[MLB-WIRELESS] internetphones

[Anthony Baxter]

rick wrote:
> can someone email me some urls for them? maybe some that you can call
> peoples hope phones with ? what kind of charges are involved?

There's two components to this:

1. The phone. You can either buy a hardware phone or adaptor, or
else use a software phone (a program that will run on your PC and
use your PC's headphones and mike). Hardware phones are further
divided into VoIP phones themselves and adaptors. I have a cisco
ata186 sitting on my study desk - it has two RJ11 ports and an RJ45.
I can just plug any standard phone into one of the RJ11 ports and
just use it.
There's a bunch of others, for instance, sipphone.com. - a quick look
at froogle will show a bunch of them (search for 'voip phone' or some
such). Typically, an adaptor will set you back around AU$120 - $150,
while a phone might be 3 times that. Obviously the cisco phone offering,
the 7960, is even more expensive. But hey, it's cisco.

There's a number of software phones out there, both free and
commercial. Free ones I know of include xten's xlite, sjphone,
kphone, linphone, and shtoom (which is my project). In addition,
the voice chat in MS Messenger and Apple's iChat uses SIP (the
underlying VoIP protocol). I've not yet found out how to use this
to initiate a phone call to a gateway from one of these.


2. A PSTN gateway. The voip phone is fine if you only want to
talk to people on the net, but if you want to connect to people
on the PSTN, you'll need a gateway. There's no end of choices
here - FWD (fwd.pulver.com) is one of the oldest, and offers
free calls inside the US. I'm not aware of any paid (or free)
services operating inside Australia. You could of course use
a US provider, but that will cost more (since your call is
being routed to the US and back) and will have significant
latency (delay). A quick googling gives this list
http://www.voipproviderslist.com/country/Australia/

I have no ideas which, if any, of these guys provide retail
termination from IP to PSTN, nor what their pricing might
be. Someone who's a bit bored at work or something might like
to go through this list and send a followup.

A final point on standards. If someone tries to sell you on
their proprietary VoIP solution (e.g. Skype), *run*, don't
walk, away. One of the great things about standards-driven
VoIP is that _lots_ of people are implementing it. This
means a better choice of clients, and also means you can
choose a provider of your choice to terminate your calls.
I don't care how wonderful Skype's super-secret protocol
is. When it comes down to it, if I want to use it, I have
to use _their_ client. And if I want to talk to someone
who's not on their network, I have to hope that one day they'll
provide a gateway, _and_ that this gateway will be reasonably
priced, _and_ that they'll bother to put a gateway in Australia.

Oh, and one other thing: There's actually two standards for
VoIP you need to care about. The older H.323, was designed
by the ITU (the telco standards body) and is, in a word,
horrid.
Fortunately, the IETF's SIP is rapidly destroying H.323. Do
not buy anything that only talks H.323 unless you're looking
for a paperweight.

Hope this is helpful.
Anthony

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