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First, hook up a wireless IP link. Plenty of people report modifying 802.11 equipment for 10+ mile point-to-point.

Next, buy a Vonage VoIP solution. (about $50 sign up and $25 monthly - requires about 90kbit symmetric - fully integrates with US phone system.) I've use Vonage with my cable modem for a few months now and have been very happy.

You can probably get everything in place for less than US$1,000, assuming that you can get line of sight to someplace where you can put the far end that has also has broadband available.

BTW - satellite IP is spotty with VoIP due to the longer latency.

if you want to speak to your US buddies, i highly suggest signing up with vonage unlimited long distance to us/canada for $45.00 per month. quality's great and they even introduced a low bandwidth mode where it only takes up 3k/sec both ways (compared to the normal 9k/sec). if you're going to signup, might as well help me out :-d

if you want to speak to your US buddies, i highly suggest signing up with vonage unlimited long distance to us/canada for $45.00 per month. quality's great and they even introduced a low bandwidth mode where it only takes up 3k/sec both ways (compared to the normal 9k/sec). if you're going to signup, might as well help me out :-d

"Craig uses the analogy of the telephone: You can unplug a telephone and move it to another room and plug it in, and 99.9999 per cent of the time it will work. When we use it, we are pretty sure that we know who we are talking to, and we know we'll get a bill at the end of the month and we know what rate we'll be charged at"

No, we don't know that. That man has obviously never seen the wiring in my apartment building. I'm lucky if I screw in a light bulb and have it work.

And as for the bill? I scrapped my landline and went with Vonage because I *never* knew what the bill was going to be. The list of 9 different taxes varied every month.

Tell the companies that you deal with that you want to be put on "mail only" or don't give them your phone number at all. For example, I didn't have a land line for a while (until I got vonage which is great btw), and when I dealt with my companies, I told them that I had no phone. In addition, I did not want to be called, ever. FYI - this even works with the collections calls.

I'll stick with my Vonage setup, it doesn't require my box[s] to be on to use it.

Now if you could set that up so that all I had to do was get online with my powerbook, plug in a phone and have my Vonage number access, that would rock.

I am looking at getting one of these myself. Anyone tried it?

One thing I don't like about Vonage is that you have to use their Cisco ATA-186(the "POTS-to-Ethernet gizmo" you mentioned). Of course, they password protect it and provision it themselves, so it can only be used with their service. This means you don't get to play with this nifty device, 'cause they've locked you out. Goes against the hacker spirit, seems more like the Microsoft "we've set this up for you for your own protection" thing. I even emailed them to ask if I could use my own ATA, here is their response:

"We do not currently offer service on devices that we do not provide. We do include the Cisco ATA 186 free of charge. We do appreciate your interest in our service. Please do let us know if we may be of further assistance."

Why would you want to configure the Cisco ATA yourself? Well, you might want to try Free World Dialup, or you might want to play with VOCAL from vovida.org. Or whatever.

What I did was to buy a Cisco ATA-186 myself from YesMicro for about $170 with shipping. Then, I got an account at iconnecthere.com and set up my ATA using their setup instructions (it's a Word file, oh well...). I pick up the phone, and it works. When I make a call, they just charge me by the minute (2.9 cents to the U.S.). They have other plans that are cheaper, if you make a lot of calls. If you want to send and receive calls, you can do that for $8.95/month, or $10.95/month for a toll-free number (first hour is included, extra minutes at $0.10/minute). I don't, however, need my own phone number. So, here was my decision-making process, in a nutshell:

With Vonage, if I don't need my own phone number, too bad, no discount; I get a phone number anyway. I still can't tinker with the Cisco ATA, and I still need to give it back (it's not like I could do anything with it anyway, since it's locked down). $39.95 for unlimited calls to the U.S.

With iconnecthere, if I don't need my own phone number, then I don't pay the extra $8.95/month. However, I need to buy the Cisco ATA. Assuming a cost of $170, it would cost me $14.16/month to pay for it. Taking the cost of the Cisco into account, $39.95 buys me 1404 minutes/month, or about 47 minutes/day. Without the cost of the Cisco, it's 1767 minutes/month, or almost an hour/day.

However, I don't make a lot of calls every day. So, with iconnecthere, I can just pay by the minute. Assuming I make about 15 minutes of calls/day, that's $24.16/month including the cost of the Cisco as above, or $10/month not including the cost of the Cisco (with their 1000 minutes for $10 plan). Plus, I have the fun of being able to hack around on the Cisco ATA, and it's mine to keep.

So, in conclusion, if you don't want to hack around on your Cisco ATA, you don't mind giving it back, and you make over an hour's worth of calls every single day, go with Vonage. If you want to hack your Cisco ATA, own it, and make less than an hour's worth of calls a day, iconnecthere seems to be a better option.

For VoIP that lets you receive calls, check out Vonage or Packet8. Both of these are based on appliances, not computers, but at least they don't require you to run Windows. I'm not paid to pimp these services and I haven't tried them, so I don't know if they suck or not.

