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http://www.freeworlddialup.com/ Gives anyone a free phone number forever, globally, and you can dial to and from most VOIP services.

It works great with any VOIP SW or HW or Asterisk for a fancy home answering machine.

If you need the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) world to call you, http://www.ipkall.com/ will give you a free Washington phone nuumber.

It just moves to VoIP, like everybody else: FWD 612

As the parent suggests, this is old news. These sorts of things have been around for a while, but they really were free before.

FreeWorldDialup used to sell a number of interesting hybrid phones including one that was a regular cell phone that, when in a free WiFi area, would route calls through your VOIP system instead of using the cellular network. I think you had to stay put through the duration of the call because there didn't seem to be any mechanism for switching between VOIP and cellular if you moved out of the WiFi coverage range.

One, interesting device they had was one that would allow you to route your VOIP calls through your cell phone. The idea was that some cell phone rate plans actually made it cheaper to use your cell minutes than your land line for long distance and various other types of calls, so you could just plug your cell phone into this base station and set you dial plan on your VOIP network to route calls to the device. So, you could pick up your SIP phone, dial a number which would route the call through your PBX to this device, which would use the cell phone to make the final connection.

I'm sure a little googling would reveal that these things are still out there even if FWD isn't selling them anymore.

The patents in question seem to have claim to have invented VOIP in 1999. However, the free world dialup project has been around since 1995. Also, back in 1998-1999 I remember Microsoft was offering free PC-Phone calls to the US using MSN Messenger. Their partner was charging for the same service. I think that would certainly qualify as prior art.

Anyone who has ever used Ekiga will never use Skype again. Ekiga is a VoIP client with video and IM capability, phone book, etc. and it has excellent sound quality. You can get the software here: http://ekiga.org/ and if you don't have a VoIP address yet you can get one here: http://ekiga.net/ or here: http://www.freeworlddialup.com/

Just so you know, I started with Skype, and it works just dandy. If it drains away my resources, I haven't noticed it. But, I've recently had the pleasure of installing asterisk at home, and it is the way to go! If you install and use Asterisk, you have the widest choice of phones (including soft phones) and VoIP endpoint providers, and you have the flexibility of changing your mind about any one of those choices at any time without disturbing the rest of the system. In my recent conversion, I converted the whole house to use Asterisk without changing any of our phones. My wife doesn't notice the difference - she just calls normally and it works. But, behind the scenes, I can selectively route different calls to different networks - hard wired or VoIP - to take advantage of whatever route I decide is the best. If any one of those routes starts to irritate me, I can change it without affecting the rest of the system. Try that with Skype.

Now, a common argument you might get against this approach is that it's unneccesarily complicated and requires a dedicated machine. Well, it may be partially true, in that it's more complicated than installing a single SIP or Skype phone or softphone, and the best (IMHO) approach for an install takes a surplus box; however, the TrixBox distribution gets you up and running awfully fast, and can be installed onto a crap machine (I'm using a celeron 500). Follow the How-To here. The flexibility is worth it. And, if you have a decent net connection and VoIP provider, the call quality even for VoIP is outstanding.

Other advantages are flexibility in call routing. I currently have a digium TDM400P card hooked up in my install, with one module hooked up to the phone line, and the other module hooked up to all my analog phones in the house. (I'll eventually replace some of the analog phones with some nice IP phones when I have the cash.) I could just as easily add SIP softphones connected to Asterisk, if I wanted, but normal phones seem more natural to me, and it's cheap to do with the TDM400P card. I have three inbound and outbound trunks set up, one using the land line, one using VoipJet for long distance over VoIP, and one for calls in from and out to the Free World Dialup SIP network. I have my dial plan set up as follows:

Any calls coming in from either my old PSTN landline or my Free World Dialup account are routed to my dialplan, which during the day (6AM to 11PM) rings the analog phones. If the caller is blocking caller id, it forces them to enter their phone number first before ringing the phones. At night, (currently defined as 11PM to 6AM) callers are sent to a VRU, which asks them to hang up if they're a phone solicitation, press 1 to actually call us, or 2 to send the call straight to voicemail without waking us up. In either case when it rings the phones, it will go to voicemail if we don't answer. That voicemail can be retrieved either by the phone, by secure web interface, or currently I also have it email me the wav file of the message.

