At the end of 2005 I made some predictions about the VoIP industry which I will review further in a day or two. While a couple of my predictions have already proved correct, perhaps the most interesting was:
6. The Skype protocol will be reverse engineered by August 2006 and application code will be offered for license.
Today I received a call through Skype from a friend at a company in China, except he told me he was not using Skype to call me. His company has successfully reverse engineered the Skype protocol and he wanted to call me in the United States to see how it worked between physically distant IP addresses. We talked for a little over nine minutes before the call dropped. Then I called him back using my Skype and we spoke for another three minutes.
The first time we talked there was a noticeable echo on my end. The second time the voice quality was good ol" Skype crystal clear. At present they only support placing Skype peer-to-peer phone calls and they have not yet implemented presence. They have plans to add presence, instant messaging, and a host of other features. Their end goal is to create a client 100% compatible with Skype. They sent me a screen shot of their software (below) and my IP address was 100% correct.
Credit goes to Copernic, who posted this in Back page News on our forum.