Free Software Voice Over IP Solutions? 79
Shisha asks: "I'm looking for some Voice over IP solution for Unix (Linux, and Solaris in particular). I want to call friends in Prague from the UK. Is there any way how to make the phone call go over the net?" I know there are programs like CCFAudio, Ethernet Phone, FreeWebFone and Speak Freely, however I haven't used any of these programs so I can't say to how well they perform. Have any readers out there tried any of these or have other VoIP solutions that they use that deserve mention?
Is there such a thing as GnuPhonella? (Score:4)
Caller gets on computer,
which is (or gets on) internet via local 'phone/DSL/cable/intranet-gateway/etc.,
caller starts GnuPhonella, enters international phone number
GnuPhonella locates a DestinationCityLocalArea GnuPhonella node that isn't busy, and negotiates service,
Destination node dials *OUT* into DestinationCityLocalArea,
where someone asnwers by *ORDINARY* phone, and
conversation ensues. (FAX could be done similarly).
Does this exist (I mean for cheap h/w with GPL s/w)? Note that it requires simultaneous internet connection and POTS voice dialout at the destination, to get to an ordinary phone in that area, but with non-phone internet connections becoming common (especially in businesses) that should be less and less of an obstacle.
What cards can dial voice connections for your computer? Any voice modem? Or is there more to it? Special wire to audio card from modem like CD wire? Can you have both?
GnuPhonella nodes could be identified first by their international phone prefix paths, so knowing the number you want to dial could do an automatic search for the a node at that area.
BTW, what would be the legal difference between a group doing this as (a) internal between branches of a business, (b) internal to a human family, (c) a private club, (d) an informal group of friends, or (e) an anonymous public association?
Re:Offtopic=6, Funny=7, Total=13 (Score:1)
GO MODERATORS!!!!
Legislation passed (HR 1291) bad for IP Telephony (Score:3)
Here [house.gov] is the bill with the amendment.
The bill is supposed to not allow the taxation of internet services, but at the last minute due to pressure from the TelCo companies, a new paragraph was added to the end making IP Telephony taxable.
What do you guys think?
For more information:
Internet Rally against HR1291 [pulver.com]
A Wired.com article about this legislation. [wired.com]
A ZDNet article. [zdnet.com]
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
--
Originally from the Usenet Oracle (Score:1)
The original text can be found here [wmin.ac.uk].
Meerkat.
Re:VON (Score:1)
Telecom NZ has a contract with the government... the "Kiwishare agreement"... that forces them to keep local phone calls free. They've been using every possible opportunity to try and get around it... the 0867 scheme is a good example, forcing data calls to go through a seperate network so they could charge 2c a minute after 10 hours, except for calls that went to ISPs with 0867-prefixed numbers (so they could then degrade service to all ISPs except their own, XTRA, maybe...)
then there's also the time they decided to make all current prepaid phone cards obsolete with no refunds.... 19 million dollars worth of them. They didn't get to do that, thank god.
They pull something like 12 billion dollars a year out of this country. For a country as small as New Zealand, that's one hell of a lot. Overall, I'd be happier if Telescum were still owned by the government.
Voice over IP Flawed Archtitecturally (Score:1)
MozillaPhone? (Score:1)
How long do you think it'll be before someone writes a VoIP module for Mozilla? Now that would kick ass.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Free VoIP/Videoconferencing Solution (Score:1)
http://ee.lbl.gov/vat [lbl.gov]
Re:VON (Score:1)
Interoperable? Compatable? (Score:1)
Can I use speak freely with Nautilius? Can I use RAT with Voxilla?
TIA for your shared knowledge!
Re:Windows For Telepaths (Score:1)
Your writing is good: do more.
Re:Local calls (Score:1)
And local toll calls are usually more expensive than long distance calls because the local phone company has a monopoly (and to be fair, they also have government restrictions on their base rate, which they have to recoup somehow).
why is this funny? I'm in Israel calling Philly!!! (Score:1)
outside the US, we pay per minute on a local call... international is killing me!
