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

I remember something like this for bbses

[krudler]

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

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.

Germ of an idea

[icypyr0]

Germ of an idea? Slashdot editors win again!

Re:Germ of an idea

[Dynastar454]

germ, n.

1) Biology. A small mass of protoplasm or cells from which a new organism or one of its parts may develop.
2) The earliest form of an organism; a seed, bud, or spore.
3)A microorganism, especially a pathogen.
4) Something that may serve as the basis of further growth or development: the germ of a project.

See #2, #4. The usage is correct.

No thanks

[MarkRose]

I'm a fan of the P2P concept, but I'm not sure I'd want to be involved anonymously -- after all, I definitely do not want someone using my phone to make obscene or harassing phone calls.

Re:No thanks

[LWATCDR]

Not only that but what if someone hacks the system and uses your phone to make a long distance phone call? What if a telemarketer outside of your country uses your phone?
I see a lot of issues with this. Too bad it is a neat idea.

Re:No thanks

[winkydink]

Well, in thge US, you would prevent this by using a 2nd line and not having a long-distance carrier. If somebody wants to use my line to call 10-10-IDIOT, I have no problem with that.

I think you would have a strong case for common carrier status if you provided a dedicated line for this purpose. Of course, the legal bill to prove it could be astronomical.

This is very similar to the early days of UUCP/USENET. Yes, times have changed, but if I get some time, I'll throw a box at this.

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

Re:Great idea

[Bonker]

The problem I see here is that the Bells have been playing the 'We have a legal right to profit off the masses' game for even longer than the record industry. They see people taking advantage of this and you're going to start getting people hammered with 'unreasonable usage' fees like customers of some of the less scrupulous ISPs. They're going to start hammering lobbiests and bribes into whatever niches they can find on federal, state, and local levels.

The makers have even invited comparison to 'Illegal' forms of P2P by adding 'Ster' onto the end of their name.

Bellster.

Seriously. It's just ASKing for a lawsuit.

Is your server running?

[Tackhead]

> 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.

f0ne: *RING*
d00d: Hello?
k1ddi3: Hi, is your server running?
d00d: Yeah.
k1ddi3: Well, you'd better catch it!
d00d: *slam*
k1ddi3: PWN3D!

I used it

[Anonymous Coward]

I called my [garbled] and we [unintelligable] about the &6&^7^7^9&&&[NO CARRIER]

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)

Germs?

[CypherXero]

The idea must suck if it's being compared to a germ.

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).

Critique

[Dejohn]

This seems like a great concept. It's a great use of current technology to subvert the big phone companies. When I first read about it, I thought to myself "wow! this is going to become HUGE!" Then I realized that there are some serious problems to be overcome, such as

• Privacy. I could pick up my phone line and listen to your conversation with Grandma
• Currently, anyone who wants to hook up needs to run the whole Asterisk server. I'm sure someone will write a small little client that interfaces with some cheap hardware eventually
• Potential for abuses: dialing long distance numbers from your line, making obscene or harassing calls, etc. As the "owner" of a phone line, I'm theoretically liable for all its use

So, while I think this is really an awesome adaptation of the technology we have, and certainly a great perspective of what Asterisk is capable of, it'll be a while before this sort of things becomes mainstream and people want to hook up to it.

NO Privacy

[CharlieHedlin]

In the FAQ it talks briefly of privacy, saying there isn't any.

I have an Asterisk PBX at home, and it is very easy to set the system up to log and record every call. Imagine if I joined Bellster (which I don't plan to, my VoIP services are already insanely cheap) what type of privacy violations I could commit? Granted it would be illeagal to listen to or record a conversation without either parties concent, who would know?

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.

Re:Costs

[ibpooks]

Also, the US is the only place i've lived where local calls were free.

They usually aren't exactly free. Typically if you read the fine print, there's some deal where the monthly service will include 400 or 500 local calls "free", and then you pay through the nose for additional local calls. I would bet these clauses are there to specifically prevent a re-seller situation like this. An open public line could probably hit the 500 call mark rather quickly.

No Friggin Way...

[nweaver]

P2P networks like this are built on foundations of trust, a foundation which does not exist.

Beyond the toll dialing (which could be prevented by proper configuration of the PBX software), the bigger concerns are leechers (long distance is a huge cost for advertisers), scum (nice, anonymous, robo-dialers with prerecorded spam messages), and tapping (it might be worth it to set up a few PBXs just to listen in on others conversation!).

what if you pay for minute on local calls?

[spectro]

The idea is great for the US where you have flat rate local calls, however I see it will very diffictult to find somebody volunteering their phone lines in South America or any country where greedy phone companies like Spain's Telefonica run the show. In there you pay per minute for you local calls and I can see somebody's phone bill growing exponentially.

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.

Re:"Free" with a big cost

[mwilliamson]

You can run asterisk on a linksys wrt54g, linked with a sipura voip adapter and that is all you should need. $200 and you're there.

Land lines

[elgaard]

Nice idea, but I don't believe it will work.

1. Local calls are not free in most of the world. This limit the use for long-distance calls.

2. Most people into this kind of stuff will be dropping their land line and use pure VoIP (including IP->PSTN service) + cell phones.

I live in Denmark and switched to VoIP (musimi.dk).
IP-IP calls are 0 c/min. Including calls to FWD, SipPhone etc.
Local PSTN calls are 2.5 c/min (1.6 at night).
DK->CA PSTN calls are 2.9 c/min
DK->US PSTN calls are 3.2 c/min
Subscription is $1/month/phonenumber.

Of course I wouldn't mind using Bellster to make free calls to the US/Canada, but I cannot offer much in return.

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.....

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:"Free" with a big cost

[spiritraveller]

wrt54g is a router made by Linksys. It runs a version of Linux, and several third parties have made their own versions of its firmware, adding various features... one of which is apparently the Asterisk PBX. VOIP is voice over internet protocol, which means any way of having a voice conversation over the internet. The sipura voip adapter is one way of making voice calls on the internet.

Asterisk is more accessible than suggested

[roderickm]

Yes, there are privacy and security concerns that stem from Bellster -- what happens when a bomb threat is called in using a Bellster route? -- but these are questions that must be answered as voice and data truly converge. Bellster is a disruptive technology, and Jeff Pulver is all about that.

However, you set the barrier to entry way too high: Asterisk doesn't require a shiny new "PBX-ready" PC. You can choose any of the following bootable CDs to turn any old PC into an Asterisk box with just a Control-Alt-Delete. Not a PC fan? Asterisk now runs on Mac OSX, too. Now the only real barrier is the hardware, an FXO interface to connect to your POTS line. Just such an interface is reasonably priced at Digium.com, the makers of Asterisk.

Bootable Asterisk CDs:
http://knopsterisk.com/
http://www.automate d.it/asterisk/
http://www.xorcom.com/rapid/
http ://www.osdisc.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi/products/li vecd/asterisklive

Don't want to spend all that just to join the free love revolution that Bellster hopes to be? Well, Asterisk has tons of other uses, like being a PBX for your home or office, too. Set up mailboxes for each member of the office or household. Email an incoming voice message automatically. Zap the telemarketers that don't pay attention to the do-not-call list. The list goes on as far as your imagination: Asterisk makes computer telephony accessible to everyone with a computer. Even if Bellster isn't the future of telephony, Asterisk is.