If you are looking for VoIP, for a cheeper solution to the service your local Telco offers, then check out Vonage.

Granted, this solution isn't VoIP through a PC application, but for the price and quality, it is still better than what I have seen from Ma Bell. Specially if you have/need an area code currently on their offering list. Although, if you want/need another area code, you get to choose one.

I have been with them for 2 months now as my only house-phone service. Granted, there are a few things that have yet to mature, but they are minor in comparison to what we all have to put up with, with Bell. Even the voice quality is good. Better than cell service, but just sleightly less than regular POTS. Definitely better than other Net2phone applications that I have tried.

How many people ACTUALLY make calls from their computer? ... quality still doesn't compare ... I remember making calls back in '98 when this was a new technology, and I stopped after about 2 weeks.

Personal use is getting approachable, too. Someone recently had a column (eweek, ddj, infoworld... I read too much and can't find it!) that talked about links on dslreports.com that talked about switching to Vonage, a hardware VoIP vendor. Their base price is $25-40 per month, with lots of services, cheap int'l, and TRUE number portability!

Poll Question - Do you really make calls that often from your computer?

Speaking of which, it really chaps my asterisk to think the phone companies managed to make this sort of massive savings (to datastreams rather than a copper pair per call) and our rates went up, not down. As much as people complain about the **AA's, telcos top my list of companies that have rip-off pricing. Despite my losing about $30k in value on my telco stock last year, I am thrilled to see them cratering.

-- advaitavedanta

Why use a desktop computer at all? I'm more impressed by services like Vonage. They give you a little POTS-to-Ethernet gizmo that you plug in anywhere behind your firewall, and you just connect any phone to it. Pick up the receiver and you hear a dial tone. Dial a number and it goes out over the Internet. You never have to bother with the computer. The computer doesn't even have to be turned on. Let's face it, if you're a geek, or even a lesser gadget freak, you've already got multiple computers sitting behind a firewall or mini-router on a broadband connection. So you just plug this thing in and go.

QuickNet's service appears to be cheaper. I was going to sign up for it, but I don't like the idea of having to have a program running on a desktop to keep the dial tone available. That's the problem with most Windows-based programs that do things like this, and it's no better when someone does it on Linux. (Ok, it's a little better, but this type of thing belongs either in a daemon or in dedicated hardware.)

I didn't have a land line until I tried vonage. Works over a broadband connection, connects to any phone, and with only a small amount of wiring ability, you can connect it to your POTS NI, and have all of the phone jacks in your house working with dialtone. That and it's $39/mo for unlimited local, long distance, voicemail, etc. Numbers are portable, and the sound quality is equivalent to a standard telephone. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a very happy customer.

I was a Verizon customer up until a couple months ago . Since I enjoy a quality high speed cablemodem already, I signed up with Vonage. I "highly" recommend them to anybody who has the bandwidth to use their service.

They are not 100% perfect, but if/when something happens, they've made it a point to notify customers of what was going on. Without even complaining, I received a $5 refund for a 1 day outage. They also have very good customer reps that answer your email/calls quickly and professionally.

I never liked Verizon from the first time I moved into their service area. Their customer service seemed more wary of me as a new subscriber than happy to do business. I used their automated online system to order service, and they did not activate my phone service the day I requested. I called up to find out why, and they wanted me to pay $250 deposit. $250 deposit for phone service? WTF? That's at least 6 months worth of service. After bitching, they then offered to waive the deposit if I got my old phone company to right a "letter of recommendation" saying that I was a previous customer in good standing. Uhg.. pain in the ass, but worth saving $250.

I was a Verizon customer up until a couple months ago . Since I enjoy a quality high speed cablemodem already, I signed up with Vonage. I "highly" recommend them to anybody who has the bandwidth to use their service.

They are not 100% perfect, but if/when something happens, they've made it a point to notify customers of what was going on. Without even complaining, I received a $5 refund for a 1 day outage. They also have very good customer reps that answer your email/calls quickly and professionally.

I never liked Verizon from the first time I moved into their service area. Their customer service seemed more wary of me as a new subscriber than happy to do business. I used their automated online system to order service, and they did not activate my phone service the day I requested. I called up to find out why, and they wanted me to pay $250 deposit. $250 deposit for phone service? WTF? That's at least 6 months worth of service. After bitching, they then offered to waive the deposit if I got my old phone company to right a "letter of recommendation" saying that I was a previous customer in good standing. Uhg.. pain in the ass, but worth saving $250.

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.

This is *exactly* the reason that I switched to Vonage from my phone provider (PacBell) -- because calling cell phones were getting too expensive.

With Vonage you can check your calls online, get any area code prefix you want in the USA (how cool is that), setup voice mail and forwarding online, and lots of other goodies. Plus, having a flat rate per month for the entire US doesn't hurt either :)

The system has worked well for me so far, with only minor artifacts in the sound quality under pretty heavy traffic on the cable modem.

I already got rid of my home phone and just use a cell phone. Also, I will be moving to VoIP at the office as soon as Vonage can get me a Denver area code.

