Slashdot Mirror
Skype Gateways for Local Calls?
cgenman asks: "My girlfriend is currently living abroad, but needs to make calls here in the States. I'm investigating Skype to phone gateways, but none seem to allow the person who is trying to Skype in remotely to initiate calls on the local phone network. What experiences have people had with Skype gateways which give remote people full local access? Are there other setups better suited for this purpose?"
Your girlfriend probably want to subscribe to something like Vonage, SkypeOut, or some other Internet telephone provider. Sure, she'll have to pay for her calls, but it's definitely a lot less hassle than having to set up a gateway.
Plus, she gets her own phone number people can call her on, if she gets a service that does that.
On the more geeky side, if you want to be your girlfriend's telephone operator so you can give her free calls (I don't know, maybe that kind of thing turns you or her on), you definitely want to play around with Asterisk, the free open source PBX, and get an account with a tinkerer-friendly SIP provider. Using that setup, and a SIP softphone program on the computer, or a hardware SIP telephone adapter or SIP telephone, you can do pretty much anything you can imagine.
Don't bother trying to do anything clever with Skype though, it's not an open system, and you're a lot better off with an account from some kind of tinkerer-friendly SIP provider. Not living in the US, I can't give you any specific recommendations.
Hope this helps.