You win again.

You dont bring me flowers anymore ...

I have some pretty nightshade...

Well... I should say that I can understand your concerns.

If I can be of any help: I only know of ONE person who uses skype and many more who use SIP...

I don't really know anyone using SIP, although I know of a couple of folks that have tried it. Most use Skype. In other words, people's experiences will be different.

That been said, I agree totally with benny1967 about wishing for SIP interoperability support in Skype.

nice to know 100million people that use skype, unfortunately even though I have a very large network of friends, I only know 1 person that uses it, so I have about 10,000 reasons not to use it :-D unless of course Nokia wants to send me a bluetooth headset that actuallyworks with the n800 and a free calling plan to regular phones...

I find that using a wired headset works fine, though some people seem to find it technologically humiliating -- not cool enough.

I don't find $30 a year that oppressive, especially considering, for example, that many companies charge that much a month for wireless access at places such as Starbucks, or, if you don't want a month's worth, you can get it for $10 a day. Even Vonage costs about that much a month.

I think that all computer users everywhere have to realize that it costs money for some things.

BTW: How exactly would we push for "net neutrality" in places like Russia, where I lived for a few years, or China?

Also, true net neutrality seems to me to be hard to come by. When I lived in Russia, because of the nature of the building I was in, I had to use a dial-up. (Eventually I got a faster connection, but to do so I had to have a radio transmitter installed on top of my building, pay a $500 installation fee, and pay connection fees of approximately $100 a week if I carefully limited my connection and stayed away from Internet broadcasting.) So things were abysmally slow, though most Russians in big cities now have fairly easy access to faster networks. But we can't exactly legislate that users of Dial-up have as quick access as everyone else. And I have heard that scientists are working on a faster Internet, one that only scientists can use now. Shall we mandate that anyone can used the science Internet?

[net neutrality]
The way I see it it isn't as much about giving everybody equal bandwidth, for me the issue is along the following lines: Imagine you travel from hotel to hotel, and this hotel chain provides free wi-fi (or even pay wi-fi, but except for the more expensive US hotels it seems to be free most places now). You use Skype, or possibly Gizmo to communicate with your fellow humans.

Then one day the wi-fi operations in this hotel chain is bought out by a company that is also in the business of selling voip phone kits. The first thing they do is to block Gizmo and Skype. And oh, they sell email accounts to ("sign up for your account at shocksmock.com"!), so they also block access to gmail.com and yahoo. And so on. That's what seems to be happening certain places, to a bigger or lesser degree. This is something that must be stopped, and _now_, or it's too late.

Or you have a choice of 1 or 2 ISPs that will connect your home to the Internet, but lo and behold they both want to sell you their own VoIP so they too block Gizmo (they're not competent enough to block Skype, fortunately.. ). What are you to do?

I know a big telecom in India is trying to block Skype, and one of the larger ones in China (but not the one operating around Beijing, the last time I was there). Both do this because they're in the business of selling phone landlines. Tmobile appeared to be blocking access to my ssl-secured imap server (in a hotel where I had to buy access), at least that was the only hotel (I visited many the last few weeks) where this was a problem.

There's another kind of net neutrality that's up in the news these days, where telecoms want Google and other popular sites to pay lots of money to the telcos. This is also important stuff, although not of direct consequence to us end-users, at least right away. (The blocking described above is quite immediate!) But that to will kill us somewhen in the future, when only the big and rich information providers can get access to a full-bandwidth pipe, and the small ones can't. Then only the rich ones will be left, say goodbye to popular but poor blog sites, for example. I suspect that even some of the rich ones will help fight this though, so for now as a layman I'll keep fighting the port blocking..

That number completely exaggerated. I have a few test accounts for skype as it takes only seconds to get them. They are all inactive, but count to the "100 million".

Last time I checked there were about 8 Million online users at Skype. Certainly impressive, but far away from the 100 mio.