This week, Microsoft shuttered Skype. For a lot of people, it’s a sad but nostalgic moment. Sad, because for older Internet users it brings back memories of the connections it facilitated; nostalgic because hardly anyone seemed to be using it any more. As Chris Stokel-Walker wrote at Wired in 2021, somehow when covid arrived and poured accelerant on remote communications, everyone turned to Zoom instead. Stokel-Walker blamed the Microsoft team for lacking focus on the bit that mattered most: keeping the video link up and stable. Zoom had better video, true, but also far better usability in terms of getting people to calls.
Skype’s service – technically, VoIP, for Voice over Internet Protocol – was pioneering in its time, which arguably peaked around 2010. Like CompuServe before it and Twitter since, there was a period when everyone had their Skype ID on their business cards. In 2005, when eBay bought it for $1.3 billion, it was being widely copied. In 2009, when eBay sold it to an investor group, it was valued at $2.75 billion.
In 2011, Microsoft bought it for $8.5 billion in cash, to general puzzlement as to *why* and why for *so much*. I thought eBay would somehow embed it into its transaction infrastructure as it had Paypal, which it had bought in 2002 for $1.5 billion (and then in 2014 spun off as a public company). Similarly, Wired talked of Microsoft embedding it into its Xbox Live network. Instead, the company fiddled with the app in the general shift from desktop to mobile. Ironic, given that Skype was a *phone* app. If it struggled like Facebook did to make the change, it’s kind of embarrassing.
Forgotten in all this is the fact that although Skype was the first VoIP application to gain mainstream acceptance, it was not the first to connect phone calls over the Internet. That was the long-forgotten Free World Dial-Up project, pioneered by Jeff Pulver. On the ground I imagined Free World Dial-Up as looking something like the switchboard and radio phone Radar O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) used in the TV series M*A*S*H (1973-1982), who was patching phone calls being transmitted via radio networks. As Pulver described it, calls were sent across the Internet between servers, each connected to a box that patched the calls into the local phone system.
Rereading my notes from my 1995 interview with Pulver, when he was just getting his service up and running, it’s astonishing to remember how many hurdles there were for his prototype VoIP project to overcome – and this was all being done by volunteers. In many countries outside North America, charges for local phone calls made it financially risky to run a server. Some countries had prohibitive licensing regulations that made it illegal to offer such a service if you weren’t a telephone company. The hardware and software were readily available but had to be bought and required tinkering to set up. Plus, few outside the business world had continuous high-speed connections; most of us were using modems to dial up a service provider.
Small surprise that those early calls were not great. A Chicago recipient of a test call said she’d had better connections over the traditional phone network to Harare. Network lag made it more like a store-and-forward audio clipping service than a phone call. This didn’t matter as much to people with a history in ham radio, like Pulver himself; they were used to the cognitive effort to understand despite static and dropouts.
On the other hand, international calling was so wildly expensive at the time that even so FWD opened up calling for half a million people.
FWD was the experiment that proved the demand and the potential. Soon, numerous companies were setting up to offer VoIP services via desktop applications of varying quality and usability. It was into this hodge-podge that Skype was launched in 2003 from Estonia. For a time, it kept getting better: it began with free calling between Skype users and paid calls to phone lines, and moved on to offering local phone numbers around the world, as Google Voice does now.
Around the early 2000s it was popular to predict that VoIP services would kill off telephone companies. This was a moment when network neutrality, now under threat, was crucial; had telcos been allowed to discriminate against VoIP traffic, we’d all still be paying through the nose for international calling and probably wouldn’t have had video calling during the covid lockdowns.
Instead, the telcos themselves have become VoIP companies. In 2007, BT was the first to announce it was converting its entire network to IP. That process is supposed to complete this year. My landline is already a VoIP line. (Downside: no electricity, no telecommunications.)
Pulver, I find, is still pushing away at the boundaries of telecommunications. His website these days is full of virtualized conversations (vCons) and Supply Chain Integrity, Transparency, and Trust (SWICC), which he explains here (PDF). The first is an IETF proposed standard for AI-enhanced digital records. The second is an IETF proposed framework that intends to define “a set of interoperable building blocks that will allow implementers to build integrity and accountability into software supply chain systems to help assure trustworthy operation”. This is the sort of thing that may make a big difference to companies while being invisible and/or frustrating to most of us.
As for Skype, it will fade from human memory. If it ever comes up, we’ll struggle to explain what it was to a generation who have no idea that calling across the world was ever difficult and expensive.
Illustrations: Radar O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) in the TV series M*A*S*H with his radio telephone setup.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.