[Asterisk-Users] RE: Land line vs. VoIP provider.

[John Todd]

At 3:42 PM -0800 12/19/03, SW wrote:
>  > As far as I know, iconnect
>>  explicitly disallows multiple call presentations. The iconnect thing was
>>  discussed on the list a month or two back.
>
>I red that discussion, it was more on multiple outgoing calls. I noticed
>with Iconnect, the sip invite message always comes as the
>originating_phonenumber at iconnect_ip. So if I use two PSTN numbers to call
>same Iconnect provided number, it arrives at asterisk as two different
>calls. Iconnect seems like completely depends on the SIP response from * or
>any SIP end point to figure out the call status (busy or on call). That is
>why I think, it is IMPOSSIBLE to set the * to receive a call coming from
>Iconnect to a particular context, other than general section, in it's
>sip.conf. (I didn't hear from any one who got this working)
>
>I think this is how, fwd and others are offering access numbers in many US
>States. Using a single number many callers can get to their (fwd) network.
>
>This is my observation, please correct me if I am wrong ?
>
>SW
[snip]

You should be able to hand off calls from Iconnecthere to whatever 
context you want, based on the IP address of the host that sends you 
the call.  The number in the call is irrelevant.

To answer a few of the other threads that seem to be unraveling out 
of this Subject:

  - anyone that offers "all-you-can-eat" dialplans will never, ever 
let you have more than one session outbound at a time.  If you find 
anyone that does, let me know.  I have some pipelining I need to test 
out...

  - Voicepulse and Nufone allow simultaneous calls, since they charge 
per minute.  As far as they're concerned, theoretically, you could 
fire up 200 sessions at once - that's great for them, they get paid 
on all of 'em.

  - It is the rumor that Vonage does not support simultaneous sessions 
due to back-office billing system problems which prevent their 
systems from discovering that there are multiple calls happening on 
the same number/account.  This leads me to conclude that they do not 
have a billing system that is fully functional, thus their plan of 
"all you can eat" is not 100% market-driven, thus their policy of 
"you don't get the password to your box or you'll cram us and it will 
be weeks before we realize we're bleeding."  Someone from Vonage who 
is reading this list (I'm sure there are several of you) may reply to 
refute this chain of assumptions if you wish, but I doubt you will. 
:-)


JT