For outgoing calls, I have it set like this: If you dial a seven digit number, a toll free number, 911, or use a 9 prefix before a long distance call (in case my network connection is down), it dials out through the land line. If you dial a long distance number normally (using just 1 + area code + number, or 011 + country code + international number), it routes it through the IAX2 trunk to VoipJet and saves us tons of money. If you dial a 8 or 393 prefix before the number, it assumes you want to call a FWD number, and routes it out the IAX2 trunk to FWD, which would be a direct SIP to SIP call for free.

In summary, it works awesome, and I had the whole thing working in a basic way (PSTN + analog phone + VoipJet trunk) in one Saturday morning. I had rerouted the whole house's phone system and revam

Of course these days it's pretty rare that the person you're calling does not also have a computer, so you could make a free point to point call with sip just as easily. You just need to know the IP address of the person you're calling, or they can get a free number for internet calls from Free World Dialup.

Last week I tried out the Beta in advance of the release of 2.0.0

Ekiga worked well for me with consumer/SOHO SIP providers FWD (http://www.freeworlddialup.com/ ) and Gradwell (http://www.gradwell.com/voip ) as well as http://www.ekiga.net./ I imagine the final version will work fine with http://www.speakeasy.net/home/voip/ but I can't be certain as Speakeasy don't mention on their site what technology they use, or if they will tell you your VoIP username and password. I don't know how their 'Remote Office' private WAN works.

Why not try it and let the world know on the Ekiga mailing list http://www.ekiga.org/index.php?rub=8

One alternative is to get Speakeasy at home, and a low cost SIP account for the laptop (you can get a free Washington State number from ipkall, and there are many other low cost SIP options.) Configure your speakeasy account to forward your calls to your laptop while you are away. Ekiga will work fine on the laptop.

Stick to open source telephony. Asterisk makes an excellent enterprise grade open-source PBX for the back end. For the end user, Free World Dialup offers a SIP compatible service with a free downloadable client that does not limit you like this.

While there certainly are the Vonages of the world, there are far more VoIP services that permit you to connect any phone you like.

Once Google Talk offers their service via SIP and most importantly allows federation with others, they will become the glue that binds together all the currently fragmented voip offerings. Providers that don't want to open up and federate with Google will slowly dissappear. After all it won't be long and most the people that you talk to will not be on landlines, but IP only, and you therefore don't want a provider that is not connected.

If I was an incumbent telco in any part of the world, I would be scared, I would probably try dirty games such as providing restricted internet access with SIP traffic filtered out.

This is clearly a free (and branded) version of eyeBeam from Xten (link) now known as CounterPath. Therefore my guess is that it's a service pretty similar to Free World Dialup (link) but with video (not sure if FWD support video).

Pulver Innovations had a WiSIP phone that would connect over your LAN to act as a standard SIP phone, which you could use, for example, with Free World Dialup or asterisk@home. Unfortunately, as one article points out, most WiFi hot spots don't co-operate and the the phone connect, so it has some major limitations. Even Pulver doesn't push it anymore... I had a tough time finding a link to it on any of their sites.

They also had a gadget that you could plug a cell phone into that would allow you to preferentially use the cell phone's free minutes for long distance calls from your VOIP system. Since most cell phones come with a huge number of free long distance minutes, it might be worth the lower quality to some, but I can't even find a link to it any more :(

FreeWorldDialup already has a free service that supports all sorts of existing standards. If you want to use a difficult to set-up SIP phone you can, but they also have an, apparently, brain-dead-easy Pulver Communicator for those who don't want to deal with the hassles. They also have a small set of pre-configured SIP phones and even sell pre-configured hard phones. The only thing they don't have is a huge marketing push to skype... err.. hype this service.

I prefer FreeWorld Dialup as a great way to go for voip:
 
- standards based
- Free
- Windows , Linux and pocketpc clients available
- Call 800 numbers and more
- Call to/from vonage customers
- get free phone number and have people call you
- Get a wisip phone (WiFi SIP) and you have the closest thing to a IP mobile phone you can get.
 
  FreeWorld Dialup

I prefer FreeWorld Dialup as a great way to go for voip:
 
- standards based
- Free
- Windows , Linux and pocketpc clients available
- Call 800 numbers and more
- Call to/from vonage customers
- get free phone number and have people call you
- Get a wisip phone (WiFi SIP) and you have the closest thing to a IP mobile phone you can get.
 
