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Wireless Networking Hardware

VoIP + 802.11 = Bad News For Phone Companies 225

Posted by timothy from the like-new-buggywhips dept.
r.future writes " Netstumbler, a site that has downloads for software used by wardrivers, points to an article on Red Herring that talks about combining voice over IP and 802.11 wireless technology. The article states "Individually, VoIP and 802.11 are hot technologies with promising futures. Now they are gaining attention for their potential as a combined force. Convergence, or the melding of voice calls over an IP network together with wireless 802.11 technologies, is becoming increasingly popular. VoIP reduces the need for local carrier origination and termination." both Netstumbler, and the Red Harring article point to the University of Arkansas as a example of an institution that has combined the two technologies and was able to "circumvented its local carrier and reduced monthly service fees from $530,000 to a mere $6,000 by using voice over IP technology ""
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VoIP + 802.11 = Bad News For Phone Companies More

VoIP + 802.11 = Bad News For Phone Companies

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  • I use VoIP (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:27PM (#7215382) Journal
    I have experienced no problems with it since I had VoIP installed by my ISP. Long distance calls to the US are essentially free, as are calls to Germany, Japan, and really anywhere except for Africa. I haven't tried calling NZ yet, but I imagine that it's pretty much the same as calling any other place in Oceania.

    • While your example is very interesting testimony, I`d like to point out that the article talks about using .11g wireless and voip for Intra-organisation telephony, you`re talking about the use of the technology to reach extra-organisation people, unless you do have coworkers in NZ, DE, JP, etc...

      I do find it interesting how there is a lot of people talking about how VOIP is going to affect telephony, and telecom regulation... When this is a great example of resistance to exploitation(intra-organisation mo

  • Hopefully a security protocol could be used to make wireless phone communication more secure. Some kind of tweaked up VPN could be used or something.
    -Seriv
  • A few companies might be selling VoIP WiFi "cellphones" in a few years. Interesting idea. But will we ever have a standard network? I only see it becoming like the current cellphone network if only a few companies dominate.
    • Where I work, we have a bunch of Cisco wireless phones that run off of our wireless network. They totally kick ass, although expensive (~$700 each). We are considering strictly going to wireless, when the prices go down.
  • I look forward to the day when telephone
    service as we know it today is completely gone,
    replaced by wireless IP technology.

    Instead of a phone, you carry a palm-pc
    type device that might happen to look a lot
    like the cell-phones of today. Instead of
    having phone service, you have internet service.

    The information superhighway is here at last!
  • So with this technology you're saying we could have phones that are...cordless? Stop the presses! That's amazing! They'll take over the phone companies' markets for sure with revolutionary ideas like this.
    • Not just that. They'll have the range of a... cordless phone! Those 2.4GHz cordless phones use the same unlicensed frequencies and transmit with about as much power as Wifi. Not very useful if you're driving around town between hotspots, but might be good for a campus type environment. You can squeeze more calls into the spectrum with VoIP.
    • The point wasn't to have new or different services, but to save large truckloads of cash.
  • circumvented its local carrier and reduced monthly service fees from $530,000 to a mere $6,000 by using voice over IP technology

    Great. Did they do it with Windows Server 2003? 'Cause I was under the impression that the only way to save 'millions of dollars' on IT these days was to fire your staff and oursource everything to overpriced monopolies.
    • The only way I can see for a typical university to have been spending half a million dollars a month was if they still had Centrex lines, with each phone served by the local phone company office. Figure $20/phone, that's about 25000 phones (probably fewer, because there's also long-distance charges, etc.) If you replace that with a PBX or equivalent, you'll save a lot of money on monthly charges, at the cost of upfront capital, and the big difference that VOIP makes is that IP PBXs are much cheaper than t

  • I think you mean:

    VoIP + 802.11
    == Bad News For Phone Companies

    Don't worry about it. Common mistake for beginning programmers.

