[somewhat off-topic] Comcast and Verizon

[Dan Ritter]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 01:10:13PM -0400, Bill Horne wrote:
> Dan Ritter wrote:
> > and Comcast without getting an all-you-can-talk local and
> > continental US LD plan included. International is likely to be
> > of average cost, but if you're really concerned, setting up
> > Asterisk and going minute-by-minute with Teliax or VoipJet or
> > someone like that is reasonably easy and quite cheap.
> >   
> 
> Oh, please, _please_ tell me more!
> 
> My kid just ran up a $100+ LD bill, and I've had to have charge 
> restrictions placed on my line to prevent a recurrence, but my wife 
> doesn't like dialing 800 numbers and having to enter access codes, so if 
> there's a "transparent" solution, I'm all ears.

How transparent do you want?

A Linksys PAP2T costs under $50 and provides two lines to plug
phones into and an ethernet jack. If you pay for it, lots of
providers will talk directly to that box for you. 

Or you can hook it up to Asterisk on basically any Linux box you
have running all the time, including some very small ones. With
Asterisk, you can do all the PBX things you want. For several
years, we had a 256MB P3-era Celeron 1 GHz handling 20 or so
users, voice mail, menuing, etc. It was never stressed.

If you just want outbound calling, for instance, VoipJet is 1.1
cents/minute in the Lower 48, 0.4 cents to most of Canada, etc.

For $12/month plus 2.9 cents/minute, you can get an inbound number 
from Junction Networks. (They do outbound, too, but why pay more
than VoipJet?)

Both of these are prepay services -- put some money in, never
find yourself with an unexpectedly huge bill. It's easy to have
Asterisk restrict things, too.

-dsr-


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