Many of you have been asking when we’ll release a version of Skype for iPhone which supports 3G calling. Well, the simple answer is soon.

Last Thursday, Apple introduced the iPad, which we’re very excited about here at Skype. David Ponsford, who features in the video above, and his team are reviewing the device and its specs, and you can expect to hear more from us about Skype for iPad in due course.

What does this have to do with calling over 3G? The SDK (Software Development Kit) which Apple provides to developers like Skype has been upgraded for the iPad. The new version, 3.2, removes the restrictions on calling over 3G, which is great news.

You may have seen other apps offering calls over 3G, but we’re holding ours back for a little bit longer. Why? So that we can give you the very best audio quality we can. When our 3G-capable Skype for iPhone app is released, it’ll let you make calls in wideband audio, giving you greater clarity and fidelity – because that’s what you expect from Skype.

To be among the first to know when the 3G-capable app is available, follow @skypemobile on Twitter or subscribe to this blog either by RSS or email using the links to the right.

I caught up with Josh Silverman earlier for a quick chat about video – past, present and future. In the video above, we talk about what makes video different, its current ubiquity, and a little bit about what the future has in store.

He also published a guest post on GigaOM earlier today, which outlines some of his thoughts in a bit more detail, from the philosophical:

For hundreds of thousands of years, people have shared meaning through language. Its form has evolved from oral to visual and, for the past few thousand years, written. Yet until the 20th century, true conversations were tied to a shared place or shifted by time (letters). Even then, only being together with someone allowed for rich, full interaction to bloom. Live video conversations are changing all that, combining the oral, visual and written traditions into virtual presence.

to the practical:

With video, people are suddenly present without having to be in the same room as one another. The encounter, by extension, is no longer merely transactional. When my friend in Ann Arbor, Mich., turned 40, I joined the party from London over video. The distance between us evaporated — a benefit voice calls cannot deliver. A similar thing happens by way of the permanent live video wall that joins up our offices in Tallinn and Prague: An Estonian engineer’s desk is right next to that of her team member in the Czech Republic.

Last, but not least, the Institute for the Future has released a report titled ‘The Future of Real-Time Video Communication’, commissioned by Skype, which sets out to answer three important questions:

• What is the future of real-time video communication?
• What will it feel like to live and work in a world where real-time video is ubiquitous?
• And what are the most important user, technological, market, and policy forces that will shape the course of global real-time video development and diffusion?

As video is at the core of what we do at Skype, we’re curious about its direction and want to ignite a discussion about its meaning and implications. Not all of us here necessarily agree with all of the authors’ findings, but I hope their work sparks an enlightening debate.

You can read more about the report on the IFTF website, or download the full report and executive summary (PDF, 1.1Mb).

I’ll be exploring some of the findings of the report in more detail over the coming weeks, but for now, dive in and take a look.

Yesterday, I gave a keynote address at the Pacific Telecom Conference (PTC) in Honolulu. I talked about the current state of the IP communications industry and where its going in the future.

The IP communications industry has been around a long time - around 15 years or so. During that time, there are four areas in which it has been extremely successful. The first is in the enterprise. IP-based business phones are nearly half of all new PBX line sales today. The cost savings of consolidating voice and data networks, and the benefits of centralized call control, have made VoIP a clear winner there. The second area of success is in consumer cable. Even though VoIP is invisible to end-users, the cost savings of the triple play has been compelling. In the U.S., 16.5 million homes are using VoIP provided by their cable providers. The third area of success is near and dear to Skype - the consumer desktop application. Skype has over 520 million registered users. In terms of usage, a just-released report by Telegeography said that Skype now accounts for 12% of worldwide ILD traffic - up 50% from last year. Thats amazing growth. The final area of success for IP communications has been voice backhaul.

We're far from done though. The future holds many opportunities. Three big ones stand out. The first is video, the second is mobile, and the third is web.

The IP communications industry has been talking about video forever, but it's finally happening. This is due to the increased user expectations (video is now everywhere on the web), the now ubiquitous availability of webcams that are built into laptops and netbooks, and the improvements in video quality we've seen - now VGA and 720p. The final barrier had been the network effect - finding others to talk to. Skype has finally jumped the network effect gap. With 34% of Skype-to-Skype calls using video, there is a huge population of folks to have video calls with. This is what is enabling us to now bring Skype to TVs, as we announced last week with LG and Panasonic.