  • 802.11 + VoIP == disaster in the making (Score:5, Insightful)

    by puzzled ( 12525 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:33PM (#7215417) Journal
    We occasionally see annecdotal evidence that 802.11 can successfully carry voice traffic. These events are highly situational and generally only happen in rural areas where a single player controls all the high ground. If you're writing a business plan based on transiting voice on a point to point unlicensed band link you're very brave, if you're planning on doing it point to multipoint you need one of those jackets that helps you hug yourself. I've deployed 802.11b, Alvarion Breeze Access II, and various UNI band access products in a five county area that contains the 53rd largest metro area in the US. Note that I said "I have" - my BP had been 110/70 my whole life but in the last ninety days before I quit that and got a job that paid it peaked at 148/98. Even if you avoid the stock fraud dirtbags, the outright equipment theft dirtbags, the theft by deception dirtbags, and the cheesy mafioso dirtbags with grandfathered licenses in the ISM band, you're still facing the simple fact that any dork with $500 and a building on top of a hill can start a wireless play, crap all over the spectrum, and there simply isn't any recourse. Voice belongs on licensed spectrum and it always will. The *only* exception to this is sideband T1 usage on high quality point to point links - think Proxim Tsunamis at $14k a pair and you're on the right track.
    • While you may dismiss this as more annecdotal evidence, I currently have VoIP running over 802.11b in a large manufacturing environment. I wouldn't suggest VoIP over 802.11b in a muli-company building, but on a large campus it works quite well.

      The equipment is all Cisco and works flawlessly. The only time I can tell that someone is calling from a wireless VoIP phone is when I hear manufacturing noises in the background. The call quality is much better than a cell phone in my experience. Plus, you get



      • If you own *all* the land around and there isn't any other hot ISM band stuff in operation that can work. I've got one small microwave cell on a campus where the owners control everything in the area and we're installing another one at another of their locations today. The second location is in a very hot area, ISM wise, so the antennas are on the back sides of buildings away from the noise. Its a backup to a private link under a road so I'm hoping that a.) its clean and b.) that it will never be used e
    • Don't most cordless (not cell) phones already use this same unlicensed spectrum? Seems to work well enough.

      The article doesn't say how much of the university's voice traffic uses 802.11, vs how much is placed directly on the wired network. I don't see many cordless phones in offices or campuses, so I wonder what is the importance of 802.11 in this setup?

    • Some input from a guy working for a company selling hardware to wannabe ISPs and Telephony Service Providers. You might say I have a vested interest in saying what I say, as we sell the stuff that works. I'll just avoid dropping any names and brands and cut to the facts.

      1.
      Yes, telephony belongs in a licensed band. you cannot build a business on providing VoIP in the 2.4G band, unless you intentionally break all kinds of regulations. If you do stick to regulations, any nutter can put you and your customers

      • You're obviously one of those bloody brits :-) We don't have nearly the government overhead here on private telco stuff - if it works, you can go ahead and use it.

        I've done one point to point T1 bypass in ISM band over a 16.7 mile link. Worked fine until one of the aforementioned dirtbags in town decided to put his ten watt(!) 2430 MHz license to use for the purpose of extracting 'tithes' from wireless providers. Talk about a comedy - low grade mafiosos attempts to mug an industry with no money. It'd
    • It seems to me that even though the data carried by a phone conversation at even normal rates of 56kbps is pretty small, by the time you add in packet overhead, framing, etc, you're actually talking more like 70kbps or more in actual bandwidth consumed, and I've yet to see a 802.11b station that could really deliver more than 800-900kbps in even ideal conditions (1 PC, 1 base station, adjacent to each other).

      Which means you MIGHT get 10 active voice calls on a single base station without running into drops
      • In a long-haul environment, the most common speeds are 8kbps of compressed voice using some G.729 variant, optionally with silence suppression, such as Cisco's G.729ab. With IP overhead, this is typically about 22kbps unless you also add IPSEC, in which case it's worse. (There are ways to get ~11kbps, but not usually.) If you're doing silence suppression, average utilization is about 50-60%.

        There are other environments which run uncompressed voice, but most or maybe all of the Cisco stuff can do compres


        • You get 8kb out of G729 but the RTP overhead is 16kb. If you own both ends of the link you can use rtp header compression and it gets knocked back to about 8k but that is strictly a Cisco to Cisco thing.

