[Gllug] skype

[Russell Howe]

Rev Simon Rumble <simon at rumble.net>, on Tue, 1 Feb 2005 16:11:12 +0000, said:

Something about 18666.com or something - a cheap calls provider.

I'm sure someone from Gllug (Richard Cohen?) recommended Telediscount to me (www.telediscount.co.uk) who I've found to be pretty damn good (quality sometimes suffers, but you can always redial...). They don't do direct billing, so you literally pay-as-you-go, work from any phone line without prearranging anything (paid by the person who pays the bill for the line).

FYI, they get their income from the telcos - either 0845/0844 numbers or premium rate numbers.

The prices they quote are BT's standard rates. If you use some other company for calls, they may charge differently (telediscount have no real say in what your telco charges).

No, I don't work for them, but at 1p/min to Hong Kong, I use them a fair bit!

Also, I must buy Damien Sandras (gnomemeeting author) a drink or 20 at FOSDEM. GM is a wonderful wonderful product (even though it doesn't do SIP - v2.0 will, though)

As for VoIP stuff... sure, skype works, but it's proprietary and therefore not so interoperable. SIP and H.323 are harder to implement, with varying degrees of NAT-friendliness, but are probably better if you want control (i.e. in a corporate environment).

skype is also a closed protocol and therefore is not open to public scrutiny. History has shown that this is rarelt, if ever, a good thing where a network protocol (especially one which purports to be secure, as skype does) is concerned.

For those who haven't played with asterisk, it's not as bizarre as it first seems, and it's a lot of fun once you get used to it!

Someone's already mentioned it, but http://www.voip-info.org/ seems to be the site Google favours, and is pretty useful, as is the #asterisk channel on irc.freenode.net and the #gnomemeeting channel on irc.gimp.org

VoIP, like LDAP, X.509, IPsec, Linux's QoS, Linux's advanced routing and various other really really useful technologies seems to be lacking in any really practical documentation (and yes, www.lartc.org might cover QoS and adv. routing, but I found I had to read it about 20 times before it even began to sink in. Not the way docs should really be IMHO).

-- 
Russell Howe 




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