End-user perspective on small office tools & technology

A Brief Prehistory of Voice over IP parts 1 & 2

I learned about this in a post by Shawn Merdinger to the VOIPSEC Mailing List. It’s a Google Tech Talk going way back to the beginning of what we now call “VoIP.” The presentation is by Danny Cohen and Stephen Casner. It’s a long video, but it’s very interesting.

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  1. Hello Michael,

    I apologize for off-topic question:
    I’ve found your detailed comment @ http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r24856177-How-to-set-up-direct-sip-calls-without-a-provider- about the possibilities of calling voip routers directly, which ended with a sentence: “Of course, if all you seek is a single point-to-point link there are easier ways…..
    I would like to kindly ask what are those easier ways? I am looking for some simple one-time solution that would allow to make computer to “some device(not computer) connected to analog phone” calls, therefore I would like to ask you if you know of any other alternatives that are currently available on the market to the voip router(i.e. pap2t or equivalent) which I was planning to use for establishing a simple 2 way communication between two points over the internet.
    Thank you.

    SIncerely,
    paul

    1. I cannot speak specifically to a voip router like the PAP2 as I’ve never used such a device. However, every ATA that I’ve ever used had some kind of “hotline” syntax for the dialplan. Such that any dialing action, or even picking up the handset on the attached phone, would cause the device to ring a predefined number or SIP URI.

      Here’s a link to a forum post describing how this is done using an SPA-3102. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1337272

      My own intent, as yet unrealized, was to use this very facility to add a doorbell/gate phone at our fence. I’d use an analog doorbell phone plugged into an ATA, having it ring an extension that was registered to one of the accounts on our Gigaset home phones.

      If both devices are on your LAN then NAT should not be an issue an you can likely dial by IP address. If they’re not on the same network, and so you’re facing NAT, you may find it easiest to register them with one of the many free SIP service providers. That means that they will be registered with an out-of-house SIP Registrar/proxy that will help overcome the NAT traversal issues.

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