Internet phones a pain... (Score:1)
what i did.. (Score:4)
i was implementing a VoIP solution for a company a few weeks ago where linux based kiosk terminals where euquiped with phones that should be able to make VoIP calls to a central callcenter including video. i looked at the existing software. H323 seems to be the way of the futurere and there are already H323 based solutions on the way. openh323.org [openh323.org]. even thought they where not stable enought for my needs yet. but at least the demo appication (voxialla) was able to interoperate with the M$ netmeeting shit. video transmition with H263 codec (for low bandwith) is also on the way. for my solution i decided to use quicknet [quicknet.net] telephony cards (it greatly enhances the telphony experience if you have a real phone connected to your computer which can also ring and is independent of the sound card). those have a DSP on board which does voice compression accourding to the most important standads. it has a GPL'ed kernel driver. (the only downside is the DSP code itself is not open but that is not that much of a problem).
i decided to just adopt the demo code that came with the quicknet cards for my appolication since it was more stable then the H323 things. (it is easy since the compression is already done on the card). for the video thing i used a parallel netscape server push with 1 picture every 3 or 4 sekunds 160x120 (about 2k Byte) in size). greetings mond.
while the phone co. holds me hostage (Score:1)
As it is, to use VoIP I have to pay for the local call to my ISP... why should I pay double digits USD for a 5 minute call over regular billing!
Gnome-o-Phone (Score:3)
What about Gnome-o-Phone [sourceforge.net]? Also, a Freshmeat search [freshmeat.net] might be helpful...
Re:VON (Score:1)
Using free software is theft because if you want software, you should pay for it.
Sheesh. VoIP is only stealing if you are stealing the bandwidth in the first place.
Re:Is there such a thing as GnuPhonella? (Score:2)
Re:VON (Score:1)
You might want to say this to the people in all the countries that used to have government owned monopolies running all telecom. I'm sure they'll inform you that they were paying a lot more than you are for phone service, and that in many cases it wasn't as good. They'll also tell you that after the market was opened up in their country, and the national telcos privatized, cost has gone down and quality has gone up. Strange, eh? I guess that national telecom monopolies are indeed a superior idea, but we just haven't seen any proper implementations to date. Kind of like communism, I guess.
Local calls, packet queuing, linmodems (Score:2)
I'd like to see such gateways for deaf people, calling out or in at 300 baud to/from textphones using old, cheap modems - the idea is to network deaf people (who use textphones a lot - think keyboard plus very old modem in one package) into the huge world of Internet instant messaging (and maybe WAP and SMS messaging for mobile phones).
As for VoIP - check out the Linux-DiffServ project, its EF (Expedited Forwarding) per-hop behaviour (jargon for a special packet queuing mechanism) is very good at doing VoIP, which needs very low latency and fairly low loss. In other words, your Linux router/firewall, or even desktop, should always send a VoIP (EF marked) packet first, even if other packets are also queued.
The other thing needed is link-level packet fragmentation - Cisco call this LFI, which is proprietary, while the IETF calls it ISSLOW - the idea is that your large (1500 byte) FTP packet should be 'preemptible', i.e. it is actually sent as many small layer 2 fragments (not IP fragments), so the VoIP packet (probably only one layer 2 fragment) can sneak in very quickly after the current short FTP fragment. Compressed RTP headers a la Cisco would be very useful - cuts down IP/UDP/RTP headers to about 2-3 bytes. These tricks are most relevant to low speed lines (modems now, mobile phones in the medium term) However, both of these tricks require your ISP to cooperate, so not so useful for Gnuphonella.
For one major possible latency improvement, see the John Carmack posting a while back about low-latency Linmodem drivers - these will also be important for VoIP without special hardware.
State of Linux Audio Drivers (Score:1)
RW is Cross Platform (PC + Mac) (Score:2)
Wimba -- www.wimba.com (Score:1)
http://www.wimba.com [wimba.com]
Wimba lets you send voice and text messages, with email notification, to individual email addresses, and semi-private and public forums.
Supported platforms include unix and windows. It uses a couple of TCP ports listed on the FAQ, so it may not work behind most firewalls.
Re:Is there such a thing as GnuPhonella? (Score:1)
Re:Windows and Linux VoIP. (Score:1)
actually is. This may degrade the voice quality a little, but it gets rid of that annoying lag.
Not so. I discovered the other day that Linux RealPlayer7 (and, I assume, other versions) will not use all the bandwidth available if you tell it you have a slower connection. It now thinks I have a T1 (I have cable), since none of the other settings made it use all the available bandwidth. Sure, it'll screw up some bandwidth negotiations, but few streams will want more than I have anyways.
I wouldn't be surprised if other apps have this `feature' as well.