          The RTP RFC is somewhat vague - it says you can't multiplex voice and video, but there is no explicit prohibition on multiplexing like streams. Cisco is conservative and uses one RTP stream per voice stream. Other plays like Nuera will multiplex voice streams headed for the same destination into one

  • Spammers and Telemarketers will combine forces (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Then you'll get several hundred calls per day asking if you want to enlarge or reduce certain body parts.
  • By using its existing TCP/IP networks and spending $4 million for a Cisco Call Manager, the university circumvented its local carrier and reduced monthly service fees from $530,000 to a mere $6,000.

    GREAT IDEA! They spent $4,000,000 to save 500,000.

    Of course, this is Arkansas we're talking about. They aren't much good with the number-learnin'.

    (and there's no mention of other facility/staff expenses, either, so who knows how much money this really "saves")
    • Assuming the service fees would remain the same, the initial investment will pay for itself then it will start actually saving money.
    • You do realize that in less than 8 months it will have paid for itself...
    • from Arkansas. That's $524,000/month, jackass. More than $6.3M/year. They just saved a ton.
    • Ummm...you do realize that says monthly, right? I live in Arkansas and I figure that as paying for itself in less than 8 months and saving over 6 million a year after that.

    • Re:GREAT IDEA! (Score:2, Informative)

      by mbd1475 ( 18047 )

      By using its existing TCP/IP networks and spending $4 million for a Cisco Call Manager, the university circumvented its local carrier and reduced monthly service fees from $530,000 to a mere $6,000.

      GREAT IDEA! They spent $4,000,000 to save 500,000.

      Of course, this is Arkansas we're talking about. They aren't much good with the number-learnin'.

      (and there's no mention of other facility/staff expenses, either, so who knows how much money this really "saves")

      As a senior business student at the University

    • I'm guessing you live in California, where it is a BAD idea to spend $4 million ONCE to save $500,000 a MONTH.

      Oh, and remember, this is a University not a business, so they will definitely be around long enough to see the return on their investment.

      Maybe you should get a bit of "number learnin'" yourself.
      • I'm guessing you live in California, where it is a BAD idea to spend $4 million ONCE to save $500,000 a MONTH.
        Initial investment aside, there is the question of how much of that $500K/month will be eaten up by running the service in-house. Fortunately the article answers that question: "...expects to cut the costs of internal calls by $21 million over the next decade." So they're netting $175K per month - not $500K, but pretty darn impressive!

    • GREAT IDEA! They spent $4,000,000 to save 500,000.

      Of course, this is Arkansas we're talking about. They aren't much good with the number-learnin'.


      $500,000 per month. Read the fine article, Charlie Brown. ;) That means they recoup their losses in 8 months and every month after that is pure gold.
    • He just wanted to take a swipe at the stereotype of "Arkansas." In reality, the investment will have paid for itself in less than 8 months and then the savings will begin.

      You must not be too good at number-lernin'

      James
  • All these reports on higher speed processors and 3D laptops are nice and the SCO reports sometimes amuzing but this is great. Both using new technology and cutting big company profits out of consumer bills is never bad news to me. I would personally like to see more of this possitive usage of technologies that directly benifits me. Who wouldn't?

  • Dual mode phones (Score:4, Insightful)

    by doormat ( 63648 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:41PM (#7215458) Homepage Journal
    I dont see cell phones that are only 802.11 going anywhere anytime soon, but I do see dual mode phones taking the market. Making a call via 802.11 when available and using the normal cell phone network when 802.11 is too busy or unreliable.
    • There's no demand for something like that, in my opinion. You'd still be paying your $40-90/mo for your service plan with your cell provider. What's the point in it trying to use 802.11 when it can? Saving minutes? Just really not worth it. Again, IMO.
      • you'd be saving few pennies every now and then.. totally not worth it.

        anyways, for the service to work on more places than your home neighbourhood you'd need some centralising (or maybe youd just connect to your home computer always? a ping and support disaster in the making) that you would end up buying a plan for -guess what?- a voip provider.

        the one place these might get somewhere are portable intercoms, but for even those (in some markets, with very reliable gsm providers) companies have just started
      • I'm thinking there is a huge market for college kids. Get a $30/mo pay plan (or even pay-as-you-go), and assuming that the college campus is wifi-enabled you could drastically reduce the amount of time billed to the traditional phone company. Most of their time is spent on campus anyways, and it could cut down on their phone budget a lot.

