Infographic: Skype now rules the international phone calling market

I find it kinda disappointing that a more open platform hasn't been adopted to fill this role. *Cough*XMPP*cough*

skype to skype calls work and are free thats why they are so popular.
If i wanted to call my dad he lives on the other side of the world i can go on my computer and have a chat to him on skype for hours for free or ring him from my mobile and get charged a rediculous amount peer minute.
My landline is a data line now.

I guess it's the technicalities of it that bother me. So many people perceive Skype as something that gives you a unique calling service for free, when in reality, it's proprietary branding, protocol and ads slapped on what's mostly a relatively simple directory service that has truly free counterparts.

The "in-network" calls hit me as a particularly irritating misnomer that Skype and many other VoIP providers use. On internet-based "calling services" where clients connect directly to each other, all calls should be "in-network", whether the client is connected to the same "service" or not. (Of course, if the provider is bridging between the internet and POTS, or relaying calls themselves because of connectivity issues, things are a little different, but that's not the norm for "in-network" calls.) If different "providers" would settle on a unified protocol, there's zero reason why all of these different "services" couldn't interact with each other freely. That's basically how XMPP works; it's decentralized.

I don't mean to say Skype is the devil; I use it myself. But the reason I do is because some of my friends do, not because of any technical merit. It's the network effect. I just wish all these little proprietary networks would be replaced by one free, open one, since they all operate within one network that is essentially free for clients to communicate over (once they pay their internet bills, if any).