April 16 2006 — Truman Boyes

A good relaxing day today; woke up late; read the Dominion Post cover to cover, then cleaned up the home office.

Passed my Access Protocols Chapter to Chris on the weekend; I need to add the DHCP section to finish it up. Its been crazy lately with all the writing that everyone has been asking for.

I have about 4 outstanding documents that I need to have finished up in about 4 weeks. Combine that with the fact that my work visa expires in about 10 days and I have been going to doctors for medical tests to give to Immigration, I have had literally no time.

Next month I will go to Hong Kong for an SDX setup combined with E-series. After that, after heading back to NZ, I plan to do some work in Thailand.

I started using Gizmo Project again on my PowerBook, which is excellent for traveling or just making voip calls while tethered to your laptop. I picked up a generic Dick Smith (sort of like a radioshack in NZ) branded USB phone that works fine. The buttons on the phone don't work with OS X, but I imagine they work even better on a Windows PC; however I just needed to phone to act as a headset. Dialing works from the application as expected. I put $10 on the accounts and placed some calls to the USA and was pleased with the quality, considering I was also wireless (802.11b) in the house, then routed from NZ to USA on the Internet, then passed to a PSTN handoff, then routed to my dad's cdma phone.

I still use my Asterisk running on the Mac Mini to power the other IP phones in the house, which work great through Broadvoice. Also, due to the fact that I am rarely home enough to warrant the monthy costs of BV 's world plan, I have been thinking about switching over to a pre-paid account with Sipphone.com, which runs the gizmo project. The DID numbers are cheap enough, and I imagine that my calls will be mostly to USA, Taiwan, China, Australia, and New Zealand.

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With everyone getting voip phones these days and the free nature of the beast, I wonder if we will see Telemarketing to SIP phones as the next spam? Telemarketing in PSTN networks is highly traceable and preventable due to CDR's from Carriers, and legislation, but what about calling that originates from countries all over the world. If the calls are Internet-only, I wonder if the legal systems of the world would work just as well as they do to regular email SPAM?

Wikipedia has the topic listed as SPIT (VOIP SPAM).

Originally published on trumanboyes.blogspot.com. See the archived copy.