  • Its coming (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zaffle ( 13798 ) * on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:44PM (#7215471) Homepage Journal
    Many of the people I've spoken to in the area of 802.11, wireless, and telecommunications have indicated this for awhile.

    In fact, I spoke with a guy earlier in the year about a wireless internet access product his company provided. When he revealed the device is currently the size of a pack of cigaretes, and will be getting smaller, while providing megabits of bandwidth, I made a comment about putting VoIP into it and turning it into a phone. At that point he shut up and said something to the effect of, yes, well, thats a distinct possibility.
    I got the impression that was exactly where they are going.

    The idea behind VoIP on 802.11 style networks is if you have a big enough grid, you can do away with cellphones for that area.

    There is still the problem of routing calls outside the "cloud" of coverage. Obviously each company would need its own internal phone solution still, but if the "cloud" gets big enough, you'll find that companies start offering 802.11+VoIP to teleco phone gateways.

    I find it nice in the sense that the PRS radio system could replaced in these 802.11 hotspot areas. By making a small 802.11 phone, you could provide "free" wireless calls inside a 802.11 "cloud".

    I say free, because bandwidth will ALWAYS be the bain of a wireless users existance, until solutions such as UWB (Ultra-Wide-Band (check it out, very exciting technology)) become a reality, wireless will always be slower than wired.

    As geeks, unless we work for someone big like IBM, Bandwidth is always a precious resource. You can never have too much. Wireless networks never have enough. Try fitting 20 VoIP calls down a 802.11b wireless network and see how it runs.

    I'm not saying it won't work, in fact, I'm saying the oppisite, it will. It will just require some more technology, and a bit more planning than most people realize.

    On another slightly related note: Anyone know where I can buy a 802.11b frequency jammer?

    • Re:Its coming (Score:5, Funny)

      by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:55PM (#7215531) Journal
      On another slightly related note: Anyone know where I can buy a 802.11b frequency jammer?

      I think they're called Microwave Ovens. You'll probably have to mod it to remove some safety features, but it should have the desired effect when turned on in the vicinity of any 802.11b receivers. You might want to invest in a pair of shielded briefs and a grounded tin-foil hat though...
      • You might want to invest in a pair of shielded briefs and a grounded tin-foil hat though...

        Well, heck - haven't all the Slashdotters with 5-or-fewer-digit ID #s long since invested in those already?
        ;)

      • I think they're called Microwave Ovens

        Actually, you don't need to modify the microwave at all. Any $20 Wal-Mart microwave produces enough interference to disrupt 802.11b, especially if it is significantly closer to the access point than the host.

        I support a manufacturing plant that uses 802.11b for some robots on the assembly line. During lunchtime the Wal-Mart microwaves were knocking robots offline. We ended up buying industrial microwaves that were designed not to give off excess radiation.

      • Even more efficient and portable are very cheak 2.4gHx cordless phones. There are several made by Panasonic that hog the ENTIRE 2.4 ISM band. Just charge it up and bring it with you to wherever you want to nuke WiFi access for a decent area. Take it near an AP for more fun.

      • I can highly recommend against grounding your tinfoil hat. Think about it.
    • You currently own a 802.11b freq jammer, it's called a "microwave oven." It operates in the same freqency range, just disable the safety features (among other minor modifications) and you're ready to blast out the local wlans. Your typical oven provides about 1000 watts, well above the measly 30-100 milliwatts your pc card can produce, and 1000 times "louder" than the FCC permits commercial 802.11 b transmitters to operate at.
      have fun.
    • 802.11b is in the 2.4 Ghz unlicensed band, anyone and everyone can play there. Just fire up a microwave oven and watch people start losing their connections.
    • The best that is being oferred is a little like the DECT phones. Great, but you are logged into one base station only. If you move (or the RF moves), your call is lost.

      The thing about GSM or whatever is that there is a transport protocol and a mechanism for allowing your call to be effortlessly handed off to another access point. However with GSM, you login to a network of base stations when you switch the telephone on. You can't roam to another provider's base station unless you logout and log back in.


