Well since Sipgate are surely reading this I am offering odds on how long this fix will last. Any takers for a spread bet on number of days to next PBX shutdown by our European friends?
But let's consider the whole Voip value chain. Everyone has to make money somewhere. We are almost in danger of seeing Sipgate as the bad guys here. Yet they have offered a superb service for nothing if you have the ability to spend endless hours configuring Voxalot type services. It can come as no surprise that they are finally trying to squeeze the offenders like myself who quite legitimately only utilise their free offerings.
But where does this leave Voxalot? What a superb service to integrate all the free bits of different services. Unfortunately, our old friend the free market says it was only worth slightly less than what it could save you. Well with all the freebies barring it, the premium service has just taken a huge dump in value. A quick trawl around today shows that actually there are some pretty good deals around for a real service with paying numbers that might just last more than 5 minutes. Meanwhile if I added up all the labour cost of trying to wangle a constantly free phone service last year it probably cost me about $15000.
But what the heck once you've started....keep going. So only a week of hard graft and I have a modded a Linksys WRT54 with a 1Gb smart card and DD-WRT and load Asterisk onto it! Works a treat, anyone else want to buy one? At a rate of one a week the cost will only be at least ten times what a single decent service will cost you.
Plus of course this is the World of Voip and some nutter will be along tomorrow with another freebie to keep us going for another 6 months until his venture capital runs out. Long live the internet and 'free' speech...especially over the phone!
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