Canada happens to have more complex laws and regulations,' Yeung said. 'It's one product that we're constantly trying to widen with distribution. Part of the holdup is a regulation that requires telephone providers to support e-911 service, or 'enhanced' 911, which allows emergency responders to locate the caller. Company executives told CBC News in early 2008 that the service would be rolled out within a year, but it has still not launched here. 'I know from friends in Canada that they have a lot of ways to get American applications, so I don't want to comment on whether that's the right way of doing that.'Īnother feature from the company, SkypeIn - which assigns users a phone number so that they can take incoming calls - is still not available in Canada. 'Our goal is to make it as widely available as possible,' Yeung said. Skype was previously available to enterprising Canadians who registered U.S.-based iTunes accounts with Apple, although the process was somewhat complicated. 'Unfortunately Canada was not part of the allowed geography at the time, but that's been taken care of,' he said. The application has already been available for other mobile phones, including those running Microsoft Windows, for some time.Ī territorial restriction on an audio codec - a program for compressing data used specifically by the iPhone - was the sticking point that prevented Skype from rolling out to Canadians in March, at the same time as the rest of the world, Yeung said. Skype's Canadian iPhone delay was the result of a licensing issue over how it plays sound. 'Certain markets may take longer, certain markets may go faster.' Licensing issue caused delay The only thing that nobody can predict is timing,' he said. Everybody in the industry knows that networks are going -based. Tom Yeung, Skype's director of market development for the Americas, said it is inevitable that all voice calls will eventually become simple data transmitted over the internet.

Wireless carriers have so far prohibited the application from using the iPhone's cellular internet connection to make calls, because doing so means customers could drop their voice plans altogether.

Skype's calling features will only work when the user's iPhone is connected to the internet through Wi-Fi.Īs elsewhere, Skype's calling features will only work when the iPhone or iPod is connected to the internet through a Wi-Fi wireless network.

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