," which means "I'll call you without paying any rip-off per-minute charges and with superior better-than-phone quality."

Where does Skype fit into the VoIP landscape? Do you want to be a primary phone service like Vonage or Net2Phone?
Skype is addressing all the problems of legacy VoIP solutions: bad sound quality, difficult to set up and configure, and the need for expensive, centralised infrastructure. No one has seriously addressed these problems before, and this is why VoIP has never really taken off.

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Could it be that ISP’s are making this out to be a bigger problem than it actually is? We’re a small country with an internet penetration of less than 60%, for every Youtuber there’s someone who only uses the internet to check their emails, more people surf on their mobile handsets than a few years ago. Surely things should even themselves up.