You did it with Google voice. The obvious next gateway to bridge is to do the something with Skype. Giving the Obi unit the ability to bridge both Google voice and Skype as voip gateways would make the product very unique. Google Voice has a large user base in the USA, Skype has a large user base internationally. The unit is becoming very interesting. Keep up the good work.
On different forums, others have asked for this feature as well as support to connect to Skype API via USB to PC (with Skype client running on a computer).
There is an open source SIP to Skype gateway. http://www.mhspot.com/sts/siptosis.html. I don't know if the software people at the Obi central can find a way to integrate this. I think this is what they use to integrate Skype over at PBX in a flash version of Asterisk.
Where have you seen this discusiion?
Believe me, it is a pain in the Asterisk to get Skype working with FreePBX. You can always buy the official channel driver from Digium but that costs something like $66 for a SINGLE CHANNEL - would you want $66 added to the cost of an OBi just to support Skype? I wouldn't. Then there is the backdoor method, which essentially means you have to have a Skype client running on your Asterisk server and do some audio routing tricks to make it work (and it won't work on a computer that doesn't have built-in audio). Not only is the audio quality a bit marginal but if your server is not behind a NAT firewall you never know when it will be appropriated by Skype as a "supernode." I actually set this up on our server once (following these instructions (http://www.freepbx.org/support/documentation/howtos/how-to-set-up-a-skype-gateway)) because it seemed like a neat idea, but nobody really used it, and I didn't like the idea that it was using an unknown amount of bandwidth, so I wound up pulling it down.
I think you can buy Skype-approved devices that allow you to connect a regular phone, so you could always get one of those and connect it to the Line port on an OBi110. As far as I can tell the only advantage that Skype gives you is higher quality audio (and sometimes I do sort of wish that devices like the OBi110 had a high quality audio option, perhaps using the G.722 codec (or maybe something better, if it exists), because while many naysayers claim that corded phones won't support higher quality audio I don't think that's always true. It would be interesting if OBiTALK network calls had high-quality audio support, at least). But in the end I'd rather see us bring Skype users over to standards-based devices and services like the OBiTALK network, rather than seeing the OBi devices try to accommodate closed, proprietary systems that would likely drive up the cost of the devices.
Now, if there was a way it could be done without increasing the cost of the devices or having to pay royalties to Skype, I'd be much more enthused about the idea.
The most economic ways to have skype support is routed through a linux asterisk server and siptosis http://www.mhspot.com/sts/siptosis.html. The latter is a great software allowing one to connect skype to sip and the other way round.
Works very well indeed.
Forum member shap explains how to connect the OBi with Skype using SIPToSis as a gateway.
http://www.obitalk.com/forum/index.php?topic=701.msg0;topicseen#new