One Day VOIP Calls Will be Free, says eBay

eBay CEO (and new Skype acquiree) Meg Whitman let slip an unusual notion yesterday: eventually, voice communication over the Internet will be free.

During its quarterly financial conference call yesterday, eBay CEO Meg Whitman responded to an analysts’ challenge of the online auction company’s just-completed acquisition of VOIP provider Skype with what might be an unusual prescient notion: eventually, voice communication over the Internet will be available for free, and service providers will have to earn money on advertising and fees for value-added services.

During the conference call, J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan challenged Whitman to elucidate how eBay planned to earn money from Skype, which many industry watchers have painted as an eventual victim of its own rapid growth. As Skype gains more users, the reasoning goes, an greater proportion of Skype’s voice service minutes will be unbilled “P2P” traffic between existing Skype users, rather than traffic between Skype’s network and standard telephone networks, for which Skype collects per-minute revenue. As the system adds users, the result would be a net decline in net revenue per service minute