MWC: Verizon Wireless, Skype cozy up

Verizon Wireless’ old enemies are quickly becoming its closest friends. Today at Mobile World Congress Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) and Skype announced plans to offer Skype’s service to all VZW smartphone customers, carrying Skype’s traditional business model of free or cheap voice calling an messaging but using Verizon’s near-ubiquitous CDMA 1X network rather than a VoIP connection. The two even hinted at bigger plans for the future as VZW’s 4G long-term evolution network is deployed and its FiOS network opens to new applications.

Using an application co-developed by Skype and Verizon, smartphone customers will be able to make and receive unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls and dial out to local and international landlines or wireless numbers using regular Skype Out calling rates. The calls, however, will traverse VZW’s 1X voice network where they’ll be switched as normal phone calls in the core and handed off to the Skype VoIP network. Verizon, however, will still require all Skype users to have a data plan, which will be used for IM and presence features also being introduced at launch.

In 2007, Skype and Verizon were at odds over open access, which Skype and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) lobbied hard to become a requirement on VZW’s 700 MHz spectrum. Though Verizon lost the battle, it played the gracious loser, promising to work closely with its former opponents on open network development. Verizon Wireless didn’t just make nice with Google; last year it announced a partnership with the Internet giant to work on services and platform development, a direct result of which was the Droid phone. Now it appears to be doing the same with Skype. Rather than merely cooperating with the VoIP calling provider, Verizon is partnering with it, though the two wouldn’t reveal any details of their business relationship.

Skype CEO Josh Silverman said he felt the partnership with Verizon was perfectly natural, given Skype’s recent strategy of pushing further and further into operators’ networks. “By working with Verizon we can offer a service that is second to none,” Silverman said. By embedding Skype until the mobile network proper, the use cases for Skype balloon as the user is no longer dependent on a PC or a WiFi connection. “Suddenly inbound becomes very possible because I’m not tethered to a PC anymore.”

As for where the partnership will eventually lead, VZW executive vice president John Stratton told a crowded press conference to “close your eyes and imagine.” Fielding questions about whether an all VoIP-version of Skype would be used on long-term evolution devices before VZW launches its own VoIP service, or whether Skype could be integrated with FiOS IPTV for in-home video conferencing, Stratton refused to offer specifics, but he said there would definitely be much more to the partnership than what was announced today.

“There will be an array of services we’ll announce at launch, and we hope to have some very exciting things to announce with our partners at Skype at that time,” Stratton said.