The PhoneGnome idea is mildly interesting except for the fact that (1) you need some kind of hardware apparently and (2) it would be PhoneGnome-proprietary. I am sure if you changed the name of PhoneGnome to Cisco and Skype to Microsoft, many people would no longer be so enthusiastic. What leads you to believe that these companies will be any more open than others?
Pulver's .tel TLD proposal was interesting but ultimately failed. Carrier ENUM appears to be an open solution using an existing TLD. If an organization has phone numbers (from Vonage, to enterprises, to traditional carriers) then they should be able to participate and find a way to route VoIP calls over IP all the way. Without it, we have PSTN-imitation-VoIP where it is only IP-based on the access network and we connect to the regular old circuit-based PSTN to actually terminate calls (the old fashioned way). (Yes, Skype is different.)
Posted by VoIP Dude at August 8, 2005 12:46 PM