Voip Comparison

Are voip phones and skype phones interchangable (same thing?)?

Public Comments

1. The answer is: it depends on what type of VoIP phone you are talking about. Skype uses a proprietary protocol that is usually not supported by the actual hardware IP Phones. What you see advertized as a Skype phone is essentially a (mostly) USB sound card with built-in microphone and speaker that resembles a phone handset in its handling. The actual voice compression, establishing call and other functions are implemented in Skype client software running on your PC. If the Skype phone you see advertised is this kind, then it will also work perfectly with other software VoIP phones, both vendor proprietary and standard such as SIP. It is concievable that Skype will eventualy become more common on hardware phones (only three models are avaialbe at this time from Linksys, Belkin and Netgear to the best of my knowledge). These hardware Skype phones will not be compatible with the rest of the VoIP services (unless you can run two versions of internal software in the future) but for the time being you can almost always assume that a Skype phone means USB soundcard in a shape of a phone, and that type will work just fine with other VoIP services.