Joe gets it when it comes to open-standards and VoIP. In his post Why I hate Vonage he bemoans the fact that commercial VoIP providers don’t support SIP addresses, ENUM, and other VoIP open-standards that would allow users to make more free calls.

He compares the situation to email:

Can you imagine if you were charged every time you emailed someone using a different email provider, because your provider printed out the message, put a stamp on it, and mailed it to the other provider? Of course not! Yet we allow VOIP providers to take our call, run it over an analog phone line, to send it to another VOIP provider, and charge us for it. And why would they do otherwise? Comcast Digital Voice charges 27 cents a minute to make a call to Argentina. If you and your other party were both using a provider that used an open SIP system, you could connect directly, through SIP; instead, they’re collecting quite a bit of money for not a whole lot of effort.

He correctly notes that:

ENUM allows completely seamless integration of VOIP and POTS: if you’re calling someone still using a regular telephone, your provider connects for you and you’re charged accordingly; if you’re calling someone whose also using SIP, it’s completely free.

Sound familiar? That’s exactly how PhoneGnome works. You simply lift the handset and dial real phone numbers. If the call can be sent free via VoIP, it will be. Otherwise, it is placed to the traditional phone network (at discounted rates). As Joe says: “As more people switch to the new system, the system runs even better.”

PhoneGnome is the only user-friendly, mainstream consumer focused commercial VoIP service that fully embraces the open standards Joe refers to, including SIP interoperability, ENUM, ITAD/ISN, and free WEB 2.0 XML-RPC APIs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.