  • SexOverIP [kungfunix.net]! Act now and soon you too will have hundreds of 'Girls Gone Wild' throwing <strike>things</strike> themselves at you. Girls dig geeks! Then you can use your new VoIP for SoIP. You can also fight any e-VD with Norton Antivirus. Act now protocols are limited.
  • "...the University of Arkansas as a example of an institution that has combined the two technologies and was able to circumvent its local carrier and reduced monthly service fees from $530,000 to a mere $6,000 by using voice over IP technology"

    All of which savings were transferred to the football team. I mean, this is the South we're talking about.

    • I go to the U of A. You should see the jumbotron in our stadium. Kinda makes you wonder why they don't throw that much money towards bettering our academic reputation....
      • If U of A is anything like University of Georgia, they don't mix their academic budgets with their athletic budgets. All of the money that is made through the athletic department is kept within that department and vice versa.
    • I went to the UA. They don't mix money. And they are working very hard to raise their reputation. They've done an amazing job in the 8 years since I started there...
    • .. reduced monthly service fees from $530,000 ..

      How do you spend half a million dollars a month (!!!) on phone service? Did they all their calls routed via Fiji Islands?

      If the U of A has 2000 phones, then monthly bill for each would be $250. Sounds like they were being ripped off..

  • Single point of failure (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:46PM (#7215484)
    My boss tried to advocate this for our new building. The next morning the halfcompetents who run our IT department had the network go down for a couple of hours. Not to mention the fact that most of the site was paralyzed for 3 days by the last round of worms.

    Sorry, you've just bundled all my communication over a single VERY FAILURE-PRONE medium. I'm willing to pay for 5 or 6 9s of uptime rather than cruise by on the cheap. If we had VOIP we couldn't even get in touch with our department tech (savvy and on top of things) when we got DoS'd.

  • Dartmouth, Vocera (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dolohov ( 114209 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:48PM (#7215503)
    This has been a big topic on the Dartmouth campus lately, with VoIP being set up campus-wide. There are lots of people who will just use it with their laptops, but several profs already have a nifty little device from Vocera [vocera.com] which hangs around the neck on a lanyard and is mostly voice-driven. (The comparisons to a Star Trek communicator in the article are actually pretty apt, except for the size) Their CEO was just here a couple days ago giving a lecture on the device. Very cool stuff, though most of the software is necessarily server-side, and seems to cost a hefty amount.

    It's partly being touted as an alternative to cell phones (reception sucks up here) but 802.11 reception is too limited to make it worthwhile for those of us who live off-campus. Still, I'll be watching carefully to see how it goes.
  • We have experimented with voip and just a few nodes. I can see that it has the potential to save a HUGE chunk out of our current telecom budget, but will require upgrades in the form of new desktop computers, new desktop OS, new servers with new licenses to support the new desktops.... It will save $500,000 but will cost us $1,000,000 easy. I know it's the right decision for the long run, but the investors are not willing to give up the cash.
    • Why the new desktops and servers? There are standalone units, like the Cisco IP Phone (yeah, it's cisco, but they aren't too horribly priced). Start switching the phones out, a few at a time.
  • Why pay USF to incumbent carriers to string more monopoly copper pair (even at a discount to low-income, educational/library and rural users) when new upstarts can deliver equivalent tech for even cheaper than that to everyone?

    The one thing telecos can deliver on is reliability (big-ass banks of batteries power COs during outages) but even that can be shifted to local co-ops who can repackage service from wireless/voip carriers along with local copper pair or self-contained boxes with a big battery, wirel
  • I am, within a month, going to installed "multiplexed T1" system over a pair of Proxim wireless units. It will link two schools that I have jurisdiction over, and provide telephone service between them. This will save the district almost $1000 per month in T1 charges. It's not quite VOIP, but it's the same concept of voice-over-digital-data-lines.
  • I mean, anything that kills Kristina from Teen Girl Squad is a good thing.

    Aside from that, it really is awesome. Charles County Maryland's Public Schools, where i work, is ripping out all the traditional million dollar phone systems at the schools and replacing everything with Cisco switches and IP phones. Doing so is set to save us $300,000 a year of the taxpayers' money.

  • This newfangled "horseless carriage" is bad news for the horse and buggy industry.
  • You can see it coming.

    A faster internet means no need for cable television any more.

    Probably the reason the Cable Barons are trying Video on Demand. But it will be useless against the tide .

