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My VoIP bill so far has been about $5 for 16 months of service - after I dropped the scumbags at Vonage with their $10 disconnection fee.

So in May 2005, I pre-paid $10 for a teliax account that I use for the type of calls that would eat into my included cell airtime - calls to 800 customer service numbers which involve long wait times. I still have about $5 left, even though I've made quite a few calls.

I also make many long international calls using voiptalk. Excellent sound quality, barely appreciable lag, $nothing/minute, $nothing/month, $nothing/ever.

I've lowered my conventional-telco costs down to $6/month - the fee Qwest extorts for my Speakeasy naked DSL circuit. I look forward to dropping that to zero when fixed wireless becomes feasible.

Cellphone service is next.

Will T-Mobile play the Judas goat?

If you're talking about T-Mobile US, why not? Aren't they the only US operator that hasn't paid billions for 3G spectrum? They should be best positioned to offer a very competitive package of flat/"free" WiFi SIP and data together with cheap/pay-as-you-go GSM/GPRS/EDGE fallback when "on the road".

However the custom access point, if true, would be a killer, at least for me. If I can't use their SIP service over any IP connectivity I happen to be in the range of, how are they different from, say, teliax with the forward-to-my-mobile-number feature?

This is why, although I really like the idea of a hybrid SIP/GSM mobile, I'm not paying a cent for one which ties its SIP functionality to an operator. It was stupid with conventional GSM and network/SIM locks, it's absolutely medieval with SIP/WiFi.

Oh, and another thing: For me to tie one of my primary public "addresses" - my phone number - to an operator, I must be bribed, substantially and continuously. Otherwise I'll roll my own teliax/SIP/IAX/pay-as-you-go service, thankyouverymuch.

I guess you're right, it's going to be ARPU crunch time. Excellent, Smithers!

teliax is another provider.. maybe /. knows more? Maybe this would be a good ask slashdot.

Let us not forget some of my personal favorites.

Our company has ported over our primary phone numbers (including 800 numberes) to Teliax http://www.teliax.com/ recently (we were with Vonage, but had constant dropped calls, and clarity issues). It's a great little VoIP company that offers IAX and SIP termination. They allow unlimited simultaneous calls via one account (along with outbound callerid specification/spoofing), and you are simply charged their $0.02/min rate for both incoming and outgoing calls, plus $5/mo per line. Highly scalable and stable, though a reliable internet connection is a must (we have 18Mbps at our disposal). Obviously, we use Asterisk, but there is no obligation to do so, any SIP-compatible offering should work fine. So far Teliax has been extremely reliable, though they are undoubtibly a very small company, but you also get fast/personalized support from their main engineers, not the teir 1 support idiots companies stick you with [*cough*Vonage*cough*].

Anyhow, that's just my experience. If you don't already have the bandwidth to spare though, it's probably not the right path for you (though bandwidth saving codecs like g726 [instead of g711 ulaw/alaw] will help conserve bandwidth while keeping call clarity, but possibly adding latency) ... One other recommendation is to retain one POTS/PSTN line for 911 calls, it's doubtful any VoIP company will have that down soon, and you don't want internet connectivity to prevent 911 calls in an office environment... you may already have one for Faxing, since no VoIP provider I've seen yet offers T.38 for faxing, though it appears asterisk may be getting some support soon http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=5090 so Teliax will probably have support for that once it's in!

Where it starts getting tricky is how to connect your LAN-phones to the outside world. You can use POTS lines, or a BRI or PRI, or a T1, but that all requires additional hardware from Digium. You can get VOIP service from many cable companies and CallVantage and Vonage and such but beware! If the VoIP service requires you to use their hardware adapters, you STILL need additional hardware. You might save a little money, but other than that there is no advantage for POTS if you have to use their adapters. Plus, what a kludge that is. Your incoming call goes digial(in)--> analog(adapter)--> digital(PBX)--> analog(phone)--> digital(PBX)--> analog(adapter)--> digital(out) JUST in your PBX! If you can get/can afford the bandwidth, a 100% digital solution requires minimal hardware investment (only the phones and the PBX server). There still don't seem to be that many providers, though. But I have had pretty good luck with a couple. Broadvoice has a BYOD (bring your own device) line of rate plans that are compatible with Asterisk, though you can only have 2 simultaneous lines per account. Teliax has a flat-rate plan with up to 4 simultaneous calls, and you can have an unlimited number of simultaneous calls (subject to bandwidth constraints) using the Pay-As-You-Go plan. The other nice thing about Teliax is that it supports audio codecs other than the standard 64kbps(per incoming and outgoing channel) that Broadvoice supports. Using more efficient codecs will allow you to pack more simultaneous calls in the same amount of bandwidth.

Oh, and use a high-quality router that supports QTos packet prioritization.

Off-topic, and very slightly tongue-in-cheek:

Although telcos, in the US and elsewhere, suck royal dick 24/7, having the recipient pay for incoming calls turns out to have advantages, rooted in the fact that it liberates you from the real telco {mono|oligo}poly: The PSTN numbering cartel.

Consider something like UMA, only turned inside-out: Instead of making your mobile number your "public" number, you use your SIP/IAX endpoint for that instead. Since a lot of your customers/friends/colleagues etc still use the PSTN, you give it a nice PSTN proxy through a VoIP operator that supports this.

When you're out of the house/office your SIP endpoint is forwarded to your mobile number. You can do that for zero incremental cost - to the original caller - in the US because you'll be paying the termination fees through your incoming airtime.

Add the advent of WiFi-capable mobiles and the proliferation of free hotspots in the places you're likely to use your mobile (home-work-starbucks-mall) and you have a very juicy, extremely low barrier-to-entry lever over the mobile operators.

In the rest of the world this would not be possible because the initiator of the mobile leg of the call (your asterisk box/subscription service) will have to pay the high (captive market, fun fun fun!) termination fees the mobile operator charges. This is where not paying for incoming airtime works against you: Cost is not the only problem here; the major problem is that this makes you have to buy [or subscribe to someone who buys] into the PSTN numbering cartel in order to get a number with a high enough termination "cushion" to cover the cost. The barrier to entry has been somewhat safely defended...

Of course, in the US and elsewhere, the operators are going to do everything they can to stop all this from happening. Some of it may even be meaningful, like offering decent UMA rates (don't hold your breath, this sounds too much like competition). When WiFi mobiles get introduced in the US I expect to get a laugh from their T&Cs and general brain-dead-ness when they try to both sell and cripple WiFi at the same time :-)

This is still wrong. From their rates page:

0.302 Euro excluding VAT (0.393 USD)

http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates/all_r ates.html#listing-J

Much more expensive than http://teliax.com/ that I mentioned earlier.