I have a completely different reason to be happy about Skype being ported to the N800: Skype works.

I suppose that most of you live in the US, and use the sip either at home or on Internet cafe. Under those conditions indeed sip works and is a better choice than skype.

Under other conditions, the view is quite different. For example, I have travelled in Asia, Australia and New Zealand lately. I thought I could use gizmo to phone back home on decent rate (just wifi access fees).

SIP is blocked in most hotspots. Purposefully. Wouldn't your know it: most hotspots in tourist places have been bought by telcos, and grouped in networks. And telcos don't like free competition... For example in New Zealand: you can get a card to use wifi in hotspots all around the country from NZ telecom. Not really cheap, but much cheaper than cellphone roaming charges. Except that you can't phone using SIP, because NZ telecom won't let you. And good luck trying to find an hotspot you could use outside of Auckland which is not operated by NZ telecom.

Hotels with wifi access are coming to the same conclusion: let people use their room phone instead. In all fairness, I sould say that if more than one customer starts to use SIP on the hotel router, things won't work very well. Anyway: bye, bye SIP.

It's not only NZ, you'll find the same story everywhere. For example, I live in Germany. T-online bought about all start-up wifi networks two years ago. Only Vodafone has a decent competing network. Both are telcos, say bye bye to sip. Skype works, and the reason it is not that easilly blocked is because the protocol is secret, of course. It's trivial to block an open protocol. As much as I like open source, I have to realise that this is a weakness here.


Now, talk about phoning at home, on you own router. Wouldn't you know it? Telcos have understood that SIP is competition, and they've found a very creative way to kill it. For example in France, everyone knowadays uses a "freebox". It's a wifi router you get from orange (ex France telecom). It comes with an "internet phone". Looks like a good offer.

Except that this "internet phone" is SIP, and orange won't let other SIP networks call their SIP phone for free. Except that this "internet phone" is SIP, and grabs the SIP ports (of course). Try to use SIP on a computer connected to the router, and it won't work (of course). It could work, if you are computer literate enough to let your SIP client use non-standard ports and to configure the router firewall accordingly. Most people don't know how to do that. Skype does that automatically.


Nokia had a brilliant idea with the 770 originally: make a wifi phone, using SIP. Except that roaming with SIP is less and less possible. Now they try Skype. I can understand that.