[Wolves] Re: hosting ron's talk

[Stuart Langridge]

> Some of Aq's objections came across as a bit unreasonable.  The reason you
> don't have to worry about, for example, how calls are routed with your
> existing telephone is that you pay someone else to worry about it for you.
> The company you work for has a telecoms department that sort this kind of
> stuff out.
> 
> If you decided, for what ever crazy reason, to set up a non-VoIP telephone
> exchange in your own home I don't think you'd find it any easier than a
> VoIP exchange.  There'd certainly be no shortage of new acronyms to learn.

Ahem. If we're talking about ordinary consumer VoIP, which I was,
rather than deep hardcore hacker VoIP, then people *don't* want to set
up a telephone exchange in their home. They just want to plug in
phones and use them. However, the answer to a fair few of the
questions that people have about VoIP, like "how do I have more than
one phone in my house on the same line" is "Asterisk, that's what you
need". Perhaps your argument is that we're paying the phone company to
currently do that and by wanting to do it ourselves we're cutting out
the middle man, and that's OK; however, if that is the argument, then
(a) we have no choice in the matter at the moment, and (b) if we did
have a choice and could decide to pay an upstream middle-man for VoIP
services like exchanges, what's the point? VoIP isn't a compelling
technology for its own sake if you're not exploiting the power; my
issue was that if you *want* to exploit the power then it's way too
hard.

Aq.