Vopium, sometimes dubbed the 'other' VoIP company,

underdog Danish voiceover IP (VoIP) company Vopium has received a large cash injection from a prominent Indian telecommunications investor and has declared it is gunning for Skype in a bid to compete with the frontrunning VoIP provider.

Vopium, sometimes dubbed the 'other' VoIP company, today announced that Indian investor Raghuvinder Kataria, an early backer of Bharti Airtel – the third largest in-country mobile operator in the world – would invest $16.5m (£11m) in the Danish internet telecom, making him its largest shareholder.

In a statement, Kataria said: "We believe that the market demands an alternative mobile solution to Skype and the fast market penetration of smartphones opens up new and more intelligent ways of communication."

Kataria's investment significantly increases Vopium's funding as their last posted investment was €4.2m (£3.5m) in 2008 from Enex Group SA, a private Luxembourg-based investment company.

But the little VoIP still has a long way to go before it catches up with Skype, the field's clear leader.

At peak hours, Skype reports 23 million users online and Skype traffic accounts for 12% of global international calling minutes. Its users made 3.1bn minutes of calls to landlines and mobiles, and 36.1bn minutes of calls between Skype users in the third quarter of 2009.

Vopium, on the other hand, has a total of one million users with 10,000 of them online at peak hours. Last year, Vopium reported 40m-50m minutes of calls during the whole of last year.

But at reported growth of 30% every month, Vopium could well be on track to become a real challenge to Skype's hegemony.

Vopium was founded in 2006 by Pakistani entrepreneur Tanveer Sharif. Users download software to their mobile phone, which then re-routes calls over the internet. It was initially founded to allow cheap calling to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh but launched throughout the world last year.

Voice over IP (VoIP)

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone.
Internet telephony refers to communications services — voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications — that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.[1]
VoIP systems employ session control protocols to control the set-up and tear-down of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech allowing transmission over an IP network as digital audio via an audio stream. Codec use is varied between different implementations of VoIP (and often a range of codecs are used); some implementations rely on narrowband and compressed speech, while others support high fidelity stereo codecs.