Got a note from Stephan Beckert about TeleGeography Research Group's TeleGeography 2007 : Global Telecommunications Traffic Statistics and Commentary report. The whole market for international traffic's been growing...

We spent some time going through Skype's subscribers and traffic flows, and compared them with "traditional" international traffic (that is, phone to phone traffic, whether it's carried by switched carriers, or IP based carriers, like iBasis).

Skype's numbers are huge--particularly for a company that was only founded in 2004. Interestingly, though, Skype's growth has not yet had a quantifiable impact on switched volumes. Aggregate traffic from the many many carriers we surveyed has continued to grow, pretty well in line with historical trends.

Skypelights:

• Skype traffic grew by 6.2 billion minutes in the last year. From 7.6 billion minutes in 2005 to 13.8 billion projected in 2006. 80% year over year.

Just in case that's sounds like a lot...

• Other VoIP traffic grew by 16.8 billion minutes to 42 billion minutes. These are the Vonages, cable and telco voip offerings.

Their growth was bigger than Skype's total traffic. But wait, there's more.

• Swtiched telephony, grew 8% to 237 billion minutes. Switched growth was 18 billion minutes.

So even if Skype traffic is growing 10 times faster than switched service, picking up a few points of share, the Skype threat falls into telecom's background noise. Skype's revenue doesn't even fall in telecom's rounding errors.

What did growth cost? What did it take to sell 41 billion more minutes this year than last? Skype still has its dramatic advantage in marketing cost per minute served.

Where is Niklas' vision of free Skype calls forcing telcos to slash prices? The market hasn't reached a tipping point where customers fly to Skype. Yet. 

Still, it's amazing that one company, let alone a three year old company with 500 employees, is even showing up on the charts.