November 30th, 2007........Is SIP dead?

OK, so Skype has 95% of the world's Internet telephony (See earlier article). Let's accept the statistic as a given, and that Skype is a low-cost provider of VOIP as a result of "stealing" bandwidth, skimping on customer service, and being incredibly slow to implement new features. Finally, let's note that to date Skype appears to be barely profitable... so how can we ever expect Skype's competitors, using SIP (there are many), to ever be profitable? Answer: We can't. The promise of SIP, which is to bring open and universal standards to Internet telephony, are unachievable. Economics has gotten in the way. For all it's problems, Skype is the only viable "standard" and we'll all just have to get used to that fact.