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Skype threatens the end of phone numbers

The story of the week, in America, is mobile phone number portability. Go and study Skype, and ask yourself how much longer such trivia will matter.

The only thing about Skype which is definitely out of date, is its failure to address mobile phones. It´s a voice-over-Internet system of file sharing, peer to peer, and nearly two million people are already trying it out.

Skype works just like voice over MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger - except it doesn´t need MSN or Yahoo to run it. Rather, it´s like the old days of FidoNet, where every user was also a post office - just a node in the world wide mesh.

The analysts at Faultline believe that "one day, all phones will be like this" - but the analysis appears to leave out the bandwidth this will take up in the medium term.

In the long term, when every household has 10 megabits Ethernet per second, and every metro household has 100 megabits, the trivial 128 kilobits per second needed to carry voice over Internet at this sort of quality will be irrelevant extra traffic. But on today´s broadband, with a maximum of 256 kilobits per second upload speed, and contention ratios of 50:1 at the hub, it would be a challenge to calculate the likely point in time when all broadband providers were jammed by voice traffic.

What is more interesting, perhaps, is what is implied for Skype by the launch of Toshiba´s new http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/68/33552.html VoIP Pocket PC.

Right now, you can´t run Skype on a pocket PC. But there´s nothing inherent in the device to prevent it. It needs a processor to digitise the voice - check. It needs an IP address - yup. It needs enough grunt to store and forward the voice traffic - probably. And it needs enough bandwidth in and out.

After that, who needs a phone? Only people out of range of broadband. With Flarion launching this year, it can only be 24 months before phones use data as the basis for voice traffic, rather than using voice as the selling point for data, as they do today.

And you´ll use the other person´s IP address to contact them - not their phone number.