[Asterisk-Users] asterisk and skype - asterisk newbie

[Alejandro Vargas]

2006/3/17, adriano ghezzi <adriano.ghezzi at gmail.com>:
> Hi all, I just set up a small asterisk box at home and it works as expected,
> I have some relatives in USA, I usually use skype to speak to them, is there
> anyway to connect skype and asterisk.
>
> I'd like to use skpe as an extension or a channel with asterisk.
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

There are various alternatives... but I think none of them will be
good for you. The problem is skype is the only one (and there are many
of them) that is incompatible with all others.

1) Tell your friends to use another voip system. There ara many of
them: free world dialup, sipdiscount, voipbuster, voipjet,
internetcalls, and some free (gpl) ones like ekiga. All of them can be
accessed from other voip software like Asterisk.

2) You can hack the protocol and codecs of skype and make a channel...
and some method of translation for the names to numbers in order to
allow regular phones to dial to skype users.

3) You can make a program that uses the skype api and act as an iax
device. The problem of this is to have to mantein running a copy of
skype, that requires a graphics screen... it could be run under a fake
X server and I think it could be run many copies of skype in fake X
servers in order to allow to mantain more than one conversation (using
various skype ids).

4) you can buy psgw. It is the easyest but uglier option. It runs only
in windows, and then require to use a windows machine as helper for
this connections. Obviously it should be dedicated (no users in it) in
order to reduce system faults. It runs using the skype api, then
another con is that in windows probably you will not be able to run
more than one copy of skype and you only will be able to mantain only
one conversation at a time.

--
Alejandro Vargas