There is still a danger that services designed to be highly disruptive to traditional telecoms business models have been developed without sufficient regard for resilience, something we have been saying since consumer VoIP came to the fore during 2003. Telecoms engineering is no different to any other product development - there is always a commercial penalty to pay by compromising reliability or quality. The voice networks switches of the past were certainly cumbersome, complex and costly, but the network was as close to rock-solid as you could expect to get. Perhaps we should still consider some VoIP services as being like a short-cut over rocky ground instead of the smoother, but longer and well-trodden path. Many users may not yet have decided how many jarred ankles they will tolerate over that rocky ground. You still broadly get what you pay for in telecoms and there is a compromise users must accept in these relatively early days of VoIP-based voice services, especially the free on-net services.

    So the bottom line is that while Skype is now a well-established service it has largely flourished through its simplicity, good-enough quality/reliability and user-endorsement. However, there are no contracts to tie-in users and the approximately five million people that we estimate pay Skype for value-added services are those with a more compelling reason to stay. Skype will need to work hard to make this outage event a one-off or its loyal user base could be enticed away by other, better VoIP offerings. There is plenty of choice.