  FreeWorld Dialup

Jeff Pulvers Free World Dialup came before skype, does what skype does AND will forward your calls to your asterisk server using the IAX protocol.

For that reason I will be using FWD and cannmot use skype. FWD is not open as much as I would like, but I least I don't have to use their client software to take a call.

I don't know if IAX will let you originate an FWD terminating call.

Sam

FreeWorldDialup has been doing pretty much the same thing for years now. They even have their own pre-configured software. If you don't like the Pulver Communicator you can always get one of half a dozen other SIP phones (soft or otherwise) that work with the service. They even offer a pre-configured version of The SJPhone, which is essentially what the Gizmo folks are offering. If you want a dial-out service FWD offers a choice of affiliates who can give you that portion a-la-carte!

So, why would you want to use Gizmo?

You could buy a box like SPA-1001 sign up for FreeworldDialup and have the same thing. Plus you can enable IP dialing if you so wish.

I have one of these devices at my house connected to Freeworlddialup. My sister that is away at college calls from her dorm room with her computer using a Softphone. It works pretty good.

Nice SIP exchange and client so that someone can call me with my yahoo email address (Sorta like FWD plus vonage) . Its gonna happen very soon with one of the big players as they have the country presences.

Maybe FWD, Vonage, Yahoo and Google could co-operate? (..hey a flying pig!)

I use kphone with http://www.freeworlddialup.com to call my parent's VoIP phone (at least until this weekend when it didn't ring there and I only got the voice mail).

My solution is to just not run kphone unless I'm going to make a phone call. No one can possibly telemarket to me when I'm not running my SIP phone.

Can you do this outside the US or do you need a US billing address?

I live in Asia and I have a US number from Libretel. It costs me $6/month for unlimited incoming calls, and they can be routed to any SIP URL (a FWD number, your own Asterisk box, whatever). Saves my callers a bundle. All I needed was a valid credit card.

Asterisk is a soft PBX; normal people don't have PBXes, thus normal people would never install Asterisk.

If you want to call other people for free using the Internet standard SIP protocol, FWD provides some free, apparently easy-to-use software to do it. If you want to call real phones, several non-shady VoIP companies offer SIP softphones, although it looks like most people who are paying for SIP service prefer to have a hardware ATA.

One of the great features of FWD is you can call toll-free numbers in several countries for free, so I've been calling American Airlines's voice-recognition flight status system over and over again (DFW->Frankfurt at 8AM, Flight 73 arrival info).

The phone number for calling it from FWD is *18004337300, then 1, then 1.

First ever slashdotting of an airline reservation system?

As someone else mentioned - FreeWorld Dialup is a great way to go for voip:

- standards based
- Free
- Windows, Linux and pocketpc clients available
- Call 800 numbers and more
- Call to/from vonage customers
- get free phone number and have people call you
- Get a wisip phone (WiFi SIP) and you have the closest thing to a IP mobile phone you can get.

FreeWorld Dialup

I'm currently running windows and ipaq (pocketpc 2002) clients fine. And calling my home vonage service - no problem!

As someone else mentioned - FreeWorld Dialup is a great way to go for voip:

- standards based
- Free
- Windows, Linux and pocketpc clients available
- Call 800 numbers and more
- Call to/from vonage customers
- get free phone number and have people call you
- Get a wisip phone (WiFi SIP) and you have the closest thing to a IP mobile phone you can get.

FreeWorld Dialup

I'm currently running windows and ipaq (pocketpc 2002) clients fine. And calling my home vonage service - no problem!

Jeff Pulver created Free World Dialup, and AMAZING service that is free, and lets you make any domestic US call for free, as well as toll-free numbers in the UK and Japan.

He is an advocate in that he wants to keep VoIP free. They make money be selling SIP phones (some of what actually look really cool).

He sees this as a disappointment, because if taxes are applied, it's going to be quite difficult to give a person free long distance in the US (from anywhere in the world) for free. They don't even sell off e-mail addresses.

there is already a bunch of SIP talking linux soft-phones and supporting software.

kphone
linphone

some other supporting software
galago
sarp
sipimp

look at the freeworlddialup forums for lots of chatter about SIP softphones and using images on cisco hardware.
assorted other softphone downloads here.

267210 on FWD

http://www.freeworlddialup.com/support/quick_start _guide

Wow, it looks almost exactly like the WiSIP that Jeff Pulver, founder of Free World Dialup, has been selling on Pulver Innovations for about a year now.