A VoIP Milestone: Friday Oct 31, 2008

For quite some time I’ve had a SIP URI of one sort or another. It started with FWD, but I also have Gizmo5 and OnSIP accounts as well. I’ve made some of them public for over three years. I even published one in an article on SmallNetBuilder, which surprised the publisher a little. If you’re looking at the blog on my web site just glance to your right and you’ll find my current SIP URI.

Well Friday, while working in the yard setting up the displays for Halloween, I received a completely out-of-the-blue call from a gentleman in Romania…routed via that SIP URI. This is to my recollection the very first such call that I’ve ever received.

I was at first a little confused as the gentleman was not really trying to reach me, he was testing to see if the call would go through. It did, in fact it was forwarded to my cell phone, which I answered while in the front yard.

I hope that the next call takes a lot less time to come through. I’d like to see people using SIP URIs more and bypassing the PSTN completely. That will position us to see more of the as-yet-unrealized benefits of VoIP.