The world ain't fair.

Wealth is unevenly distributed, and economic mobility isn't even close to a norm. A drive west from Lake Michigan down Chicago Avenue for an hour makes that clear.

You see the same thing in Skypeland.

The millions of dollars that Skype helps keep in caller pockets? Most of that is middle and upper class money. The savings go to those with midband connectivity, with the disposable income to pay monthly what others call a day's take-home pay. Or a week's. Or longer.

The DSL or cable buy-in to the always-on Internet remains too steep or unavailable, even in the United States. Water, electricity, telephony, sewage, public safety, public health, courts, voting. It must be a mandate to add the fast net to universal access.

That's a dream of mine. Guaranteeing access to the net to everyone everywhere.

Everyone has dreams.

Many are dashed. Some don't know it. Denial for others.

Take SIP's dream. (If you're not from Planet Voipon, SIP is a telecom standard that tells software how to act like a phone network.) SIP's vision is profound and beautiful. A world without centers, where anyone can plug in to the network the way people plug in to email. Telephony as free as your Internet connection.

SIPsters don't have momentum; it's more like the inertia of the desperate who haven't an alternative. Thousands continue to invest fates and fortunes on SIP's promise. Slow to pay out, SIP now finds itself growing but eclipsed by Skype's breathtaking J curve and flashy consumer acceptance.

Many SIP evangelists are working themselves up to condescending that the Skype-thing exists, is popular with consumers in a fad sorta way, and doesn't completely suck as a product. But Skype is so closed and proprietary and consumerish and otherwise icky that the future still lies with SIP.

And they may be right.

Nobody guarantees Skype's survival or ubiquity. But there are few serious rivals and Skype continues to raise the cost of entry.

As it stands, SIP hasn't evolved much, either in specification or in practice. Why? I've heard some blame it on big telcos dragging feet, hesitant to obsolete product families. Others blame SIP never being implemented the same way twice. Or a standards process and body slow to embrace bold changes. May disparities between software and telco cultures be at fault?

Assume Skype will keep evolving quickly, serving 300 million users before 2008. How soon will the SIP community respond to the competition? Will they act effectively? With a potent vision? With specs that everyone will embrace and stick to? We'll see. The recent P2P SIP meeting holds promise.

I had a comforting reality check over breakfast with family still in town post-wedding. Nobody there ever heard of Skype, VoIP, SIP or anything like it. The same look they gave when I mentioned blogs at another wedding in 1999, the Internet in 1993, DARPAnet in 1979. Tolerant, loving, bemused, and not the least interested.