Section 8.5. Broadband Phone Politics


8.5. Broadband Phone Politics

How serious are some telephone companies taking all these broadband phone companies? Pretty seriously. Add in the fact that the government-run traditional telephone company remains the only company in many repressive countries, and you can have some bizarre laws.

Widely reported in late February by such news organizations as CMP (www.techweb.com/wire/networking/60403862), broadband phone users in Costa Rica may face serious consequences. The national telephone company's revenues have dropped because of peer-to-peer telephone connections over the Internet. When reported that 20% of the country's international calls go over broadband instead of the state-run telephone monopoly, bureaucrats got nervous. And nervous bureaucrats in countries with government-owned telephone monopolies tend to make things they don't like illegal.

Whether the "clamp down" camp will win over the "it makes more business possible" is unknown. But even in the U.S., those two arguments rage constantly.

If you're tired of company politics with your telephone company, if you want to get involved in such, start your own broadband phone company. You can do it with softphones and a little programming.

Check out "the on-line reference for Internet telephony" called iptel.org at www.iptel.org. Anything you can't find out about Internet Telephony there can probably be found at SIP Foundry (www.sipfoundry.org). Software toolkits, source code, and cutting edge research in making all this work await the curious.

Once you get your phone company up and running, you may need a PBX (Private Branch eXchange), just like the big companies have. No sense trying to buy a traditional telephone switch in the new century, so go to Digium Inc., and check out Asterisk (www.asterisk.org). Some people, although not what you would really call normal people, run one of these Linux-based phone switches in their home for everyday use (not me, I promise, but I know some of them). And if you have a small business that needs new phone equipment, Asterisk will do everything you need for a fraction of the price of a traditional telephone vendor system. For more information, see Switching to VoIP (O'Reilly).



Talk is Cheap
Talk is Not Cheap!: Saving the High Costs of Misunderstandings at Work and Home
ISBN: 1885167334
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 102

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