Finally there is a relatively easy way to bridge SIP and Skype, as described by Michael Graves in his blog post: Graves On SOHO VoIP » Peace In VoIPland: Bridging the SIP & Skype Kingdoms
But, is it too little too late? I share the sentiment that Michael expresses:
I must admit that upon hearing the announcement of Skype For Asterisk I was caught up in the burst of enthusiasm of the Asterisk user community. As time passed I found myself wondering why. In truth I have little use for such a gateway today. I had more application for it 18-24 months ago, when many of my UK associates were making daily use of Skype. More recently we only use Skype for IM.
This is the problem with proprietary protocols – Skype originally generated great enthusiasm in part because of their use of a wideband codec that yielded much better sound quality, but they refused to share or (as far as I know) even license their codec, so the VoIP world forged ahead and developed other wideband codecs – some open-source, some not. These are just starting to be used in Asterisk and VoIP phones, but they are available now to those who really want to use them.
For years I’ve held the opinion that any communications system that relies on computers being online is doomed to limited acceptance. Most people do not want to have to depend on a computer, especially a computer running Windows, for their essential telephone service. Many people don’t leave their computers running 24/7 (though that may change as new, low-power computers gain greater acceptance) and even those that do know that sometimes computers need to be rebooted or are otherwise offline. If your phone service depends on a computer being online, you’d better hope Widows hasn’t put up a “blue screen of death”, or that your non-windows system isn’t having a kernal panic or some such problem, when an important call comes in.
The Skype folks could have come out with their own ATA-type devices, that plugged directly into a network connection. Instead, the first hardware devices plugged into a USB jack. That is the worst of all worlds – not only do you not get the wide bandwidth (due to the limitations of most of the phones out there now) but you still need the running computer!
Understand, I’m not saying that Skype is going away anytime soon, just that it had its day in the sun, and to paraphrase the old saying, failed to make hay while the sun was shining. Many of the techie-types that would have been enthusiastic about the possibilities for bridging Skype and SIP a year or two ago are only sort of ho-hum about it now. We see things like the Nerd Vittles article on building your own Skype gateway to Asterisk and our first thought is, “Wow, this is great, it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to do” – and then the realization sets in that yes, you really DID want to do it, but the enthusiasm for that project has long since waned. More than likely you’ve long since figured out other ways to communicate with your Skype-using friends.
Let this be a lesson going forward – when you make something proprietary and then restrict the way it can be used, you are guaranteeing limited acceptance. Possibly the most popular proprietary software that I would place in this category is OS X (the Apple Macintosh operating system). The thing about OS X is that it’s not only proprietary and not open source (after all, the same is true of Windows) but they also restrict how it can be used (only on Apple hardware, unless one goes to extraordinary and possibly illegal lengths to circumvent that restriction). The most generous estimates I’ve seen show that OS X runs on slightly more than 10% of the computers out there – definitely limited acceptance (and before someone points out that Linux is open source AND freely available and has a much lower percentage, I will just point out that most Linux usage probably isn’t recorded anywhere – since Linux is freely available, you can’t look at sales figures or other normal indicators to accurately gauge its acceptance – and also that in the past Linux has had some serious usability issues that have caused Windows users to shy away from switching, but that’s another subject, possibly for another post someday).
Please don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the efforts of the Nerd Vittles folks, and I’m happy that they finally managed to make this work reasonably well. I’m sure some people will still find it genuinely useful. I just sort of wish that the Skype people had been more open from the get-go so that it would not have taken this long for someone to finally develop something like this.
Edit (March 3, 2009): My opinion of Skype has just gone up several notches – see my newer post, The true beginning of wideband telephony adoption? Now that they are going to make the SILK speech codec available for a royalty free license by third-party software and hardware developers, I think this just might reinvigorate interest in Skype – time will tell. Also, since I wrote this article, there has been additional information published on how to set up a Skype gateway for FreePBX users, so the barriers between Skype and SIP are in fact coming down.
