Welcome to Land of Tricks

We in the U.S. love to complain. Take this week’s introduction of Skype for the iPhone. The mobile VoIP client appears to be a pretty solid offering, letting you not only chat with your Skype buddies, but also make voice calls—as long as you’re using the Wi-Fi connection, a stipulation Apple had pointed out way back in March 2008when it first unveiled the iPhone SDK.

That didn’t stop the barrage of complaints that the ban on 3G was arbitrary and designed only to support AT&T’s business model. Which, to be fair, is pretty accurate. Whether or not that makes it wrong, well, that’s up to higher powers to decide. But at least we’re better off than the folks in Germany, where the country’s official provider, T-Mobile, wants to ban use of the Skype app on both its 3G network and its extensive Wi-Fi hot spot network.

Not only has T-Mobile said that the use of Skype is forbidden, but it’s also declared its intent to cancel the contracts of any users who use workarounds to run the program anyway. The company’s reasoning is that the program’s high data use would choke the network infrastructure and that it violates the customer contract, prohibiting VoIP—a clause apparently used by all other German mobile service providers as well.

Skype’s general counsel fired back in a blog post, saying: “They pretend that their action has to do with technical concerns: this is baseless. Skype works perfectly well on iPhone, as hundreds of thousands of people globally can already readily attest.”

Whatever the case, T-Mobile looks to have a steep road ahead of itself, as Skype is currently the top free app on the German App Store.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Skype is best known for its voice telephony service, so it was only a matter of time before it went wireless. But it’s not the first mobile voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) offering, and it won’t fly with many wireless carriers.

On March 31, Skype announced software for BlackBerries andiPhones, a week after releasing a beta version for Windows Mobile.Earlier this year, Nokia — the world’s largest cell phone vendor in terms of volumes — announced that it would start shipping some handsets with Skype pre-loaded.

But caveats abound. For example, in the case of the iPhone, Skype voice calls can be made only over Wi-Fi, not cellular. That should help reduce the amount of voice revenue that wireless carriers would lose if iPhone customers could make Skype calls over cellular.

Even so, some cellular carriers are blocking Skype. One example is T-Mobile, which has exclusive rights for the iPhone in Germany.

“There are two reasons for this — because the high level of traffic would hinder our network performance, and because if the Skype program didn’t work properly, customers would make us responsible for it,” a T-Mobile spokesperson says.

Other carriers — such as AT&T and the U.K.’s O2 — are allowing their iPhone customers to use Skype. Why don’t they view it as a threat? One reason is because very few carriers sell only a data plan for cell phones, so customers still have to spend at least $30 per month for voice service.

But carriers could take a revenue hit if some customers — particularly those who have a lot of friends and colleagues on Skype — downgrade their voice plans to the cheapest offering because they now can make the majority of their calls for free over Wi-Fi.

Those voice revenue losses wouldn’t necessarily be offset by more data spending if most people who would use mobile Skype already have an unlimited data plan for cellular, Wi-Fi or both. In those cases, mobile Skype probably isn’t going to prompt many data plan upgrades.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The fate of eBay-owned Skype has been in question for months now. Back in April, it looked as if eBay was going to spin-off the VoIP service as a publicly traded company. Now we’ve learned that Skype will be sold to private investors.

According to the New York Times, eBay will announce a deal tomorrow that will send the popular Internet telephone service to an investment group. It seems as if the group includes the newly formed Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, co-founded by Netscape’s founder Marc Andreessen. The deal terms are not yet disclosed.

This deal comes during a very public battle between eBay and the founders of Skype, who are threatening to cut off one of the key peer-to-peer technologies that power Skypeand have expressed interest in rebuying their company. It’s even possible they are also part of the sale – we just don’t know yet.

We’ll bring you more information as it develops.

Update: Others involved in the deal include Index Ventures (London venture capital firm, early Skype investor) and Silver Lake Partners (private equity firm).

Popularity: 3% [?]