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Skype Courts Businesses With "Skype for SIP"
Skype has made a new foray into the business front with their announcement of "Skype for SIP." This allows businesses to migrate to Skype without having to move off of their old PBX systems. "Skype has long had a business unit, but that version of its service required computers and software, which is how most users make their Skype calls. With Skype for SIP the company seeks to lower the pain barrier by requiring no hardware installation whatsoever, and the re-configuration of a SIP-enabled PBX to an established codec that presumably is within the skillset of whoever maintains it already."
Just browse through their forums. Their support system is almost nonexistent. The Skype software also seems relatively buggy in my experience.
I have been trying to use both SkypeOut and SkypeIn as my primary phone for almost a year now. SkypeOut is pretty decent, it's really cheap on the subscription plans and it works well. SkypeIn has been a whole different story. It has been very unreliable. Often I miss calls as Skype sends them straight to voice mail (like I'm not logged in even though I am). When this happens there is no trace of anyone calling unless they leave a voice mail. I have to log out then log back in to get the SkypeIn number to start working again. Then just stops working again after a while. It is unusable in my opinion.
I still use SkypeOut but I use a regular SIP provider for incoming calls. I probably won't be using SkypeOut much longer though because there does not appear to be any way to set your caller ID number to anything other than a SkypeIn or cellphone and I want to set it to my SIP incoming number.
Don't feel bad. Your questions about Skype are all valid (I am a telephone / networking specialist) and have valid support from past headlines.
I think there's a lot of people here on /. that have a knee-jerk reaction to VoIP (it's 1337!!!!11) and can't stand to see someone ask the important questions behind the 'free' service.
I'm managing a VoIP system now (Asterisk) using a fractional T1, and can attest that there are issues with VoIP, and just running blindly toward it will cause pain. Keep asking those questions.
VoIP can be a fine system, but you must be aware of the issues and the compromises it brings. At this point, it's no better or worse than other phone options, just different. I hope that answers to your questions show up so that people can make an educated choice for their service options.
If you already have SIP infrastructure there are loads of companies competing for your business in SIP to POTS bridging
That's assuming the point of this is to bridge to the PSTN. Allowing SIP users to call Skype users (without going via the PSTN) would be beneficial for their customers. They don't make money from calls they aren't bridging to the PSTN, but retaining their customers means more people who might make use of the bridge.
Skype doesn't offer particularly good value for money
Nor do many very successful businesses - Skype have a big name for themselves, and this makes them the first choice for a lot of people who are too lazy to shop around for a good deal.
I often hear it commented that Skype is "easier" than SIP - this has very little to do with the protocol, and everything to do with the fact that the user doesn't have to exercise their brain and make a choice about which service provider to use. The sad thing is that when Skype give them a really sucky service (because they try to work around broken networks, with varying success, rather than forcing the user to fix it) the users conclude that "VoIP sucks", rather than "Skype sucks", and don't even bother looking at the alternatives.
its one advantage over SIP providers is that it is trivial to use from behind a NAT or a firewall, something that doesn't apply to a company that already has SIP deployed internally.
SIP is actually quite trivial to deploy through a stateful firewall and most NATs so long as *all* your calls are going through the NAT. STUN does, for the most part, tend to work reasonably. It isn't 100% reliable (as the STUN RFC admits), but it's pretty good and if it works for you once, it'll probably work for you every time. On the other hand, in cases where SIP won't work, Skype will do crazy stuff like silently tunnelling your voice over HTTP instead of making you fix your terminally broken network - this frequently leads to a crappy service with no real indication to the user that they could fix their network to make it better.
http://blog.nexusuk.org