Counting Skype Users

Jeremy Wagstaff has a blog entry entitled "Skype's 100 Million: Where The Hell Are They?" in which he questions Skype's claim of 100 million users. As users of Skype will note, the number of online users at any given moment is somewhere around 6 million.

Not sure what all the angst is about Skype subscriber numbers. Any telecom service is going to have more registered users than online users at any given moment. If not, the networks would collapse, since they are all engineered with a level of over subscription implicit in the design.

Skype is different from a conventional switched network because it is using peer to peer technology, so theoretically, it should be able to scale better.

I am just happy it exists. Having access to cheap, easy to use voice and video communications with chat and presence has completely changed the way I do business and interact with family.

Skype