It’s here, the user owned phone system

The rebels are at it again. This time they’ve built a free, open-source VoIP platform for embedded devices. It’s a VoIP PBX in box, a cheap affordable box. The box, in fact, is a common Linksys router. It’s called SIPatH (hey nobody said geeks know how to name products).

So take a standard Linksys router and toss this free code on it, and you have yourself your own SIP proxy server. No more NAT problem (the router has a real IP address and and can properly map to all SIP phones on the NAT LAN). It’s open (not locked to a provider). This allows one to simultaneously use whatever services and PSTN termination provider one likes, in any mix and match fashion you like. Use a Brazilian telephony carier from your home in France. There is no such thing as local anymore.

In a related note, some other bright folks have squeezed (a limited version of) Asterisk onto the the Linksys WRT-G router: Asterisk on OpenWRT

These hacks may be still too geeky for a lot of people, but watch this space. It fortells a future. Look out telco copycats. Someone will make this a plug and play consumer product, and it’s probably not far away. Do you see yet where this is going?

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