---
Re:what i did.. (Score:1)
Check out the Internet Phone Jack [quicknet.net], which is a full-duplex audio card designed specifically to carry your voice over the Internet and the Internet Line Jack [quicknet.net], which connects your local phone lines to an IP network.
:)
And yes, there's full Linux support.
And... no -- I don't work there. I just think it's a very cool product.
Re:Local calls, packet queuing, linmodems (Score:2)
The problem with fair queueing on modems is that the internal buffer inside the modem is usually quite large (on the order of 10 packets), and this buffer isn't subject to queueing. AFAIK the buffer must stay inside the modem for reasons of Tradition and V.42b. All real-time/fair queueing algorithms must muck with the output queue. For real network cards rather than modems, this means NIC drivers can reorder packets inside the FIFO onboard the network card. Each hardware NIC driver must have fair queueing support to deliver a good implementation. Therefore, it will never happen with traditional modems. You will have to buy a new modem, which may not exist yet.
I think you are talking about fair queueing w.r.t. ``Linux-diffserv'' because diffserv is the name of an IETF fair queueing working-group.
There is a lot of research on fair queueing. It deals with issues like the one you discuss, voice packets pre-empting large FTP packets. However, all the papers I've read are a much more advanced discussion than knee-jerk reactions like introducing another complexity into the protocol stack. They typically start with a GPS model in which each packet is 1 bit long, and then generalize the results for discrete packets. The ordering of the packets is actually a lot more interesting than their size.
This research was basically completed about five years ago with Hui Zhang's HFSC [cmu.edu] algorithm, which is implemented in the ALTQ [sony.co.jp] package for *BSD. ALTQ is part of the KAME IPv6 stack that the three BSD's are importing into their trees and tracking as it evolves.
The relevant aspect of these algorithms is their ability to allocate bandwidth and latency separately and predictably. A high-bandwidth, high-latency FTP connection can share the same packet-switched link with a low-bandwith, low-latency VoIP connection. This is what ``real-time scheduling'' means. Although usually those words refer to CPU scheduling, the ideas and algorithms involved are similar if not identical.
This software is a real Computer Science answer to the age-old phone company allegations that only circuit-switched networks will ever reliably carry bounded-latency multimedia streams. It is not new, although it may be new to Linux or to popular use. If implemented on the whole Internet, it's basically proven that these algorithms can guarantee a clean, low-delay connection with no dropouts.
There are other papers about how to distribute some of the processing so these algorithms can scale to the core backbone, as well as stuff about extending them to wireless networks. Some of this research may be ongoing.
Anyone know which VoIP stacks work with IETF's diffserv ideas or RSVP?
Re:Voice over IP Flawed Archtitecturally (Score:1)
- trained from birth to pick up even the smallest flaw
I'd have to differ with you there. How many times per week did you study "listening for flaws"? Humans are interesting creatures, however, we are surprizingly insensitive to many things. If you listen intently for specific flaws, then you are likely to hear them -- even when they aren't there. You might be surprised by the amount of damage to a digital audio signal that you cannot hear.I wouldn't say VoIP is "junk". It's not as perfect as conventional telephony, but for the price, you cannot beat it. I've setup and used VoIP and I found it to be on par with the quality of most cellular phones. The round-trip delay is alot higher and there are flitters of drops as packets get lost or too far out of sequence. In my case, the call was effectively zipping around the planet -- my desk in NC to CA via standard IP into GRIC's private IP network to a partner in Germany and back into the PSTN to a desk in London. There was about a half second delay (I was monitoring the call on my end.) Yes, it was far worse than me dialing London directly from my desk, but at 2.97 CENTS per minute, VoIP beat the crap out of convention telephony.
Re:VON (Score:1)
Do you think anyone would be eager to step up and sell ISP services if people were only willing to pay 2$/month for dialup (56k modem and ISDN), 5$/month for DSL, or 7$/month for T3-like cable modem service? There's no way to make money like that. The "free ISPs" of the world are still very new to the scene and may very well fail hideously -- but then, they make money from advertising, not by selling connectivity. (If banner ads have taught us anything, it's that people become blind to them and even spend money on software to filter them out. How many banner ads are in the web pages you see everyday? How many do you notice? How many do you actually click on?)
