Hooking up Skype to Asterisk via SIP

So far, the success of Skype within their walled garden of VoIP has been quite impressive. One of the more interesting things I've learned from my travels is that Skype is extremely popular in Asia (at least outside of Japan) so much that in many places, "Skype" is synonymous with "VoIP." However, there is benefit in using a standards-based approach, especially if that helps us to integrate Skype's network in with the rest of the telephone network. This has long been a point of interest; Stuart Henshall wrote about Skype/SIP interactions more than a year and a half ago.

I've spent a good bit of my free time in the last month investigating three small-scale Skype to SIP integration packages. You can read the details at the link. Of the three that I looked at, ChanSkype was the most promising. It had a complex setup, but by far the best sound quality and it was also the easiest to integrate into the dialplan. A new version was released last week, but I haven't been able to try it yet. Stay tuned...