P2P Meets PSTN, With Bellster

flinderhans writes "Jeff Pulver, the guy who started Free World Dialup (free VoIP network) and had the germ of the idea that turned into Vonage, has launched a P2P network called Bellster that allows users to share their private lines to make calls anywhere on the public-switched telephone network. Interesting stuff, even if it doesn't look quite ready for prime-time."

Comments

Great idea

[chris09876]

This really sounds like it could be useful. Phone companies are such a horrible monopoly... this could be a good start in getting rid of them while transitioning off their service. It might be somewhat inconvenient though... if you want to use your phone line, but someone else ties it up for awhile. I wonder if they have a solution to that problem

Won't Work For Me

[AnonymousCactus]

I live in a place with very few high-speed connections, hardly any Internet users, and a max of 1000 people are a toll-free call away - if I have to go tit-for-tat I'll never make any love to pay for what I take because no one will want to call anyone in my area. In general, does a tit-for-tat model make sense when P2P introduces geographical or other dependencies? Does it make more sense to credit an open line rather than actually allowing someone to call using it? How do you prevent fraud in a system like that? (i.e. my phone is in iowa, you don't want to use it, i swear)

Re:Hmmm except local calls aren't always free

[munro]

Local calls are free in New Zealand.
Can anybody else report where they are free?

Incidentally, in the late 90s when I was living in London I visited New York. I went into a news agent and bought a cheap call card, and dialed my neighbour in London, from a phonebox in downtown Manhattan. Later I worked out that I had paid about the same for the call as if I had called him from my house next door to him (2p a minute during the day or something... I have forgotten the numbers).

what FWD used to be

[austad]

This is what FWD used to be back in 2000 or 2001. I don't think it ever made it past the beta stage. It wasn't P2P persay, but anyone using the network shared their phone line to make calls in their local calling area.

When you signed up, you put in the area codes/prefixes that were local, and when someone made a call, custom software on the Cisco ATA-182 device checked with the server to see if someone resided in that area and had an open line. If so, the call was routed over the net, the remote ATA-dialed the number, and you were patched through. If no one was in that area, your local ATA device dialed it out on your own phone line.

The project was damn cool. However, the ATA-182 had some serious hardware bugs, and probably was the greatest contributor to the demise of the project. The original plan was to get FWD branded ATA's into stores like Best Buy so anyone could pick one up and contribute. As far as making money, I think they were betting on profit from hardware sales, but I'm not sure.

FWD went away for awhile, and then re-emerged in its current incarnation. Hopefully this will address some of the security problems that were present in the beta, like the ability to dial a remote user's device by IP and be patched through to a dial tone. By doing this, you avoid the access policies and you could dial 911 or make LD calls on someone else's phone. Not good... at least for the victim.

Once you have an asterisk box you might not care

[sprior]

The funny thing is that once you have an asterisk box working you can hook up to some very cheap VOIP providers (much cheaper than the phone company or even the "retail" VOIP providers). Not that the appeal of free stuff ever completely goes away, but if you can call anywhere in the US for less than $0.02/minute anyway there isn't much motivation to do the extra fuss and let someone use your phone lines for totally free calls.

Like any p2p app, this'll start good and end bad.

[Jailbrekr]

Greed always wins.

I am sure that there are various unscrupulous companies out there, jsut waiting for something like this to reach critical mass. When that happens, BAM. 3rd world telemarketers start to pester the everloving crap out of you.

Regulation, for good or ill, is there for a reason. The restrictions that are in place just as much protect the consumer as it is to restrict their choice. And while we are all too aware of the restrictions, we take the protection for granted. Take those regulations away, and the abuse will not only be rampant, it will be in our face. If you think spam is bad, imagine getting non stop phone calls from 3rd world telemarketers pushing cheap crap and the promise of millions of dollars in illict monies is war torn Nigeria.....

Re:NO Privacy

[BenFranske]

You could set Asterisk to play a prerecorded message that the conversation might be listened to and/or recorded by a third party, this could be quite interesting. As long as you tell someone you're invading their privacy if they still go ahead with it all the more fun for you.

works sweet

[austad]

I just set it up, and it works extremely well.

I just set a custom prefix to use on my phones to tell it to route out Bellster, next step is to make all calls default through Bellster, and then fallback to my Voicepulse account or my local phone line.

I called a buddy in NYC over it and he couldn't even tell it was VOIP. Not that I'm surprised, I've been doing VOIP for awhile now.

Now all someone needs to do is come out with a little arm based box that runs it for use in your home, or a modified Xbox distro with asterisk. You don't need a Zaptel card if you have Vonage/Voicepulse/packet8/etc.

Re:I remember something like this for bbses

[illumin8]

using a phone line on a bbs to call *another* bbs that was out of your long distance range. Cool oldschool stuff :)

Back in the good old days I remember dialing into the local university and using their outbound modem lines to dial BBSs all over the country on my friend's father's professor account. That was fun. I even ran a BBS for a while that participated in Fidonet, which was a lot of fun. I would dialup a node in Arizona where I picked up mail feeds from late at night while the long distance rates were cheap. Fidonet groups were very similar to Newsgroups, however mail took 2-3 days average to be delivered due to all of the intermediate hops. Coverage was international, and pretty reliable. Some of the higher volume groups could really up your long distance bill as well.