Skype Gets SIP

Big news in the Wall Street Journal (must be big!) - Skype gets SIP. Picked up on GigaOM, it looks as if the service is in limited Beta initially. Combined with OCS recent SIP capabilities and even Digium getting in on the game (i.e. count Asterisk in), that means Enterprise VoIP is getting even more an more interesting and multi-vendor.

However, it isn’t all that straight forward, as a comment on the GigaOM post notes:

“We are on the Beta for Skype-for-asterisk and I discussed the ‘new account’ thing with both Digium and Skype. Bassically the issue is that the EULA for existing skype users states that they may not tell 3rd parties their passwords. The way that the Skype-for-asterisk is constucted you _have_ to tell the PBX admin your skype user-id and password. That’s in direct conflict. So S4A users will have to agree to new terms whatever happens. To ’simplify’ the situation Skype have said that existing personal accounts will not be able migrate to the new user class.

This gives those of us who have our business names registered as skype ids a problem that we won’t be able to use them with S4A. (the VoIP user’s conference has call discussing this with me and Digium’s John Todd - (link) )” Tim Panton