Skype works on AT&T's 3G on iPhone 3.0
We just found something very interesting. When you install Skype on a 3.0 developer preview iPhone, you can use AT&T's connection to make and receive calls. It even works pretty well over EDGE. Skype treats AT&T's WWAN like a Wifi connection.
Context & Ripple Effects
Skype's route onto the iPhone has so far run through carriers rather than around them: back in October 2007, Skype and the operator 3 launched a dedicated mobile phone with Skype built into the tariff. The new wrinkle reported here is different — on the iPhone 3.0 developer preview, Skype simply treats AT&T's WWAN connection as if it were WiFi, routing calls over 3G (and even EDGE) with no carrier partnership or special build.
That makes this a discovery about default behavior in unreleased software, not an announced product: no other outlet picked up the story on the day, and since the 3.0 firmware is still a developer preview, whether calls over cellular survive into the shipping OS is exactly what Apple and AT&T have not said.
First-order effects
- Developers running the 3.0 preview can make and receive Skype calls away from WiFi on AT&T's network, spending data instead of voice minutes — a direct bypass of AT&T's per-minute plan on its own handsets.
- AT&T bears the traffic either way: after its network already failed under iPhone load at South by Southwest in Austin this month, voice-grade streaming over 3G adds a new class of sustained demand.
Second-order effects
- If calls over cellular reach the shipping firmware, AT&T's voice revenue is undercut on its own data pipes — sharpening the reportedly ongoing talks with Apple about tiered data pricing for the next-gen iPhone, where heavy VoIP users would be the natural target of usage-based plans.
- Operators elsewhere face the same squeeze from the opposite direction: 3's handset-and-tariff bundling shows one defensive path (partner with Skype), while blocking or degrading VoIP shows another, forcing every carrier to pick a side.
Third-order effects
- Whether VoIP over cellular ships is decided less by what the software can do than by who controls distribution: Apple's App Store review and carrier terms sit between Skype and the user, making the platform gatekeeper — not the network operator — the decisive check on over-the-top voice.
- If the WiFi-like treatment of cellular data becomes the norm, voice detaches from minutes as a priced product and reattaches to data, pushing carriers toward metered broadband models across the industry.
The trend: Mobile telephony is splitting from carrier voice networks toward over-the-top apps riding flat-rate data, with Apple's gatekeeping of the iPhone determining how fast the split happens.