Re:Local calls, packet queuing, linmodems (Score:2)
Searching on google.com for linux diffserv and ISSLOW provides reasonable links, btw - the actual links of interest are http://lrcwww.epfl.ch/linux-diffserv/, and for ISSLOW, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2688.txt and http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/issll-charter.h
The Carmack contribution is on slashdot.org, search for carmack and modem. Or see www.linmodems.org and http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Softwar
For general info on QoS and links to DiffServ info, see www.qosforum.com.
Actually fair queuing is only one DiffServ PHB (per hop behavior, i.e. queuing technique basically) - DiffServ is an architecture that specifies where and how traffic should be classified, marked, shaped, metered, shaped and queued/dropped. FQ is only one technique in the diffserv toolkit, and is currently not being standardised within DiffServ. Diffserv also standardises the format and meaning of the TOS byte, and defines some standard codepoints (e.g. EF for low latency, low loss).
FQ algorithms are quite nice, since you can reduce latency without just allocating extra bandwidth to a class/flow, but they are relatively costly to implement on routers, which may be why Cisco implements only a class-based form of FQ within its higher end routers. Although Juniper seems to do more granular stuff... I tend to focus on algorithms that have been implemented and turned on in widely deployed routers (since I work for a policy-based network management company, Orchestream), but there's a lot of research out there, as you point out. Implemented mechanisms tend to be quite simplistic, e.g. PQ-CBWFQ from Cisco is a bandwidth limited priority queue layered on top of a class-based weighted fair queuing setup (the PQ carries VoIP typically).
Linux's diffserv effort is really just a layer on top of the quite impressive set of queuing mechanisms built into the 2.2 kernel. Probably at least as complete as KAME, and able to support RSVP as well as DiffServ apps.
As for modems - you are right about the buffering problem, which is why Carmack et al are looking at how you write a mostly-software modem that can be loaded into the Linux kernel in order to (a) reduce overall latency vs hard modems and (b) allow priority or fair queuing perhaps.
Whatever mechanisms you introduce are protocol transparent typically - PQ, WFQ, WRED, HFSC, etc all simply re-order, delay or drop packets. They introduce extra complexity into the host and router IP stacks, but are normally at the interface queue level.
Apps don't necessarily have to be changed to support DiffServ - just use appropriate linux/BSD commands to classify the appropriate traffic. RSVP does provide more functionality but normally requires the app to be changed somewhat. I don't know specific linux apps that support RSVP, I would guess only the ones that were used when originally testing the RSVP stac (vic and vat??).
CCFaudio (Score:1)
It also offers good multiuser conferencing. Most of the others don't.
On the negative side, it is not compatible with any other iphone. Most iphones offer some standard protocols--vat being the first and there are some newer ones. It wouldn't be very hard to add compatibility modes to CCFaudio, but the funding ran out (it was developed as part of an NSF funded project). Feel free to hack.
CCFaudio can be used with CCFringer which provides a gui for establishing connections. It only works if the other user is using it, too, of course. It hasn't been widely tested.
Hope that helps,
Re:VON (Score:1)
At the moment, we're just hoping that the new wideband wireless bandwidth the government is selling, will encourage competition within the next few years.
Try Nautilus (Score:5)
Nautilus is a free(and open-source) voice over IP(or serial connection) program that focuses on encryption, however you can turn it off if you don't want it, or if you run into truble with export laws. I have ran it many times with it's 2.4Kbit codec, and it sounds much better that anything else I have ever heard over 56k modems. Since your only using 2.4kbit/s, if you are using it over bad links, it can easily resend data and have plenty of bandwith still left over.
It will run under DOS,Windows,and many types of Unix
Get it here [lila.com]Some info (Score:5)
openphone.org [openphone.org]
Packetizer.com [packetizer.com]
SpeakFreely.org [speakfreely.org]
Voxilla.org [voxilla.org]
___
OpenH323 (Score:2)
Another phone... (Score:2)
It works pretty well, but requires a central
'name'server... (yes, you could remove that, it's
GPL).
Author: David Ashley
http://www.xdr.com/dash
Program name: Phone
Program Homepage: http://www.linuxmotors.com/phone
Re:Some info (Score:1)
Windows For Telepaths (Score:5)
Windows For Telepaths
You open the box labeled "Windows TP", carefully extracting the pouch labeled "License Agreement". You examine the contents of the pouch, finding an inflatable beanie bearing the Windows logo rather than the familiar 3.5" diskette package. You inflate the beanie, insert two "C"-size batteries (not included), and carefully place it on your head. You press the Start button.
