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Voice over IP experiences  16 Aug 2004 We decided to go with VoicePulse for a VoIP provider. The outcome has been mixed. When the quality is good, it is essentially indistinguishable from a regular landline. However, it is more common to get dropouts -- bringing the quality down to a not very good cellphone call. I use WonderShaper to provide traffic shaping on my broadband connection (Comcast). This fixed the interaction between surfing and voice calls. However, we still get significant dropouts. The cause appears to be packet loss somewhere in NYC -- this is based on running traceroute at the troublesome moments. On the upside, the service is cheap -- but it sounds that way too.

Is this the year of Voice Over IP (VOIP)  14 Jan 2004 I've started to play with Asterisk PBX. This is an open source IP PBX. The hassle is getting a device that can talk to a phone. I suspect that the best route to go is with a device like the Cisco ATA (as used by Vonage and others). The Sipura 2000 seems to be rather cheaper and is used by some newer IP vendors. However, it is not clear that my IP service over my cable modem is really reliable enough. I probably need to start to monitor uptime. My plan is to try and route all outgoing calls out over IP and use the landline for incoming and emergency outgoing. I feel that Free World Dialup features somewhere in the solution. On a related note, I found UK-2-ME, which gave me a UK phone number that rings my phone in the US. For free. A UK person who calls this number pays the national rate -- i.e. regular long distance rates. A great deal -- especially at weekends.

Topic:  All Internet Radio Phone Pond Weather

Rolodex

ffmpeg
Open source audio/video streaming software -- this drives my pondcam