Skype expands business internet telephone service offering

Perhaps eBay is having a change of heart. After all, if you can't get out of it, get into it. The company's Skype division announced its support for SIP, the technical standard in use by millions of internet phone users in global businesses. With this new support, Skype radically expands its potential infiltration into the standard for Voice-over-IP in addition to its hugely-popular (but proprietary) VoIP service that ties its customers to actually using the Skype product to make and receive calls.

So now, customers can use Skype from most SIP-compliant systems to call out to global fixed or mobile telephones and those same customers can call into millions of phone systems using the Skype software they already use. No need to have a "Skype-to-Skype" phone call or conference -- now, Skype users can interact with the non-Skype business universe. This is significant because it expands Skype's presence into more direct competition with established telephone carriers around the world -- something that has made century-old telcos nervous ever since Skype was invented less than 10 years ago.