With the once loyal fans of Skype and SkypeOut now looking for a new company to service their internet telephony needs, Danny Wirken discovers some interesting truths behind many of the main competitors.

At first glance there are seemingly hundreds of them. Thanks to the rapid and surprising success of Skype and SkypeOut many other companies have begun to offer internet telephony and VoIP services to the same market – cheap calls nationally and internationally and free calls to other users of that particular service.

It’s not just the giants like Yahoo!, who has recently released their own voice calling VoIP service bundled with their newest version of Yahoo! chat, MSN and AOL who are competing for their share. A plethora of smaller and less noticeable companies have sprung up to join the smaller handful of firms that existed even before Skype.

Some names may be familiar to you – Globe7, VoIP.Net, Speak2Phone, VoIPGate and so on. However, hidden among the top 100 and top 200 VoIP firms both online and with brick and mortar offices are a collection of companies who are fronts for one single VoIP provider: Finarea S.A. This firm owns VoIP Discount, SipDiscount, VoIPCheap, SparVoIP, InternetCalls, VoIPStunt, VoIPBuster and Netappel. Each of these companies regularly updates the countries to which their users get free telephone calls. With careful monitoring of these companies you can often find that the country you want to call can be reached for free by at least one of them!

Well, there’s always a catch. You do need to credit your account with some money first and the cash won’t stay there forever. 120 days is adequate for most people’s needs especially if you are likely to use the service regularly and credit your account often.

However the real truth here is far more interesting. The expansion of this company into many and the gradual rise of the competition in general herald an interesting view of the future internet telephony market especially with regards to Skype. No longer can Skype claim to be the industry leader when so many competitors are enjoying relative success. Skype are keen to publish figures of new customers but seldom do you see the figures of customers who no longer credit their account or use the SkypeOut service.

The increasing amount of dissatisfied customers and the ever growing pile of complaints against the company may well lead to the eventual decline of Skype as a market leader. It would be a shame because the brand has enjoyed such unconditional love for the last three years since inception that some might be led to comment that it would have been very hard to push such devotion away. It’s not too late for Skype to reclaim its crown however – simple and straightforward customer service implementations will do much to help retain the current customer base and perhaps push some of the contenders back into the shadows.

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