Theyve taken their time but there are now a plethora of companies offering quality competition to the Skype world of internet VoIP telephony. Danny Wirken takes a closer look.

Skype is cheap. That is to say Skype is quite cheap. Alright Skype isnt all that cheap. With the recent barrage of complaints made against the once golden boy of internet telephony, Skype users are on the move and looking for somewhere to call home.

Enter stage left Globe7, Yahoo!, VoIP Net, InnerVoIP, MutualPhone, Speak2Phone, Xeloq, VoIPGate, VoIPDiscount, Quazzle, InternetCalls, Gafachi, Teliax, Best2Call the list goes on.

Not only has this competition provided for a cheaper set of prices (a set of prices seemingly ignored by Skype who maintain a relatively expensive set of per minute rates) but also for a significant improvement in the quality of the connections involved and the choices of which network to use to carry the all important telephone data along to your friends ear.

This effectively means that you should never again have to suffer the insufferable two second delay between speaking and hearing, nor should you need to worry about paying for credit only to have to wait for several days before being able to use your phone to call someone!

Different companies have taken different routes through the world of internet telephony, often in stark contrast to the old republic of Skype. While Skype calls suffer in terms of quality and customer service is often nil, other newer talent have deliberately invested in outsourcing their customer service to allow for a real telephone number to call and rapid responses to emails.

Best2Call, for example, offers a head office in the USA a location poor Skype has had trouble providing calls for this last week. AxVoice, the broadband phone service, also has its head office in the states. The popular LunaPhone, also a USA based outfit, has prices that directly challenge the Skype way of thinking as do many of these new (and some old!) companies.

But what has Skype done to reply to the increasing competition? It seems that we now see Skype adverts everywhere so we can be confident that fewer funds are finding their way into the customer service budget. While gaining new members is obviously important for any such company, one has to wonder why Skype is not doing more to retain its most loyal of customers who are now being pushed away thanks to the attractive lower prices and better quality of other providers.

Trendy marketing can make a huge difference, and there is no doubt that the Ebay takeover has done a lot for the exposure of Skype and internet telephony in general to a wider audience who might otherwise not have typically been users. Marketing alone is never enough to sustain business however, and Skype is finding this out the hard way.

Keep your eyes here for updates on the best new internet telephony technologies and services to rival Skype.