Call anywhere on your cell phone for $5 with Asterisk

I was searching for some PHP info when I came across this cool article. It describes how one could use asterisk@home with your cell phone and call anywhere in US for $5 a month. If you shudder when you have to pay your long distance cell phone bills, and if you have some ingenuity, you could save a bundle.
Article is very informative and is rather long. But it certainly is interesting read if you are interested in VOIP- IP telephony.
Have a good read at Nerd Vittles.....

Cisco takes a bitter sip of SIP in call manager 5.0

Cisco Systems has announced plans to adopt a key Internet Protocol telephony standard, which will allow for the addition of new network service features and will let companies like Microsoft integrate their communications products with Cisco gear.
Cisco is one of the last telephony vendor to accept SIP, it does kind of seem that Cisco was dragged kicking and screaming into the SIP camp. May be it got scared of all the IP-PBX systems that over taking Cisco with their products. Specially open source solutions like Asterisk, SipX and OpenSer.

VOIP blocking War? again!

Slasdot rpoerts that there is an issue with comcast blocking VOIP calls from vonage!
How long before other ISP's follow the suit? Well read the article discussion and the vonage mailing list here

I am back!

After a month long break I am back at the scene! Well, there will be more posts soon!
Welcome again.

LIBJINGLE in IM/P2P jungle? GoogleTalk explains what it is!

In one of my previous posts VOIP IP Telephony: A week in VOIP and IP Telephony, I mentioned about LIBJINGLE and I was excited about it. Apparently, there were many others, according to googletalk blog itself. The search link it gives lists my site in page two!. That is fine. This will be a new era in IM P2P and VOIP, IP Telephony.
As much the excitement, there were some confusion as well about the LIBJINGLE library. So Mike Jazayeri, the Product Manager has taken the task up and explains the scenario's and capabilities as far as GoogleTalk is concerned. I think it is a good read and here are the topics that Mike decided to talk about;
1. Voice calls between other PC IM/VOIP clients such as Gaim, Adium, Psi, etc. And Google Talk.
2. Voice calls between mobile devices and Google Talk!
3. Peer-to-peer applications.

I am sure there are more ways than the above to use this library. I am for one playing with my Jabber server and Asterisk server. I will let you know how it goes.