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Help me: I’m lost in a maze of technical terms, all hauntingly similar. For example, CDMA, the Qualcomm standard for mobile phones – is this an industry standard, or a proprietary protocol?

Yes, I think it matters: and the context is (once again!) skype. Or rather, a “potential Skype-killer” – the gizmo Project. You know – voice over IP, or VoIP.

Personally, I’m pretty cynical about Skype killers, because they all seem to be yet another SIP phone network. My view about SIP is that if any product based on session initiation protocol was about to become a rival to Skype, it would be Pulver’s pioneering Real World Dialup. Frankly, every day I have to delete half a dozen proud boasts forecasting world Domination by yet another SIP based solution. Meanwhile Skype closes in on 200 million downloads.

So the question which is really worrying the SIP fans is whether you have to be an open industry standard to succeed. Their logic is that no serious players will tie themselves to a standard that someone else controls. And my question is: why have all the European telcos tied themselves to wideband CDMA, or 3G protocols, when they are controlled by Qualcomm?