>
> the idea was to plug the phone line into a modem card and route the audio
> through an SIP call, thus allowing anyone to call our house and use the
> free long distance.
Well, I hope you don't mean call your house and then make a long
distance call using your phone line so that you pay the toll. I'll
explain how to configure a dialplan to avoid that and that's probably
the first thing everyone needs to learn before running an Asterisk
server. But I think you mean making a SIP connection from another city
to your asterisk server and then to eliminate the toll there. Both are
possible and I'll explain how all that works at the presentation.
> lots of people have cellphones but for some reason or another are required
> to have a land line, which then goes unused.
I'm curious about this. Why would you need to have a landline? Do
certain businesses require it now or something? Back in 1999, I moved
into an apartment and tried going without a landline and just using my
cellphone and wireless internet. I don't remember running into any
trouble like needing a landline.
> this unused telephone
> infrastructure could be put to work as a community resource to provide an
> 'internet phone gateway' for local POTS telephones, or in reverse to allow
> skype/SIP calls to local phones. the software to do this could be
> distributed for free on a custom linux live-CD, only requirements being an
> internet connection and an unused computer with a modem.
That's an interesting idea. One thing that you can do (but I haven't
done yet) is connect Asterisk servers together using the IAX protocol.
Its usually used for redundancy in the same office, but I wonder if its
possible to pool POTS lines together from different locations
transparently. I guess you could theoretically make your own PSTN,
which is basically what the phone companies connect to each other over.
But you'd have to be willing to give up use of your phone line and some
internet bandwidth.
> i'm sure there are a couple terms of service being violated somewhere.
I don't think so, but it depends on the phone company I guess.
--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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