Interesting new compeditor to Skype

In the words of: http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=11523_0_5_0_C

Meet… ‘The VoipBuster’

You won’t find too much hype on their site, (http://www.voipbuster.com) perhaps because its in Beta, but let me outline the seismic shift created by this one. VoipBuster enables you to dial your own landline from your PC and then usurp the handset to make free calls around the planet. That’s right, hack the POTS hardware, with a mouse click or two and take it over. Revenue model is a simple 1 Euro for the service… Neat and precise, and right on Skype’s Achilles heal, the head-set requirement.The interesting thing about this is that it tips enormous value back into the fixed-line handset infrastructure that had been looking decidely dinosaurish. The other factor is that applications and services like this are obviously going to proliferate, and so its going to be ‘choice-overkill’ and in the mix, Skype will innevitably face some serious competition. (Note also the emergence of iSkoot (http://www.iSkoot.com) this time based on Skype’s own API, with a very similar proposition)Will future battles be fought on factors like audio fidelity? (now that many have experienced the difference between hand-set and head-set with VOIPs added fidelity) P2P networks have shown massive shifts in their user-bases as new applications s came onto the market. Will Skype be so vulnerable to that scale of user-churn? It could! In this current environment Skype’s jump on everybody else will be the main cause for congratulations at headquarters.Skype still only represents about a third of the size of a large file-sharing network's user-base…the future is wide open.