Some good VoIP financial analysis from Forbes. A summary of Merrill Lynch comments and more can be fount in this article which I pretty much agree with. Excerpt:

After an "eventful week" in Voice over Internet Protocol, Merrill Lynch analyst Glen Campbell concluded "we continue to believe that VoIP, particularly with the portals and Skype now competing for leadership, will separate the access and applications businesses over time."

EBay completed the acquisition of Skype in October.

Last week, "Google launched its mobile e-mail service in the U.S. and entered exclusive negotiations with Time Warner for a 5% stake in AOL," the analyst said in a report.

"While there are many reasons for Google to court AOL, an important implication is that Google might pull AOL, with its huge instant-message user base, out of the Microsoft Yahoo! orbit in favor of its open-standards approach," said Campbell. "Communications applications (instant messaging in particular) have enormous network effects. The established portals and Skype use proprietary protocols for voice communications and have an important head start; Google is playing catch-up very aggressively, it appears," he said.