Immediately, the image of an hourglass comes to your mind. You find yourself trapped; unable to move anything in your body save your eyes. After an indeterminable delay, you regain control of your senses. You are suddenly compelled to speak your name and business affiliation. You then retrieve your Windows TP package and chant the Product-ID number.
Suddenly you see the words "Windows is detecting new hardware" flash before your eyes. You crash to the floor, writhing in agony. You feel every muscle in your body contract and retract in turn. Your mind is filled with the image of a blue inchworm, creeping slowly across a grey field. The creature finally reaches the edge of its domain, and your seizure ceases. You take a moment to regain your composure, and you are reminded of your high school anatomy course as a complete listing of every organ in your body appears before your eyes. You browse the list for a moment, and utter the phrase "OK". After a short delay, you hear the sound of a trumpet echo through the recesses of your mind.
You find yourself in a large, barren space. You look around, and discover images labeled "My Brain", "Recycle Bin, and "Set up the Microsoft Network". You feel compelled to utter the word "Start", after which a list of options floods your mind. Weary from the detection phase, you utter the word "Shut down". You close your eyes, and blackness surrounds you. You feel yourself start to drift into sleep. Your peace is interrupted, however, as a bright orange light invades your nothingness. "It's now safe to shut down your mind".
You drift into unconsciousness, and sleep for several hours. When you awaken, you are frozen in place as you see clouds and blue cycling colors. After a short eternity, the familiar "My Brain" icon reappears in your mind. But something is terribly wrong; you can feel it in your gut. Just outside the range of primary vision, you can sense something lurking about you on all four sides.
You slowly look up, and see the word "Safe Mode" glaring back at you. You back away slowly, swivel your head, and there it is, behind you as well. Your heartbeat quickened and you are terrified as you turn to your left and your right and it meets you there as well, its cold, heartless glare filling your soul with despair.
Quickly, you summon Control Panel, System, Device Manager. You feel yourself frantically gasping for air as you run through the list of installed devices. You come upon "Respiratory System" and are horrified to see a black exclamation point on a yellow field next to the entry "Lungs". You close your eyes and utter the word "Properties". On the closed curtains of your eyelids, you see your life flashing before your eyes.
You force yourself to concentrate on your situation, attempting to discover which system devices are in conflict, when suddenly your entire body seizes up in pain. You lose all sense of reality. You are floating through the clouds as you hear a voice echo through your mind: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated." You start to black out and suddenly you remember your situation. You stare in horror at your blue extremities, knowing that, without oxygen, you will not last much longer. With all the consciousness you can muster, you force yourself... To reboot.
You awaken in a place that is dark, but familiar. A solitary white prompt on a black field greets you. You look behind you and see the wreckage of the operating system that nearly spelled your demise. "Cannot find a file that may be needed to run Windows". You turn around to face the prompt, and a wide grin comes across your face. You take a deep breath and revel in the life-giving atmosphere. You laugh as you utter the words, "DELTREE WINDOWS".
Suddenly you find yourself on the floor of your home. You find the charred remains of the Windows TP beanie littering the floor. You carefully gather them up, stack them neatly on an altar, and burn them, promising yourself never to risk your life with Microsoft again. You bury the ashes, knowing that your life is again in order.
Look at the hardware and possibly reconsider (Score:1)
Unless your soundcard and software can do full duplex (mix incoming and outgoing sounds) the conversation can get very confusing. Unless you are used to saying "over" at the end of a sentence I suppose.
To those saying that you are cheap, I understand. I can ring USA for 3p/min from the UK, but Prague would be 19p/min.
By all means give it a go. However, you may find that you are better sticking to email and instant messaging between expensive calls.
Robust Audio Tool (Score:4)
Re:Windows For Telepaths (Score:1)
Perhaps slashdot could have a "jokes" section or some sort of wholly general message board to prevent such, [but then again, I would probably never read it], eiye! slashboard spam...
Windows and Linux VoIP. (Score:3)
One tip, and I think it may apply to most software packages. Tell the software that your connection is a little slower then it actually is. This may degrade the voice quality a little, but it gets rid of that annoying lag.
I tried this on a PII-266 under WinNT 4.0 SP5 though a firewall using RH 6.0 on a Pentium Overdrive 83 system on a Cable Modem.
I'd like to some software that will let me use OS/2 and Linux to talk to people I know that run Windoze.
