Now here’s an interesting piece of information. Skype has, as you may be aware of, become hugely popular and has a reported 521 million registered users. It turns out that that is enough to take a considerable chunk of change away from the traditional telephone companies, especially when it comes to those expensive international long-distance calls.

According to a new study by TeleGeography, worldwide international telephone traffic racked up 406 billion minutes of call time in 2009. Contrast this with international call traffic between Skype users (free over the Internet), which was 54 billion minutes, up from 33 billion minutes the previous year.

Now here comes the really amazing thing: If you count international calls between Skype users in with the overall international telephone calls, Skype’s share of the pie is almost 12%.

“The volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous,” says Stephan Beckert, a TeleGeography analyst. “Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far.”

And here is another kicker: Skype’s actual share is bound to be even higher than 12%.

Why? Because the numbers above only include calls between Skype users. They don’t include SkypeOut calls, Skype’s Internet-to-telephone pay option. For example, in Q3 2009, Skype had 3.1 billion minutes of SkypeOut calls. Not all will have been international calls, but it’s not an insignificant amount of calling time (12.4 billion minutes in a year).

You could argue that Skype’s incredible growth is a sign of what many have predicted for some time now; sooner or later all calls will be made over the Internet. It’s just a matter of time.

Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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