[Asterisk-Users] Free WWT (WorldWideTelco): Utopia, or just a matter of organization?

[Jon Radel]

Marconi Rivello wrote:
> In US, local calls are free. So it wouldn't be a problem to make such
> a network to get rid of long distance calls. But in other countries
> (like here in Brazil) local calls are charged. So there could be some
> king of billing (without commercial purposes, just to pay for the
> costs), or something...

Well... actually...  There are ever fewer people left in the U.S. who 
have free local outbound calls.  Lots of people have enough calls or 
minutes included in the base monthly charge to cover their normal 
calling every month, so it sort of looks like the calls are "free." 
However, if their phone is suddenly in use 18 hours / day by people all 
over the world their bill might jump painfully.  For example, if I 
exceed my monthly allowance on my residential POTS lines with Verizon, I 
pay 9.6 cents per local call.

However, if your phone company in the U.S. ever noticed that you were 
billing or sharing your line, they'd probably make you get a more 
expensive business line, and that's if they were feeling really, really 
nice.  (A Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) not to be named here once shut 
down one of our DS-3s without notice because we thought we were 
wholesaling the capacity, in part because we were carrying VOIP across 
it.  Their lawyers turned green, and sent people with fancy titles to 
apologize, after they realized what the business office had done, but 
it, and lesser episodes, show that the LECs in the U.S. are, as a 
general rule, quite freaked out about all this VOIP and "free" phone 
call stuff.  You are messing with their revenue, you know.)

All of which pales besides how you'll feel the first time the police 
drop by to discuss a phone call placed from your phone that played a key 
role in some nasty crime.  The chances are you'd have some very long and 
very painful discussions with police officers who wouldn't know an RTP 
packet if it punched them in the nose about how a) it wasn't you, b) it 
wasn't somebody who came over to your house to use your phone, c)  you 
might be able to figure out what country the call was from if they let 
you go home and look at your logs, and d)  they should believe you and 
not the technicians from the phone company.

So, I'd second other recommendations here that do this if you must for a 
few friends you trust, but think really, really hard before you open 
something like this to the public.

--Jon Radel