Threat to telecos from Skype far from overstated

Over at InternetStockBlog, James Enck comments on two studies from Japan (in Japanese) that suggest Skype's impact on telephony usage may be incremental rather than substitutional. That is, people are using Skype to make calls they wouldn't have otherwise have made rather than using Skype to make calls they would once have made from landlines or mobiles.

I suspect this will prove a false hope for the doomed voice telephony industry. In the most recent survey, 14% of Skype users said that having Skype had occasioned a decline in their use of fixed and mobile phones; in a previous survey it was 20%. 74% and 78% respectively cited no change.

To me, this doesn't show that using Skype doesn't change telephony usage patterns but that the impact is only beginning to be felt. It would be astonishing if Skype was having much impact on the use of mobiles yet - that will only come once the roll-out of reliable citywide wifi networks is fully underway, and we're not there yet. It also seems likely that even if consumers had already reached the point of deciding they could do away with their mobiles, year-long contracts would make for a drawn-out process that would only now be having much impact.

Skype is still new for most people. It'll take a while for everyone except hardcore geeks to trust it enough for all their calls and be comfortable chucking out their landline and/or mobile. In the meantime, they'll have contracts to wind up as well as the ingenious bundling efforts of combined ISP/mobile/voice telephony firms to contend with. There's still a little way to go, culturally, technically and administratively, before we see a mass substitution of Skype for fixed and mobile telephony, but I have no doubt it's only a matter of time. As Dylan says...it's not dark yet, but it's getting there.