You are right that skype just works, and this is a big win. Ekiga in some cases does not work, either because some structural limitations, or because of bugs. We are trying to fix the latter ones.
If you wish help, just tell what you have tried and what does not work.
Ekiga "just works" when NAT and firewalls get out of the way. In the
real world, it "just works" when there is a NAT aware VOIP service or
SIP proxy as an intermediary. Ekiga.net does not qualify - it just acts
as a broker for nodes to find each other. Ekiga "just works" with
diamondcard.us, nextiva.com, and other commercial VOIP services, without
any special firewall setup. This is because ekiga is connecting
to the service, instead of another node behind NAT.
The problems people have are mostly with peer to peer operation, since
both parties are typically behind NAT.
There are two or three things that can solve this problem for ekiga:
1) Easy to deploy asterix server to use as a SIP proxy - acting like
the commercial services. (It could be a commercial service - someone
has to pay for the bandwidth.)
2) Support IAX protocol in ekiga. IAX combines all the UDP ports used
in SIP and RTP into one UDP port, with a virtual port field in each
packet. This would give ekiga essentially the same plug&play peer
functionality of skype (without the monstrous security risk).
3) Support IP6 in ekiga. IP6 eliminates the NAT issues. There will
still be firewall issues, however both Windows and Linux support
dynamically updating the firewall (e.g. firewalld in Fedora), so
ekiga could automate that for the end user.
Today, ekiga works well as an open source client for a wide variety of commercial VOIP services. The company I used to work for replaced
phones with SIP service (aptela, then nextiva when new owners broke aptela) years ago. This gives you a number of clients (including
ekiga), and a number of competing services to chose from.
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