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

[Chris Lee]

Jon Radel wrote:
> 
> 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

A few friends who you trust can get quite large when the system is like 
the PGP web of trust, if the 'project' were to require that a trusted 
member were required to 'sponsor' a new trusted member at risk of their 
membership then the users could possibly grow quite nicely.

Add to that a required Asterisk configuration if you want to connect 
e.g. 'Must have these restrictions enabled (only calls originating from 
controlled sources may travel via trunks)', 'must provide 2 trunk 
connections (one to sponsor and one to group voted destination)','Must 
publish Asterisk config or relevant part to group or at least connected 
parties'  etc.

It could be quite an interesting community.
Of course if it were a true web of trust environment with any member 
able to use anothers directly without routing through others then login 
names and passwords would be useless and pgp keys would have to be used 
so that revoked members could be excluded without massive maintenance, 
and new members added by similar means.


Chris.