Re: X11R6.9/X11R7 release wranglers call 4 Nov 2005

On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 17:04 +0100, Egbert Eich wrote:
> Jim Gettys writes:
>  > IIRC, Keithp and Carl Worth set up Asterisk on fd.o; we could conference
>  > via VOIP there.  I'll check with them.  I know Keith's been playing with
>  > kphone with success as well.
> 
> As I've stated they may not be a viable alternative for everyone.

Asterisk can easily run telephone interfaces, and have seamless
teleconferences with conventional and VOIP participants.  Then we don't
necessarily need any carrier at all.  This is how W3C does its
teleconferences, I believe, and Ralph Swick (of Xt) did a lot of
software for scheduling, etc, such a bridge.

Whether we have a suitable machine with phone lines available near by,
however, is much less clear. Asterisk also can talk to other asterisk
servers, that might be someplace else where there are available phone
lines.

I dunno if anyone provides such a service commercially for other
asterisk users; the community and businesses growing up around asterisk
are large enough it is entirely possible.

The hardware interfaces are actually quite cheap: you can start playing
the game for all of around $100US.


HMMMMMMMMMMM....  I just thought of a probable solution.  Broadvoice,
the VOIP carrier I use, will talk to asterisk servers; cost is about
$21/month per line and for a few bucks more you can even have 800 number
service.  This is part of why I chose Broadvoice (so I can eventually
have my own asterisk system in my house).  They also seem to have very
good international coverage, and offer numbers in a bunch of countries.

We could run our own Asterisk server on our own system, and pay
Broadvoice for enough conventional numbers that those who still need to
call in conventionally could do so.

See www.broadvoice.com.

			- Jim