As an engineer in telephony I get to work with VoIP calls a lot.
The Skype solution is truly great.
I've been using Skype-Out several times now to place calls from the Netherlands to Norway and New Zealand.
These calls we're all great and without noticeable problems.

This brought me up to the idea of creating/buying a gateway for Skype for corperate companies.
The idea is an Hardware solution with at one end has an standard telephone connector (POTS or ISDN) and on the other end a LAN connector to connect to the internet.

Using the LCR functionality (Least Cost Routing) of the corperate PBX, calls from employees to countries abroad can be automaticly placed over the internet using Skype technology!

Hardware like this would definitly sell..

So is there anyone working on this yet???

Any luck so far? I guess CISCO has some HW, but the specs are too technical for me.

Yes. PCPhoneline.com have a Skype VTA1000 gateway you may now order which also supports SIP. I am testing one at the moment and it works really well.

You can connect the VTA1000 to a regular PBX extension using a VPC1000 so anybody behind the PBX can place Skype calls from their regular extension phones. You could also enable calls in the opposite direction which means a Skype caller would get dialtone directly from the PBX and could reach anybody on the PBX by simply dialing their extension.

I had the same question. Look here:
http://forum.skype.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=9246


/Skunk

This already exists with Asterisk and many gateway providers that exist (link). You can even do this with hardware in your Cisco or Avaya PBXs.

The Skype compliant IP-Phone and ATA products I have been beta testing allow Skype access from PBXs and also from mobile phones.

I just checked and they are now available online at http://www.pcphoneline.com/skype .