Roger Wilco (Score:1)
Roger Wilco (http://www.rogerwilco.com [rogerwilco.com]) is a voice activated net radio system designed specifically to augment games. It is free, and there is a freely available SDK for using it within your own game. I run it in standalone mode, where it has nothing to do with the game itself, it just sits there as another application.
The interesting thing about Roger Wilco is that it doesn't screw up your computer. I run it over Unreal Tournament and it takes very little bandwidth (I don't notice any induced lag) or processor power (again, not noticable on my PII). The game sound comes through clearly and is not interfered with by Roger Wilco. The quality is almost as good as normal telephone. Previously I was not aware that this level of quality was possible.
The company is very intent on becoming the dominant net-voice technology. I don't know if they will succeed, but this is very good for consumers. They give away their software to get a large user base, and I suspect that if enough linux users wrote to them they would open the source for us to port or write a port themselves.
magic
would be better with a william_gibson'esque theme (Score:1)
It would be better with some sort of neuromancer-ish cyberpunk direct brain-machine connection sort of thing.
I'm impressed, kid... Write that up as a short (Score:1)
That's really cute.
Excellent imagination... flows well... re-write it
a bit (I'm sure you know what I mean) and it's
a killer short story..
Thanx...
Re:VON (Score:2)
I'm going to assume for a moment that this was a troll, and I'm also going to assume that they unknowingly (or knowingly, it's not important) brought up a very important point for discussion (although not completely on topic).
Why should you have to pay someone when you make a telephone call? You don't pay for email, except in a very obtuse way. What I think this issue is whether or not access to PUBLIC networks should be free or not. IMHO, there is no excuse for charging for any kind of network. Public network infrastructure, power, phone, net, everything should be nationalized. End of story. Right now, we might pay a few dollars for a universal access surcharce, but that's not what it's about. The phone company expects you to believe that it costs them on a per minute basis to keep up their networks. It doesn't. MCI/Worldcom's cost is about US$0.02 per minute, and you know what, most of that goes to pay telemarketers. There is absolutely no reason why we all can't pay, say, a $70 annual telecommunications tax, and have unlimited connectivity.
It is of course easy to argue that that's where it's going anyway and why bother with all that nasty government stuff. Well, that's what we have government for. The government should be progressive as well as protective. I mean hell if we pay all this money in taxes, shouldn't the government do something insofar as looking towards the future is concerned?
People around here seem to have a problem with monopolies. I don't. Just so long as they're not unregulated, controlling, tyranical monopolies. If MS had always had an open source approach, can you imagine how much better of a product it would be? No more waiting 3 years for a bugfix, etc. But the thing is a monopoly, properly used can be a good thing. In monopolies, you don't have non-compatible equipment to deal with or any of that. And if that monopoly answers to the GAO or some organization, then you wouldn't have things going on like AT&T charging US$0.35/min when it was completely unnescessary.
If we had a national telecom monopoly with progressive leadership, I think that universal access in this country with a reasonable fee is not an unreasonable thing to consider. DSL a couple dozen IPv6 addresses to every home!
And here, the argument that if we take away monetary rewards, we take away incentive for development just doesn't work. It's not like this service would be giving away free OC-192s to Digex or anything. Anyone who wanted to get more than their 'fair share' will have to pay for it. There will still be a market for high band products and services becuase the public network will need it, and there will always be private networks. On the consumer side, this national monopoly would have to fund R&D to be constantly improving the quality of service.
Of course there is the question of practicality and likelyhood. Is it practical? yes. Is it a good idea? yes. Will it ever happen? no.
Here's why not. All the phone companies are not interested in going out of business anytime soon. Bernie Ebers (head of worldcom) does not want to give up his billions in stock to accept a slightly smaller salary to better life in this country. Theres one reason all these guys are in it, money.
There are so many people who would hate it, not because it would threaten their livelyhood, but because it might reduce the value of their stock, if we had a free, high-speed, IPv6 network with say ten billion ip addresses reserved for phones worldwide.
But wouldn't you love it? If you could dial a 10 digit number into your IP-Phone (TM) and be connected to anyone, anywhere in the world?
It's pie in the sky i know, but isn't it fun to dream?
