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Because the Zyxel Prestige 2000W appears to suck.

I haven't read about the Cisco phones, but they're priced even higher -- unreasonably high compared to a simple DECT phone and a Quicknet Internet PhoneJack card. Although I haven't tried this either, but it looks pretty sweet.

The idea of a Zyxel Prestige 2000W was pretty cool though, and I wish it were good. The idea is cool, and I actually considered it instead of a DECT cordless myself. But that review pretty much put me off.

What, indeed, do we know about Jack?

[NOTE: This is not a recommendation since I have never used their products]

You could check out:

INTERNET PHONEJACK

"With the Internet PhoneJACK, you can use your familiar telephone (including your cordless phone) to make and receive Internet phone calls. You can plug your standard analog telephone, fax machine or headset into the Internet PhoneJACK and keep your Internet phone calls private."

They appear to support linux

or on the same website:

iprint2Fax

[NOTE: This is not a recommendation since I have never used their products]

You could check out:

INTERNET PHONEJACK

"With the Internet PhoneJACK, you can use your familiar telephone (including your cordless phone) to make and receive Internet phone calls. You can plug your standard analog telephone, fax machine or headset into the Internet PhoneJACK and keep your Internet phone calls private."

They appear to support linux

or on the same website:

iprint2Fax

These should help you;

Vonage
Net2Phone
Quicknet

Quicknet Technologies

OpenH323 Project

I have actually been working on a hardware/software solution for this. Instead of buying a Quicknet Internet Line Jack for $600, I am working on a few mods to this kit so it can be controlled via the parallel port instead of by the telephone hook.

On the software side, I am using some RTP software I am working on to transfer audio between machines. So what does this all mean? With some custom hardware and software I will be able to have household (neighborhood) telephone service using any computer on my network.

If anyone is interested stop by www.magicicecreambucket.com in a few weeks for information on building this device for yourself for under $60 and some software for it.

You may also find this page, CAN THE INTERNET TAKE THE PLACE OF A PAIR OF COPPER WIRES?, to be germane to what you want to do.

One other thing, I can tell you from sad experience that whenever you try to do something that's a bit non-standard, and ask for advice in a forum like this, you will always get responses from a certain contingent of people that will tell you that it either can't be done, or that you will be putting yourself/your computer/your company in danger if you do it the way you want to. Without going into all the details, I asked for a solution to a problem (that was in some ways kind of similar to yours, although it involved data rather than voice) and I was told that what I wanted to do could not be done reliably, blah, blah, blah. I got about a dozen messages telling me why it couldn't be done, and one that told me how to do it. Guess who was right (Hint: It's wasn't the people who started out by saying "I'm a professional and I've been doing this sort of thing for several years now...")

(That discussion did NOT take place on /. but rather in a Usenet newsgroup - still the principle may apply here).

If a company like Vonage can provide phone service via the Internet fairly reliably (note I did NOT say 100% reliably, but it seems to work for most users that have commented in the BroadbandReports.com VoIP forum), then I cannot see any good reason that you can't do what you need to do, except for the fact that finding the right equipment to do it may be a challenge.

I wish some company would understand that there is a market for a simple device (or pair of devices) that would let people extend THEIR OWN home or office phone lines to other locations using broadband Internet connections. A lot of people want to sell phone SERVICE via the Internet, but no one seems to want to sell the hardware so you can "do it yourself" easily.

Bayonne

Bayonne, the telecommunications application server of
the GNU project, will offer a free, scalable, media
independent software environment for development and
deployment of telephony solutions for use with current
and next generation telephone networks. Bayonne
already offers a fully distributed application server for
use today with multi-line telephony cards from many
vendors under free operating systems.

This works great with the single line Quicknet Cards as well.

Check out the Internet Phone Jack, which is a full-duplex audio card designed specifically to carry your voice over the Internet and the Internet Line Jack, which connects your local phone lines to an IP network.

And yes, there's full Linux support.

And... no -- I don't work there. I just think it's a very cool product. :)

Check out the Internet Phone Jack, which is a full-duplex audio card designed specifically to carry your voice over the Internet and the Internet Line Jack, which connects your local phone lines to an IP network.

And yes, there's full Linux support.

