Phoning for free

Niklas Zennström, CEO and co-founder of Skype, believes that telecoms should change their traditional offer if they want to compete with free applications in the future.

"I think [applications such as Skype] help telecoms to sell more broadband connections. On the other hand, it's obvious that all calls will be free of charge in a couple of years, so telecoms should transform into broadband providers rather than communication providers," Zennström said during a visit to Warsaw.

However, Jerzy Sadowski, strategy director for mobile operator Polkomtel, is not worried about the future of traditional telecoms.

"Mobile telephony is still developing and will continue to develop in the future. It's main advantage over internet applications is its reliability. When you're doing business for instance, you can't constantly worry that a system will crash," he says.

Zennström pledged that Skype would remain free of charge in spite of growing competition.

"Our business model is to offer communication free of charge and other value-added services for a fee. Skype will always be for free," he said, and added that the company's objective for this year is to earn $200 (zł.624) million in revenues, up from $57 (zł.178) million last year.