Any idea why Skype does not provide any official means to call skype accounts from a SIP connection? Even a paid interface is not available.
The only thing that is available is a paid service where you can call phone numbers from Skype to your SIP trunk<p>so, there's a huge world of SIP telephony, and another huge world of Skype users. And they don't talk to each other.<p>I'm not considering dirty hacks which bind Asterisk or FreeSWITCH with a Skype GUI client installed on the same machine.
The purpose of Skype is to have a monopoly on the namespace and interop threatens that. Realistically, don't most people use SIP with phones that can only dial numbers?
Who would make money if this existed? Who would lose money? I have a hard time articulating a concrete benefit for Microsoft that would result from a gateway.
>so, there's a huge world of SIP telephony, and another huge world of Skype users. And they don't talk to each other.<p>They do talk to each other, users pay for the privilege.<p>Think of it as a win/win for skype/sip providers. Just not a win for the users.
There's an online service called Blue Jeans Network that lets you have a conference call with Skype, H.323, Google Talk, and Microsoft Lync participants.<p><a href="http://bluejeans.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bluejeans.com/</a>
Here's a link for the hack you mentioned: <a href="http://www.personal.psu.edu/wcs131/blogs/psuvoip/2011/12/skype_for_asterisk_the_hard_way.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.personal.psu.edu/wcs131/blogs/psuvoip/2011/12/sky...</a>
"Still no"?<p>There was "Skype for Asterisk" for a long time, and unsurprisingly it's the first hit on Google. It was killed shortly after MS bought Skype. Life is hard when you buy into proprietary protocols.
So... Skype launched their official SIP service years ago. It is called Skype Connect. They wouldn't provide a gateway because that would cannibalize their low cost SIP trunking service. See <a href="http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/business/skype-connect/" rel="nofollow">http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/business/skype-connect/</a>
It is complex to fully reverse engineer Skype: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_protocol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_protocol</a>