Re:Dialpad, ipmasq'ing (Score:1)
Surfing the net takes far more bandwidth (Score:3)
-russ
Re:Dialpad, ipmasq'ing (Score:1)
#!/bin/sh
#
#
# access on Linux Servers with IP-Masquerading/Firewall.
#
# Add the following to
# Slackware or
# ------------------------------------------------
#
# Start dialpad portfw:
# if [ -x
# .
# fi
#
# ------------------------------------------------
# Change x to your servers ip address.
# Change y to the clients ip address.
#
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -f
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 51210 -R 192.168.0.x 51210
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P udp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 51201 -R 192.168.0.x 51201
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P udp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 51200 -R 192.168.0.x 51200
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -ln
# SpeakFreely
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -f
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2074 -R 192.168.0.x 2074
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P udp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2074 -R 192.168.0.x 2074
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2075 -R 192.168.0.x 2075
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P udp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2075 -R 192.168.0.x 2075
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -ln
#
Try the MBONE programs (Score:1)
Re:Anyone know of a good sound recorder for Linux? (Score:1)
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Re:OpenH323 (Score:5)
There are some problems with the H323 specification in general though. For example:
There are of course many options in the VoIP world right now - SIP is a protocol that works to simplify the processes of the H323 stack. As far as I know, there are a few different implementations of SIP and none of them work very well with each other. You can read more about it here [columbia.edu].
A friend of mine has written some very good articles about Linux and Internet Telephony:
Linux Journal Article [linuxjournal.com]
SVLUG Presentation [openphone.org]
I personally think that the best solution right now in terms of interoperability, quality and Free-as-in-speech-ness is OpenH323 with OpenPhone. Our company uses a combination of Quicknet PhoneJACKs [quicknet.net], OpenH323 [openh323.org], and a few CIPE VPN tunnels to connect people from CA to Texas to Australia at their Linux boxes using real-live ringing phones - at essentially no cost. Quality is very very close to a typical old-guard phone call, even from San Francisco to Sydney over the Internet, _and_ encrypted. Blows my mind whenever I use this stuff. The Quicknet cards have GPL'd drivers and are in the current kernel tree. They seem to add a ton of power to the call by offloading alot of the work to hardware DSPs.
Asterisk PBX and gnophone (Score:1)
Neat stuff.
Re:VoIP?! Give me a break! (Score:1)
Multiple protocols = bad. (Score:1)
Open H.323 (Score:1)
They have a standards based simple phone program
called openphone.
Re:OpenH323 (Score:1)
Now, I am not sure about that, but I am pretty sure. HTTP and FTP, both, allow 8 bit connections. With SMTP the protocol didn't want to assure that, so 7bits are recommended (but not required). Once 7bits are used, the overhead isn't significantly bigger than the 7/8 bandwith limitation you impose.
Do correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:Is there such a thing as GnuPhonella? (Score:1)
Re:Try Nautilus (Score:1)
PGP (Score:2)
Windows only tho (Score:1)
One Microsoft Way
I've used SpeakFreely (v7.1)... (Score:2)
The best part is the availablity of *nix CLI operation! You aren't forced into X to use it; handy on older laptops & PC's.
Re:Some info (Score:1)
Dialpad requires Windows, BTW. Oh, and it only works computer-phone in the US. "anywhare" hardly applies.
Dialpad (Score:1)
Re:dialpad (Score:1)
Speak Freely (Score:3)
Meanwhile, my non-geek friend at the other end installed the precompiled Windows95 binary, played with menus and generally did the dumb-end-user thing and got it running with no problems...
So, for decent sound quality, interoperability with the non-geek world, pretty good reliability, a variety of compression options, - oh, and an echo-server to test your setup against - speak freely is pretty good.
Since I was happy with speak freely, I can't say how it compares to the others.
--Parity
Re:Dialpad, ipmasq'ing (Score:1)
#!/bin/sh
#
#
# access on Linux Servers with IP-Masquerading/Firewall.
#
# Add the following to
# Slackware or
# ------------------------------------------------
#
# Start dialpad portfw:
# if [ -x
# .
# fi
#
# ------------------------------------------------
# Change x to your servers ip address.
# Change y to the clients ip address.
#
# Dialpad
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm autofw -A -v -u -r udp 51200 51201 -c tcp 7175
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm autofw -A -v -u -r tcp 51210 51210 -c tcp 7175
# SpeakFreely
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -f
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2074 -R 192.168.0.x 2074
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P udp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2074 -R 192.168.0.x 2074
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2075 -R 192.168.0.x 2075
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P udp -L 24.x.xxx.xxx 2075 -R 192.168.0.x 2075
/usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -ln
#
Re:VON (Score:1)
You can seriously sit there and think that a government run monopoly will bring innovation and efficiency to the internet? That it will be nimble and willing to provide cutting edge technology to the country? That it will provide free and unrestricted access to everyone? How long do you think Napster would last on a government internet? Hell, here's an on-topic question: how long do you think IP phones would last on a government internet before some bureaucrat decided they were a waste of precious communal bandwidth?
