.tel is just yet another first-in-best-dressed top-level domain. Sure, if I manage to score scotthoward.tel then it's going to make me easy to find, but what about the thousands of other Scott Howards out there?
It certainly does seem that skype has captured the vast majority of
voip end users, so I don't think there's much point trying to
recapture them with something else. They just won't understand if it's
harder than a couple of clicks.
So it needs to be made simple. Skype is NOT the answer to VOIP in any form as far as I'm concerned. It uses a proprietary protocol, and then routes your traffic via the systems of other Skype users (and of course thus also routes other peoples traffic via your system). Whilst this makes sense for P2P file transfer, it doesn't make any sense for comms.
VOIP/SIP is taking off in many different ways in many countries - and
the real win comes when it _is_ transparent to the end user. Vonage in
the US and and Engine/MyNetFone in Australia are examples of companies
that are doing this, and in fact Vonage don't even mention the word
"VOIP" on their TV ads - it's just "Phone Calls over your Broadband
connection". Add in all the companies that are starting to deply the VOIP capabilities that already exist in their phone systems, plus all of the telco's who are using VOIP behind the scenes (eg, Gizmo5 allows you to reach around 11% of all US phone numbers for free via VOIP) and you're starting to get a lot of worldwide SIP users!
Eventually something is going to be needed to allow for optimal routing between the multitude of VOIP providers - be that enum or something else...
Scott.