Dean Bubley: Skype over 3G

Dean Bubley has been churning out the posts since 3GSM at his Disruptive Wireless blog. Here he notes that "while the mobile world is focusing on dual-mode WiFi/cellular devices, some of the pioneers of VoIP are already moving onto VoIPo3G."

Bubley said the Hutchison / Skype partnership made noise but what he personally found most interesting was this blurb in another press release that "Skype for Pocket PC 2.0 works .... with an internal Wi-Fi or 3G (EDGE, EV-DO or UMTS) radio. " Bubley points out a Symbian client is in the works too and concludes:

It will be interesting to see if Skype tries to exploit a variant of handset-specific J2ME Java that'll be appearing on mid-tier phones later this year. (it's called JSR-180 for those who care....) This gives access from the Java environment to a SIP stack on the phone, if it's present.

There's an awful lot of Java/EDGE phones around... although whether they'll have the necessary horsepower to run the Skype client is another matter. (as is the per-MB data rates that operators charge)