Giant Microsoft Will Buy the Phone Service Skype f...

Software giant Microsoft has announced today that it agreed to buy the online telephony service Skype for $ 8.5 billion $ U.S., its largest acquisition in 36 years of history.

The acquisition of Skype would offer Microsoft a potentially valuable tool for communication while the firm tries to increase its presence on the Internet and the smart phone market.

Skype is particularly held by the website and eBay auction fund Silver Lake. The service has 663 million users worldwide.

Microsoft wants to marry the functions of Skype with its Xbox game console, the mail program Outlook and Windows smartphones.

About 170 million people use Skype’s services each month. They spent over 207 billion minutes of voice and video communications in 2010.

Entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who started the company in 2003, have struggled to make their business profitable since most people use Skype calling services for free. Approximately 8.8 million customers per month, only 5 percent of the total number of users pay for services.

The group would have lost $ 7 million last year for a turnover of U.S. $ 860 million. End of 2010, its long-term debt was U.S. $ 544 million.

The current CEO of Skype Tony Bates retain the head of the company.

Microsoft makes its biggest acquisition so, after the takeover in 2007 of technology providers for digital marketing Aquantive approximately U.S. $ 6 billion.

The site eBay acquired Skype in 2005 for U.S. $ 2.6 billion, but he never managed to combine phone service and bids.

He had sold 70 percent of its shares to an investor group led by Silver Lake funds Horowitz and Andreessen to U.S. $ 2 billion 18 months ago.

IP Telephony, How Does It Work?

First a brief return to traditional telephony. The positions of traditional phones are connected directly to the public for private branch exchanges or PBXs through in business. It provides for the exchange line during the unit’s power. The transmitted signal is an analog signal.

The public switches are interconnected by specialized networks for voice transmission. The telephone number corresponds physically to a telephone line on the switch designated. To make a call, it is necessary to establish a connection, a circuit between the calling line and the line drawn through these exchanges. Fifty years ago, these switches were made with extraordinarily large complex electromechanical systems. It had huge rooms to install them. In the early 1970s, these systems have gradually been replaced by computers. The size and price of the systems decreased significantly, but the telecoms engineers have questioned the system architecture which has remained the same. Most technical advances have been made between the PBX, the interface of the subscriber line remained the same.

IP telephony is a set of telephone functions using the IP to transmit voice and manage phone functions. voice, digitized and compressed, is transmitted as packets routed in the same manner as data packets. So there is more switching circuits is the standard feature of Internet routing is used.

Netmeeting was one of the first applications to transmit voice over IP. He had a PC connected to the Internet to digitize voice and send it. The result was not famous. The sound settings were delicate and the latency (time forwarding packets) added to the time compression of voice, did not allow a natural conversation. With the advent of ADSL and computers 20 times faster, the situation has changed. Skype, released in September 2003, was the first VoIP software to make usable. The system is owned and unfortunately his phone features are limited. It does so between 2 PCs equipped with Skype. In early 2004, Skype has introduced the function and conference since July 2004, Skype offers a paid service to call or be called by landlines.

To aspire to replace fixed telephony, it takes a whole lot more advanced features. NetMeeting uses the H.323 standard developed by ITU-T, who copied the principles of traditional telephony.
A new protocol, much better suited to the Internet was developed by the IETF SIP. It is this protocol that will enable the development of telephony features. It also helps develop “SIP phones” that allow you to connect directly to the Internet by way of PC.