I'm an idiot

[mdlbear]

I've just been reading a couple of articles in Infoworld about VoIP and Asterisk, and thinking how convenient it would have been to have had a VoIP connection between the Starport in San Jose and selkit's apartment in Vancouver while he was visiting. Could have saved quite a bit on long distance charges.

Sure, he and the Wolfling can use voice chat or Skype while they're apart, but I'm thinking more in terms of using it more as a cross-border bridge between the two landlines.

Aside to selkit -- check out Asterisk and the voip-info.org wiki.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Let me know what you guys end up setting up... seeing as we both run the same general variety of distro, it might be useful. (I've got Speakeasy's very fine hardware DSL, which gets me no-marginal-cost long distance to 23 countries... but being able to go voice from one's laptop wherever there's a coffeehouse hotspot would be useful in certain circumstances... )

That's right. Asterisk *is* a Virtual PBX. *far* too useful. Definitely got my interest piqued.

Cute icon, too.

[mdlbear]

Stole the icon from the Asterisk website.

Even with only a landline connection and a limited number of extensions, Asterisk is useful as a glorified answering machine and voice-mail message center. And it even emails your messages to you.

I was all set to install it when I got an offer from the phone company for a plan with unlimited US long distance, and decided to devote more of my attention to other projects. Like the CD. But I have more motivation now.

[chaoswolf]

I have been training him to use Gizmo. We've managed to get it working on my mac, as I still don't have a decent mic for my PC.

[mdlbear]

I'll try to remember to bring one home from work. I have one that I'm not using.

The advantage of Asterisk is that we could use two * systems as a bridge to the phone network on the other side of the border. So you could make a call from the house, route it over the internet to Selkit's system, and from there to the Canadian phone system. Or vice versa.