I realize your premise is based on magically staffing this monopoly with enlightened, caring, technically savvy bureaucrats, but honestly, really, you believe that will happen? You believe that it will stay that way after five years? After ten?
It's amazing the number of people that believe that centralized control is good. Or that sending your money into the government somehow means that it will be spent in a more efficient manner.
I would love to have a high speed Ipv6 network. I love IP phones, but you can't get it for free. Someone, somewhere, has to pay for it. Why is it so unreasonable to expect people to make money while providing you with that service?
kphone (aka KT&T) (Score:4)
SIP is the IETF standard for signalling of VoIP calls (as well as other multimedia conferences). It is supported in products by 3Com [3com.com], Nortel, Cisco, ... Very cool.
You can check it out in the kdenonbeta package of KDE 2.0 [kde.org].
Re:VON (Score:1)
Re:Roger Wilco (Score:1)
There are several programs like this for Windows. None I've seen are crossplatform.
The ones I've seen that are crossplatform have had terrible GUI's. So terrible that I had to spend more than an hour to make it work. Not good.
If a project like OpenH323 is completed then we can get down to business. IMHO protocols should never be proprietary, in the end it will make the users suffer.
Re:Use the phone? (Score:1)
Re:Is there such a thing as GnuPhonella? (Score:1)
I've set up VOIP solution for a customer using Clarent [clarent.com] technology. Very effective boxes. We have one in each of their offices and a carrier-class (i.e., much bigger) unit at the telco switch. The boxes plug in to the keysystem at the customer site and all they have to do is dial a 7 to get an "internal" line (dial a "9" to get a local Bell line). The user dials a number and these boxes use their routing tables to decide which box they need to call. A user at location A wants to make a call in city B, and they have an office there, so all he has to do is dial a 7, area code, and the Clarent boxes place this call through the unit in city B. If the area code doesn't have a box in it, then it default-routes to the big box at the telco switch, onto the national Long Distance backbone, and they get discounted LD because they don't have to go through any Bell.
Now, Clarent has *expensive* boxes so that won't work well on small scales. Also, the routing information is stored in a central database which all the satellite units talk to. That brings up the single point-of-failure problem.
IANAL, but it seems like the legal issues are moot. Each node would be paying for local phone service, and paying for internet service. Do what you want with it. The only problem I see is countries which have government monopolies on phone networks. They often have anti-competitive laws in place but this would be an example of tech getting the jump on laws. I doubt any country actually has legislation outlawing anonymous VOIP distributed networks.
The hardware is the only thing left. Most real modems don't interface with sound cards in hardware, nor do they have a "clear channel" mode to let me stuff whatever audio I want on the line. At least, I've never seen one. Some of the weirder winmodems do use the sound card for the tone generator. Those are mostly on all-in-one integrated mobo's, and my intuition tells me they aren't *nix friendly. The hardware would also have to deal with international CO lines which have different tones and electrical characteristics. If anyone out there has an idea for the hardware problem, I'd be interested in working on or starting a GNU project for this. I'd love free international calls.
VoIP? Isn't it really Audio/Video over IP? (Score:3)
Dr. Dobbs Jornal [ddj.com] had one called idtAudio [ddj.com], and did an audio stream. The decoder was in Java, and the encoder in C. It streamed over HTTP. You can get the source there.
DDJ has covered alot of the compression field, and has many articles on the topic. [ddj.com]
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
Re:Some info (Score:1)
Commercial as hell, and works with some active-x component (ngrep ready folks ?) so it's windows only, but the soundquality is astonishing and the delay is less than half a second(tried with isdn)... You can call everyone in the US or Europe. Ok, so it's not voice-over-ip in the way your asking for, but there might be a few folks out there interested in this...
This post is powered by caffeine
Re:dialpad (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Other open source sites for VoIP (Score:3)