[lug] VOIP advice

[Nate Duehr]

Rodolfo Estrada wrote:

>When I am out of town, usually in Mexico. I want to 
>transfer my local calls to my location in Mexico. In 
>both places I have broadband. 
>
>Where do I start looking for the solution?
>Is VOIP linux a good option? 
>
>Thanks,
>
> - Rodolfo 
>  
>
If you can change your phone number (or put up with long waits for local 
number portability if it's available for your existing number), any of 
the commercial VoIP vendors like Vonage or Packet8 or Broadvoice using a 
standard ATA device wouldn't care if you picked that device up and took 
it to Mexico when you go... 

And most of them now also have "add-on" softphone software that you 
could just answer your calls for that line from your laptop and a 
headset/USB handset, and forego taking the gateway hardware with you on 
short trips.

Of course, some of the above is controversial and TelMex has always been 
government subsidized and monopolistic in Mexico, so the "official" 
rules might be that you can't do this, as they'd rather you get a line 
from them... but strictly technically speaking (as long as they're not 
filtering VoIP ports/packets on whatever IP network you're on down 
there), it's all easy to do.

There are Caribbean islands that have banned VoIP usage for phone 
service because the only way they can afford to maintain their switching 
infrastructure is to add-on a lot of cents per minute to long-distance 
calls off the island... and they've amortized that into their payback 
schedules for undersea fiber connects and circuit costs... but they're 
having to reconsider how they're going to finish paying for some of 
these things now that VoIP's here and easy to do. 

It's a very disruptive technology in any country with a monopolized 
phone system or government-run phone system.  Less disruptive in 
countries with competition, but certainly changing the face of phone 
service forever.

Nate