Your point that hardware Skype gateways are expensive confirms what I’m saying – such gateways are expensive because they all have to be hacks, "tricking" Skype into doing something it doesn’t really want to do (that’s what makes them expensive) and that’s why we don’t see hosted services employing such gateways for Skype, which is what I said in the first place.

The Sip to Skype hardware gateways out there are expensive. You might as weel leave a computer on all the time.

SippySkype is an example of the kinds of what I speak about, of coercing a GUI app (Skype) to act like a gateway/server – a cool hack, but people want a service for it, not to dedicate a computer runnigng Skype to this task.

http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2008/01/skype-says-no-t.html

I was pleased to see Jonathan Christensen from Skype talk about the benefits of SIP in his recent interview for EComm 2008:

http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2008/02/the-ecomm-2008.html

In that interview, he talks about how "walled gardens won’t survive" which is rather interesting given Skype’s continuing lack of interoperability.

It’s very clear that pieces of the *infrastructure* are there to do SIP-to-Skype interop. As Christensen says in the interview, Skype is a huge user of SIP connections. They just need to figure out how to make that connectivity available to users.

i am not going to point at any specific companies; but i can tell you from experience they are not always so willing to admit that the audio and/or connection problems customers suddenly start to havce are a result of the elimination of there servers.

there are significant advatages to both direct peer2peer connections and proxied connections. it would be nice if as consumers we could ask our services providers how calls are proccessed. many VOIP companies do not answer that question when asked.