It's nice to be free from those local phone service bastards.

I think most people don't subscribe because they don't know what it's like to have fast internet integrated into their lives--and their houses and hardware aren't set up to have it be integrated:

It's got to be a total package that extols the value of sharing data (text, voice, pix, video), not just receiving it, and that also provides mobility with your "device(s)" at least while in your house. Who regularly creates digital files that s/he wants to share through the web? That person needs broadband.

I can't understand why all the web-based digital photo reprinters aren't cross selling broadband, not to mention the digital video hardware vendors. Actually, Circuit City is a big Broadband reseller.

To integate the web into your life, you need mobility, not a fixed PC in one room of your house. For your kids to do their homework while lying on the floor, for you to read the news while at the kitchen table, etc., you don't just need broadband, you need a wireless hub at your house, and one or more devices to go with it. You may need a server and a network.

This bundled solution of two way participative services and mobility is the marketing solution. But, it's got to be so easy you can bring it home and plug it in. It's got to be secure out of the box. It's got be spun in a way that convinces you your life is better now that you have it.

See Quicktopic, Shutterfly, MP3.com, Vonage, and more.

I found that Vonage is more reliable and sounds better than than SprintPCS.

Your $80 figure is only correct, if you are getting DSL/Cable internet only for VoIP. Then you are correct.

They provide a Cisco ATA186. The only downsides are:

• You need a home network, but I had one and a DSL router works.
• You need a DHCP server, not a static IP network. It was easy to set it up, but they don't say so in the documentation.

I grant you that the EFF may be doing some exagerating, but not much.

Look at Felton's case. He was sent a threat, but when an opposition was made, the RIAA essentially said, "we didn't mean it" and "you misunderstood us."

Now what is commercial distribution and profit? You have link to a site that has an advertisement, is it commercial? I have seen a case that ruled linking to a site that has advertising makes a site commercial. What about a Amazon referrer link? or a Vonage affiliate link? does that
you commercial?

It is not the actually application of the DMCA being the problem, but the threats that spring from the vagueness of the law.

It's called Free World Dialup, and was featured on slashdot about a year ago. It seems to have disappeared though. I was a beta tester for it, and I must say, it was pretty cool. Basically, you plugged a Cisco ATA-182 device into your network, and into a PSTN line. Then you plugged your phone into the other side of the box. When you made a call, the box would check a central database to see if another box existed in the area code you were calling, and it would instruct the remote box to dial the number you want and route the call via SIP over the internet. If no box existed in the area code you were calling, it would just use your landline to make the call. Pretty cool idea.

But, if you want something similarly cool, check out Vonage. $39 a month for unlimited long distance, you choose your area code, and it routes all of your calls over your broadband connection. Someone I work with has had it for a month, and it works flawlessly. I'm looking at getting them for remote datacenters too since it gets kind of expensive to have business lines running in each one that only get used a couple times a year.

The service is cheap and easy enough for Grandma to use. Or you might could buy the MTA directly (Cisco ATA-186) and start hacking.

About a week ago someone told us about this device that Vonage is putting out for $20/month.

You don't have to have any special software, just a high-speed connection. Just plug in the Cisco voice router and go. Plus you get voice mail, call forwarding, online accounting, free long distance, and a real phone #. I've gotten mine and I've only lost a call once. That call was to a person in the boonies who was using a bad cell phone. 'Nuff said.

The sound quality is about 95% of a regular phone line. My only compliant about the system is that there's just under a quarter second lag between what someone says and what you hear, but that could because of my ISP.

Plus if I'm going out of town I just find a hotel with high speed Internet and plug my device in. Bomb I have an instant direct line back to the office or wife and kids(if I had a wife and kids, which I don't but that a different story). And no annoying hotel phone bills.

Web appliances are the way to go! Now if we could just get IPv6 in use and get rid of NAT we could get rid of telephones numbers. We could have IP # or domain names instead.

fone://commandertaco.slashdot.org could be the future.

[VoIP/Web Appliance evangelical rant complete, have a nice day]

I like the links, but they don't lead to anything related to "not getting booted off" or "flat-rate unlimited internet access". Both of those terms are usually used in relation to dial-up access. And that would be just plain dumb.

I need an internet connection to use my phone, but I need to dial my phone to get an internet connection...

In short, $62.95 per month for unlimited local and long distance calling (as long as you don't go over your bandwidth allocation) and high-speed internet access.

It's only worth it if you want both long distance (international is CHEAP (look, proper use of links!) with this service ) and high-speed internet access. If you just want one, look elsewhere.

I did some more digging on this product, and it looks like Area Codes are only available for New York, New Jersey, and Cali.

So for most people, right now, this is only a solution for national L/D calling out, but not really realisitic to expect your friends across town in Seattle to call you on your New York phone #.

Here's the area codes they have available: Vonage Area Codes

From their our technology page: "SIP-thru-NAT, Vonage's proprietary communications technology. "

NAT
SIP

Doesn't look terribly proprietary to me :)

Here's their rate chart for international calls