I'm considering changing my career in IT to focus more on VoIP i think this is the future of telephone communications. Has anyone tried these services? I have and it's pretty cool. you can take your phone number with you whereever you are by connecting the phone adapter to the internet and you can forward all calls, etc . . . and choose any area code.

10/7/2005 10:41:08 AM

i tried it just becuase it is cheaper than a typical phone line. never used any of the cool features. ended up switching back to a very basic phone service so i can have a constant dial tone for my tivo and i use my cell phone for long distance

10/7/2005 10:55:10 AM

hot topic for our company....http://www.aspeonline.com/Product.aspx?ProductId=3BCDBE6733904A16BFFE65FA5295142B

10/7/2005 11:10:24 AM

http://www.asterisk.org

Asterisk is a free, open source PBX.

if you really want to dig into VoIP, asterisk is a great place to start.

im fairly certain its what vonage uses for their VoIP network

and for a really good, free softphone, get x-lite from http://www.xten.com

10/7/2005 11:13:59 AM

I think VoIP has a long way to go before it can be a viable POTS replacement. The POTS infrastructure in the US pretty much guarantees 100% reliability which VoIP is still pretty far from. Those of us who don't care about having around 1% downtime per year are the early adopters who use Vonage, TWC digital phone, and other broadband based VoIP services and will help drive the technology further.

Today, and in the next several years, VoIP's primary competitive advantage will lie in corporate networks. The cost of maintaining a PBX and digital phone system is several times as much as a typical Server based PBX + IP phones and with less value-add.

I don't know how long it will be before the cost and benefits of VoIP can beat POTS for the general population, but it will be there eventually.

10/7/2005 12:13:56 PM

the cost saving is pretty effective though. i switched careers from being a network engineer dealing with complex data issues to now working with VoIP phone lines. the money is definitely in the corporate side to this as the cisco ip phone systems are expensive, but the cost savings for clients is outrageous. in 2 years the cost savings pays for the phone systems. as far as residential use - i have a VoIP line at home and it's $6/a month and all in-coming calls are free, which is cool and you can't beat the international rates. I think it's pretty awesome. another thing that's cool is you can take your phone adapter with you so it's like having a portable home phone #.


anyway. if anyone's interested in a cisco phone system pm me.

10/7/2005 12:21:04 PM

We're moving from our existing, wickedly expensive switch setup to asterisk.

the cost savings are insane.

Currently most of our remote users use standard POTS long distance to do all their call work.

And since these are remote call center agents, they're calling pretty much 8 hours a day.

And we pay for that. Its mostly long distance.

So right now we're moving them all to vonage, and the cost savings is huge.

Eventually we want to have them use our asterisk server. Which would end up saving even more money.

Its really fun stuff

10/7/2005 1:17:14 PM