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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.
It is not worth it to blow money on a device just to use such quirky proprietary software to set up VOIP-to-PSTN communications. Skype uses the compressed (lossy) iLBC codec, which is lower quality than the G.711u codec most of the mainstream SIP VOIP providers use for their phone calls. Skype also requires you (or your girlfriend rather) to either talk to the person on the phone using a mike and headphones or some kludge like a "phone" that hijacks the audio in and audio out from your soundcard. Finally, SkypeOut is actually more expensive per minute to North America than the better SIP providers.
I suggest checking out the comments found on voxilla.com and its very active forum community for advice on setting up her (and no doubt eventually yours too) VOIP connection, and work out all the details like whether you just want outbound-to-PSTN calling or if she needs a DID number as well for being called at, whether you need an IP phone or an ATA, what providers suit your needs and what is the best way to configure your software or hardware.