Re: Skype?

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 07:24:30AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> I know this is a bit OT, but can somebody explain to me the allure of
> Skype when there is a huge SIP community, with soft phones, hard phones,
> and even the asterisk PBX in Linux?

Asterisk PBX is for running real phone systems (not VoIP) over T1/E1
(24/32 voice channels) and analog phone lines.  It does extensions and
voicemail and all that other good stuff you would want in an office
phone system for thousands less than nortel and company charge while
being easier to configure (it would be hard to make things harder to
configure than a nortel BCM).

skype and other VoIP systems are for making phone calls over the
internet to other VoIP users, and on some systems (I believe skype is
one of them) it also deals with transfering the call to a normal
telephone and vice versa.  I am pretty sure asterisk also allows for
VoIP but that is certainly not its main purpose.

Len Sorensen