Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

First of all this is another Linux Journal lead, if you dont already subscribe to LJ, do yourself a favor and remedy that.The OpenPhone project has a goal, "internet telephony for everyone." Those are lofty aspirations (and scary if you are a phone company) but certainly attainable with the open source model. OpenPhone is concentrating on a a hardware based IP telephony solution that works with inexpensive telephony interface boards (currently the Quicknet cards are featured.) This hardware based approach makes sense and enables you to plug in any standard RJ11 phone into your computer and call either any other computer or any other phone in the world! The card does the work, converting and processing the analog to digital and digital to analog back again. The cards also provide hardware based audio compression that greatly improves voice quality. With compression even dial up users can expect good performance, if you have real bandwidth at the house (DSL, Cable, ISDN, etc) then you are obviously even better off. The details: protocols, audio codecs, signaling and more are in the article but the bottom line is that this technology can make your computer take the place of your phone. Video conferencing is also a part of this project (h.323.) Not all of the pieces are in place at this time, but this is exciting technology and has enormous potential. Check the links for more info and or to contribute.   OpenPhone.Org