Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is really coming of age. In the last year, I’ve experienced a marked shift of companies I do business with using the Asterisk open source PBX, many people and companies using the Skype PC-based system, and hardly anyone I know using SIPPhone or GizmoProject.

This post is about Gizmo and Skype specifically and what accelerates adoption and what doesn’t.

I love Gizmo. It sports a far superior and more intuitive interface than Skype; recording capability built right in to the software; and an open vs. a proprietary protocol (Skype’s is closed).

When I’ve been in spirited discussions about Skype’s superior peer-to-peer architecture over SIP’s point-to-point one, I’m interested…to a point. What I care most about is a system that provides significant cost reduction, new features and benefits along with my biggest hot button: double the call quality over landline-to-landline calling (8khz on phone lines vs. 16khz with VoIP approaches taken by Skype and Gizmo).

But I’m really wrestling with why I’d use Gizmo over Skype. I’m on the phone an average of 10 hours per week which is 520 hours a year or 31,200 minutes (I call both local and long distance in the US and in Canada to both mobile and landlines) and:

• I pay Skype $30 and have unlimited calling in the US and Canada for one year
• I’d pay Gizmo $624 for those same minutes at about two cents per minute.

The international rates are cheaper on Skype which hasn’t been a big deal for me since the people I talk to internationally are on Skype. To show you how little I’m using Gizmo and how Skype-oriented I’ve become, I still have over $8 of the Gizmo callout minutes I bought early last year and instead have paid the money for unlimited US and Canada calling ($29.95); purchased a SkypeIn phone number ($30); adapters, Wifi phones and other Skype stuff all because of no unlimited calling on Gizmo.

I *really* want Gizmo and SIP to succeed since it’s an open protocol and everyone can play in this sandbox with software and hardware. But just like the early days of paying by the megabyte for access to the Internet, it wasn’t until Earthlink had an all-you-can-eat for $19.95 per month that the doors blew off Internet use. I believe that’s what it’s going to take for Gizmo to get on the radar screen of users who are using Skype (Note: there are 8,692,139 online with Skype now which is nearly 3 million more than this time last year so it’s being adopted quickly).

Am I missing something? Should Gizmo immediately offer an unlimited $30 for an all-you-can-eat deal for calling in North America?