  • VoIP questions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DanThe1Man ( 46872 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @10:01PM (#7215568)
    Are there any VoIP software that lets you call from the internet to an actual phone? I've seen tons of internet to internet proprietary phones, but never one like that.

    Does anyone know software like this?

    Is there a reason software like this dosn't exsist?

    What would need to happen to get software like this to work?
    • A service not software, but does the job.
    • internet to internet proprietary phones

      Please don't call them 'proprietary'. Almost all software and services available use open protocols, even MS Netmeeting. Most of the time, reference implementations are available open-source. They won't help you use unsupported clients, but that doesn't mean it's 'proprietary'.

      software that lets you call from the internet to an actual phone... Does anyone know software like this?

      Sure. Most protocols have allowances for a link to the pots network. They're usual

      • Almost all software and services available use open protocols, even MS Netmeeting.


        Unfortunately, most of which are wholly unusable unless you have you're own IP address and full control over its routing/firewalls. Here's a hint - just because the ports above 1024 aren't specified for use, that doesn't mean you can take _all_ of them.
      • I signed up for Vonage and ended up canceling about two weeks later. I love the idea and the price is excellent, but the network latency killed it. Even though the pauses between sentences were very short, people seem to be very sensitive to them. Everybody I spoke to on the phone asked me if there was something wrong with my phone.

        When I returned the equipment and they asked me why, I told them it was like using a crappy cell phone. I was hoping for something as good as or better than my land line and sad
    • In Japan, most of the Yahoo-BB customers are signed on for BB-Phone, which can call either other Yahoo-BB customers or any land-line. I think support for cellular phones is on the way.

    • There are several different options - Hardware, Consumer-oriented Services, Business-oriented Services. Remember that the issue isn't just the software - you're connecting your network to the phone company's network, so somebody has to provide the actual physical connection. The protocols used are typically either H.323 (older), SIP (newer), or sometimes proprietary. Most of the services want to charge you money, but they're usually pretty cheap - particularly for international calling to Asia, where pho
  • I like the concept of this unified technology, but let's face it, using Part-15 concepts just are not going to cut the mustard.

    For starters, do you actually think the likes of Verizon and SBC will sit idle while the world creates virtually free mobile telephone service? I think not. They'll flood the world with free cordless telephones that, without coincidence, will be right smack-dab in the middle of the 802.11 bands. I'm thinking they'll literally give these things away with the intent of making thes
    • Not to mention there are licensed users in that band that can run much higher power, and have legal priority over Part 15 users.

      This device complies with part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions:

      1. This device may not cause harmful interference, and
      2. this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.

      If a licensed user wipes out every 802.11 network in the neighborhood, too bad. That's the risk you

  • Based on this press release [uapb.edu], it looks like a lot of people may be watching how this project is turning out. I'd be interested in what's motivating the city of Houston to dump $15 million into their telephone system. Are they trying to get away from paying the telcos or will residents have access to parts of this system?

    I'd love to see my university, UBC, take part in some of these projects. We [ubc.ca] have a massive campus, with a great wireless network [wireless.ubc.ca] that's free for the students. It'd be great to see some pro
  • As a graduate student of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (this is really about the Fayetteville campus only for now...), I have to say that so far the conversion has been seemless. I had heard about this but didn't know how far along it was, to know that it is DONE amazes me. For all intents and purposes, nothing changed...except saving $500,000 per month for the school.

    Once they completely finish the 802.11 campus-wide network, this will actually be a decent campus, technology wise.
  • Isn't this something like wireless in local loop? I've seen WLL in action in India. It's great for developing countries like India that don't want to dig up the streets to add telephone cables.
  • There are a number of 802.11b VoIP devices currently available on the market.

    Cisco makes the 2920 [cisco.com] but still requires Cisco call manager as a back end.

    and one of the more affordibale and interesting products is the Pulver Innovations WiSIP [pulverinnovations.com] Phone. (short for WiFi SIP).

    As well as other products made by companys like Symblol [symbol.com]

    Between these and Asterisk [asterisk.org], "The Open Source Linux PBX" (which works quite well btw) you can come up with great solutions, and some really neat applications.
  • I saw this coming a while back...but phone companies here seem oblivious. When I told a friend working for the biggest phone company over here, guess what he said: 'there must be laws against that'!

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