I have just bought the latest Swedish magazine mobil, and read how young people don’t sign up for traditional house phones, but find mobile phones and broadband to be enough. In 2005 the Swedish telecom “giant” Telia lost almost 1 million of the house phone customers (2004: 6.173.000, 2005: 5.198.000).

Another interesting thing is that within the end of 2005 there were in Sweden 126.000 VoIP customers, a growth of 123 % the 2nd half of the year. The market leading VoIP company in Norwegian, Telio, has again started a TV commercial campaign trying to steal away customers from the Norwegian telecom “giant” Telenor. Will 2006 be the year for VoIP?

Softphones seem to be in the wind. Just as the year started, Skype 2.0 was released with web camera support. Ekiga (former GnomePhone) also just came out in it’s first public beta. New in version 2.0 is the full SIP implementation. An OpenWengo extension for Firefox is also more or less ready to be released, as the developer is asking for help getting the extension localized. Two days ago I got the oportunity to be one of the first to test an upcoming developer release of the SIP client Zap. Voice quality was great, but there was still some ecco and I was told that the developer team was working on that. Surely a project that I would like to keep an eye on.