With regular calls nationwide and to China, England and Hungary, Ben Boxall's phone bill was running $900 a month -- not an insignificant expense for his small Van Nuys import company.
After switching to Skype, the Internet program that popularized free and low-cost phone service, Boxall cut his bill to about $150 -- a year.
"If Skype ever stopped operating, we'd be in big trouble," said Boxall, who runs Luna Imports Inc.
So would a lot of the other small-business operators who constitute as much as 30% of Skype's 75 million users worldwide. Recognizing that, Skype Technologies today is expected to roll out an upgraded and re-branded service for small businesses, targeting them both for free and fee-based services.
The Skype for Business brand is aimed at giving small companies access to some of the telecommunications services historically reserved for big corporations.
"When we launched Skype, we really had no idea it would become so popular among businesses," said Saul Klein, vice president of global marketing of the Luxembourg company, which was bought last September by online auctioneer EBay Inc.
Skype created a sensation in August 2003 when it started offering a simple, easy-to-use computer-based program for people to make calls -- and bypass long-distance and international rates charged by phone companies.
But small companies, and even small groups in large companies, also needed to cut their phone bills.
As part of its push into the business market, Skype also is unveiling today third-party products such as speaker phones, cordless Internet phones and electronic switching gear, as well as software programs to share documents and presentations over the computer during calls, to make conference calls with as many as 500 people and to translate calls in English into French, Spanish, Cantonese or Mandarin.
"My Cantonese is awful," Boxall said. "I hope that program works."The new services could help Skype tap deeper into that market and recoup some of the $4.1 billion that EBay paid for it.
Although its free program lets users make free calls from their computers, Skype generated an estimated $60 million last year from fee-based services, such as those allowing users to call people on regular phones and use voice mail.
Founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the two technologists who created the Kazaa file-sharing program, Skype began taking a bite out of the conventional telephone business, which already was reeling from falling long-distance prices and rising competition.