The next frontier is mobile. Mobile VoIP is in its infancy, but a combination of factors is creating a perfect storm for this to change. The first is the rise of the smartphone. 18% of phone sales today are smartphones, a number which will grow to 38% in 2013. WiFi is finally becoming ubiquitous on these devices, allowing high bandwidth in the home and the office - the two most important places. The growth in 3g usage and 4g rollouts are growing available capacity too. Add to that the rise of the app store as a channel for new apps, and you have an amazing opportunity for mobile IP communications apps to flourish.

The final frontier is the web. The lines between IP communications and the web are blurring. Facebook has IM. Social networks are all about person-to-person communications. Advances in web technologies - like AJAX and Flash - are making browser apps as interactive as desktop apps. The browser is now handling multimedia, and standards are evolving to enable codec support right within the browser. This trend will continue, and extend to encompass all of real-time communications.

Voice on the web won't just be about click-to-call, but rather, seamlessly integrating real-time communications with the web experience itself. Today the web is mostly a solo activity - I browse by myself, and visit eCommerce sites by myself. Imagine being able to have a virtual e-commerce shopping trip with friends, where people can browse through the shelves of Amazon together, all while chatting by voice and seeing each other with video. Imagine being on Facebook and being able to speak to someone about their status update as easily as you can post a reply to that update. That is what it means to bring a voice to the web, and it is the future.

Last week the European Parliament organised hearings to confirm the new list of European Commissioners, including Neelie Kroes who is proposed to be the new EU Commissioner for the ‘Digital Agenda’ (the policy area formerly known as ‘Information Society’). Ms Kroes has been the Competition Commissioner since 2004, tackling many big cases, including one that started in 2008 on the blocking of VoIP on mobile.

With the European Commission conducting a formal review of Net Neutrality in Europe this year, Ms Kroes’ position is crucial in protecting users’ right to decide what content they want to send and receive, and which services, applications, hardware and software they want to use on the Internet.

Well, we may be in for a treat. In response to a number of questions on the subject from European parliamentarians, Ms Kroes told MEPs that she had put a loveheart next to the topic of ‘net neutrality’ on her briefing papers. She sees as a key aspect of her term as Digital Agenda Commissioner the aim to “preserve the open and neutral Internet”, adding that

“there’s a couple of reasons to be very vigilant for new threats to Net Neutrality which can arise from many sources, and blocking and discrimination against VoIP services by mobile operators in a number of European countries are just one example … For me, it’s main [key] that we’re not blocking opportunities for certain technologies…. Open and clear cut net neutrality is needed.”

She went into more detail in relation to what she would see as appropriate traffic management:

“The core issue is whether Internet access providers and broadband providers should be able to exercise control and limit users’ access to any content; to me that is a no go when it’s done for commercially motivated reasons; only for security reasons or when spam is involved …; [if it’s for] commercially motivated reasons, that’s not net neutrality.”

Now, Skype and Internet users throughout Europe look forward to Ms Kroes taking her post and working from day one on forcing those network operators that discriminate against Skype and its users to stop their abuse immediately. We look forward to being involved, together with user / consumer representatives and other Internet companies in the ‘Open Internet Summit’ announced yesterday in the second and last hearing by Ms Kroes, as part of the Commission review of Net Neutrality.

However, although we see a lot of promising signs coming from the European Commission, we need to keep in mind that the national governments and national regulators still have to do their homework and establish (and enforce!) clear net neutrality rules in their respective countries.

Looking at the current debate in the US, we see that even if the authorities decide to protect net neutrality, as the Obama administration does, the struggle is not over at all. Those that believe that they can control what users do online just because in their mind the Internet ‘belongs’ to them (and not to users) have the resources and the commercial motives to make their voices heard. As alluded to in Josh’s speech at the CES show just over a week ago (see Chris’s blog post), the many thousands of filings and over 100,000 comments on the open Internet rules proposed by the US regulator FCC are a clear sign of the need to stay alert and take nothing for granted. Neither in the US nor in Europe.

Photo from the World Economic Forum · CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

One of the more interesting sessions I attended at the Pacific Telecommunications Conference (PTC) in Honolulu this week was a panel discussion called "The Content Providers Speak". It included technical eaders from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, who were talking about their perspective on what networking means to them.

A few really interesting points came out:

• Electricity is the dominant cost factor for them. This creates a tension between cheap power - often available far from large user populations - and good experience - which drives data centers closer to large user populations.
• The growth of dynamic content is seriously weakening the value that these guys are seeing from Content Distribution Networks (CDN).
• Facebook has a 50/50 split between leasing datacenter space and building, while Google and Yahoo primarily build.
• There is a growing move away from the use of transit ISP providers. All three of them said they had, or were planning to, move to direct peering with local ISPs. This was driven by cost savings and the ability to have greater control over performance.
  

I thought these were great insights into the challenges that application providers in our space are facing.