And... no -- I don't work there. I just think it's a very cool product. :)

Check out the Internet Phone Jack, which is a full-duplex audio card designed specifically to carry your voice over the Internet and the Internet Line Jack, which connects your local phone lines to an IP network.

And yes, there's full Linux support.

And... no -- I don't work there. I just think it's a very cool product. :)

• Crossplatform - runs on Windows and *nix (Im not sure about Max or Bez et al)
• It has been tested and interoperates with more H323 stacks than you knew existed - Radware, Cisco...
• Free Software - which is the point of this article, right?

• Very complex ... just take a look at the codebase
• Control data is transmitted in binary form - most widely used protocols are based on ASCII (FTP, HTTP, SMTP)
• It uses a port assignment process which is virtually impossible to use through a NAT firewall.

i was implementing a VoIP solution for a company a few weeks ago where linux based kiosk terminals where euquiped with phones that should be able to make VoIP calls to a central callcenter including video. i looked at the existing software. H323 seems to be the way of the futurere and there are already H323 based solutions on the way. openh323.org. even thought they where not stable enought for my needs yet. but at least the demo appication (voxialla) was able to interoperate with the M$ netmeeting shit. video transmition with H263 codec (for low bandwith) is also on the way. for my solution i decided to use quicknet telephony cards (it greatly enhances the telphony experience if you have a real phone connected to your computer which can also ring and is independent of the sound card). those have a DSP on board which does voice compression accourding to the most important standads. it has a GPL'ed kernel driver. (the only downside is the DSP code itself is not open but that is not that much of a problem).

i decided to just adopt the demo code that came with the quicknet cards for my appolication since it was more stable then the H323 things. (it is easy since the compression is already done on the card). for the video thing i used a parallel netscape server push with 1 picture every 3 or 4 sekunds 160x120 (about 2k Byte) in size). greetings mond.

Combine that with the software at www.openh323.org you can do excellent quality VoIP calls TODAY with open source software all the way to the metal.

Get more info at Quicknet's web site.

Remember - that's one way! You need to add the reverse direction, and then add the packet overhead of RTP (real time protocol) and UDP, plus the control signals. You can do great IP calls and use about 16kbps or less. I know. I do it all the time!

Our products (PCI/ISA/PCMCIA) allow you to connect a normal phone to your PC (and provide dial tone, DTMF, ringing, etc) and provide the compression codecs. We have open source linux drivers, and are in the kernel as of 2.2.14. For more information, write me or see our web site: Quicknet Technologies, Inc.

Check out the OpenH323 Project and the OpenPhone Project for more information.

These applications run on linux (and Win32) and work very well, even over dialup connections. If you use hardware to do the audio compression you can use a normal phone and get MUCH better performance. Disclaimer: my company, Quicknet Technologies, Inc. makes this kind of hardware. We even have open source drivers, and are in the kernel as of 2.2.14! We're hiring too!

Internet Telephony is the next big thing - and linux will be a major platform for it.

And, as a small point of contention, the manufacturer is not required to release any code GPL if it runs in user space. As I'm sure you realize, apps can be closed source in Linux and not violate the GPL nature of Linux itself.

A new mailing list has been started to support efforts to write new code using Quicknet Cards. You can subscribe by emailing to majordomo@linux.quicknet.net with "subscribe linux-sdk " (without the quotes of course) in the body of the message.

We are planning a special developers package price for our hardware to allow developers to save a few dollars up front (and hopefully write some great software!). We'll be announcing this in the next week, most likely.

You can download the Linux drivers from here .

Quicknet is committed to Linux - in fact, counting myself, Quicknet has hired three senior Linux programmers in the last few months. Feel free to contact me (Greg Herlein) at gherlein@quicknet.net if you want more information.

A new mailing list has been started to support efforts to write new code using Quicknet Cards. You can subscribe by emailing to majordomo@linux.quicknet.net with "subscribe linux-sdk " (without the quotes of course) in the body of the message.

We are planning a special developers package price for our hardware to allow developers to save a few dollars up front (and hopefully write some great software!). We'll be announcing this in the next week, most likely.

You can download the Linux drivers from here .

Quicknet is committed to Linux - in fact, counting myself, Quicknet has hired three senior Linux programmers in the last few months. Feel free to contact me (Greg Herlein) at gherlein@quicknet.net if you want more information.