What have I done?
2004-09-25 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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chaoswolf to Skype, that's what. Now I need to make sure that flower_cat's usual call targets are on it, and I should see our long distance bill decline abruptly.
Unfortunately, there isn't an Asterisk-to-skype gateway, otherwise I could integrate it with the regular phones. I'll install * (that's the usual shorthand for it, btw) in any case at some point, and use a VOIP provider for non-local calls.
VOIP, in case you've just landed on this planet, stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol (the link points to the main Wiki on the subject). Asterisk is an open-source (GPL) PBX (Private Branch Exchange) running on Linux. In addition to SIP, which is the usual VOIP protocol, it has its own protocol that's much more firewall-friendly; VOIP providers and hardware vendors are starting to support it.
The going rate for VOIP-to-POTS service seems to be $0.02 or so per minute (a fifth to a tenth of what a phone company usually charges), with unlimited plans running from $20-$40/month. Vonage, at $30 for unlimited US calling, is the best known, but seems to be on the high end of the price scale.
I'm not going to give up my POTS phone line -- in addition to having the number that everyone knows, it's the only way to get reliable 911 service, and it works when the power is out or the DSL line is down. With *, I won't have to: it'll happily route local calls to POTS and everything else to VOIP. The only real problems I foresee are the lack of a Skype gateway (Skype has its own, proprietary protocol) and the fact that I'll want an interface with automatic failover for power failures.
The motivation for this exercise is that I finally got it through my thick, lazy skull that our long-distance rates have gone through the ceiling over the course of the last year or so.
chaoswolf to Skype, that's what. Now I need to make sure that flower_cat's usual call targets are on it, and I should see our long distance bill decline abruptly.Unfortunately, there isn't an Asterisk-to-skype gateway, otherwise I could integrate it with the regular phones. I'll install * (that's the usual shorthand for it, btw) in any case at some point, and use a VOIP provider for non-local calls.
VOIP, in case you've just landed on this planet, stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol (the link points to the main Wiki on the subject). Asterisk is an open-source (GPL) PBX (Private Branch Exchange) running on Linux. In addition to SIP, which is the usual VOIP protocol, it has its own protocol that's much more firewall-friendly; VOIP providers and hardware vendors are starting to support it.
The going rate for VOIP-to-POTS service seems to be $0.02 or so per minute (a fifth to a tenth of what a phone company usually charges), with unlimited plans running from $20-$40/month. Vonage, at $30 for unlimited US calling, is the best known, but seems to be on the high end of the price scale.
I'm not going to give up my POTS phone line -- in addition to having the number that everyone knows, it's the only way to get reliable 911 service, and it works when the power is out or the DSL line is down. With *, I won't have to: it'll happily route local calls to POTS and everything else to VOIP. The only real problems I foresee are the lack of a Skype gateway (Skype has its own, proprietary protocol) and the fact that I'll want an interface with automatic failover for power failures.
The motivation for this exercise is that I finally got it through my thick, lazy skull that our long-distance rates have gone through the ceiling over the course of the last year or so.
