One of the things one learns is that one can often be right without saying much. For months as the JoltID suit has been rearing its ugly head I’ve been saying Skype is a brand not a technology and they would simply go all SIP. That opens the door to a lot of potential moves, but one that makes total sense is buying Gizmo from Michael Robertson.
It makes sense because Gizmo works, but what really makes it interesting is how GoogleVoice already has a peering relationship with Gizmo ( a deal I helped broker two years ago when both were just simple startups per se)
The peering means if Skype goes with Gizmo as it’s SIP backend is that calls to and from GoogleVoice are FREE and the stay on-net, without ever touching the PSTN.
Unless I’m mistaken though, Gizmo isn’t P2P SIP, but just SIP, with of course the media path being P2P like all VOIP, and the Signaling being SIP.
Andy, if I’m not mistaken, most VoIP is not P2P at all — that’s part of what makes Skype different. I don’t think Skype will be able to quickly port an SIP application to its P2P network, but I could be mistaken. Regardless, I believe they have a tall order ahead of them.
The media path is P2P
I assume you mean for Gizmo. For most VoIP services, that is not the case.
I should clarify. VoIP is peer to peer in the sense that it is routed, like all IP traffic. However, most providers use their own network rather than an ad hoc network where the peers are users. The latter is what Skype does, but not what, say, Vonage does.
What Skype is trying to achieve by purchasing Gizmo sounds a bit complicated, and it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out. I’ve seen Gizmo referred to by other sources as a “partially scaled SIP P2P VoIP.” Regardless, the combination of Skype and Gizmo still requires a lot of underlying software support (in Gizmo’s case, Adobe Flash), and users will still need to download software to support SIP/P2P communications.