[VoIP] Numbering

[Mark Rudholm]

John Novack wrote:
> 
> Mark Rudholm wrote:
>> Greetings, I'm not presently a member (don't have any vintage switchgear)but know of cnet through a friend who is a participant.
>>   
> And you don't necessarily NEED to have vintage gear, simply the hope and 
> desire to someday have some. Some members don't currently have any, some 
> simply some Key equipment and at the other end at least one fellow out 
> West has over 1000 lines and several different technologies working or 
> near working.

I suspect the fellow of whom you speak is the same person
as the friend of whom I spoke.  :-)

> Not sure where in the world you might be, but in the US, at least, there 
> still is a quantity of gear around and available.

I'm in Los Angeles (District Area 5, to be specific)

> You need :
> 1. The desire
> 2. The space
> 3. the willingness and ability and time to go after it.

My hurdle would probably be the space, as I'd have to allocate
some garage space for it.  Plus, I pay up to 27 cents per kWh,
so I'm averse to any significant constant electrical loads.

Having a proper switch would be nice, though, since, amongst other
things, it'd enable me to avoid having to graft Coin Service
functionality onto Asterisk (I don't have any proper switch gear,
but I do have a number of proper payphones that I'm currently
running off a telco DMS100 17Q Coin Service line).

Hmm, what's the smallest, not necessarily vintage, real switch
that could provide DTF coin service and wouldn't eat a lot of
electricity?

> Warning: It is a slippery slope. Once you have some REAL switching gear, 
> you will soon discover how primitive Asterisk really is in certain

I'm aware.

> areas. Unfortunately, the original design was done with out the benefit 
> of some knowledge of history and the current state of the art. Slowly,

Yeah, Mark readily acknowledges this.  I was talking to him
about coin service signaling the other day.  He didn't have
a telephone background when he created Asterisk and I don't
think he knew how popular it would eventually become.

> ever so slowly, some of those shortcomings are being addressed.
> There was a group of users that were using 311, but when Greg redid 
> things after an invasion, they seemed to have disappeared.
> Currently there are a couple of free portals from the PSTN into CNET, 
> but given the current costs of "real" PSTN numbers and the fact that 
> most of us don't have really deep pockets, inward calling to CNET is 
> done the way mobile roaming was done in the early 80's

I already have a route into aforementioned fellow's Asterisk,
so I could use that as a CNET gateway as well.

> Some of us have PSTN outward calling via prepaid SIP services that 
> USUALLY works well.
> I have yet to find an IAX service though.

VoipJet is cheap.  Teliax is good.  Both offer call completion
via IAX2 (Teliax also offers PSTN numbers for inbound).

> Within our private network things work pretty well, give the  
> differences in skill level of the members.
> 
> Welcome to the group and hope you can participate.

Thanks.  Sounds like there's a lot of knowledgeable folk
here.  I like that.

-Mark