We’re not too big a fans of Skype around here, but every once in a while a customer will ask us if her new IP PBX will allow her to perform calls to the Skype network.  We then dutyfully explain her why that is not possible.  So yes, even though I don’t necessarily have to like it myself, some customers would be very happy to see a Skype channel added to Asterisk and therefore Sipcat.

At the eComm conference in San Francisco last week, Digium’s Mark Spencer talked about the upcoming Skype channel for Asterisk.  For now, the channel is available in close beta, but Spencer expects the beta to open up “very soon”.  This doesn’t mean it will be ready very soon, but at least we’ll be able to get our hands on it and try it out.

It looks like your Skype account will have to be registed in Skype’s new Business Control Panel – which basically allows you to aggregate the different Skype accounts used in your company and distribute credit to them – but there doesn’t seem to be an extra charge for that.  Also interesting, is that the new channel will allow access to a lot of Skype-specific variables, such as: skype_birthday, skype_gender, skype_country, etc.

Read the full interview here

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 12:51 CET and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.