We need a PERSONAL VoIP device - here's a proposal (Score 1)

The problem with all currently-available devices of this type is that they require you to use a service such as Net2Phone for most or all of your calls, at a per-minute charge. In certain situations, this is ridiculous. For example, if you are traveling and you need to place a call back to your home town, you may have a perfectly good computer and your personal phone line sitting at your home or office that could be used to facilitate the call. What you probably don't have is the hardware necessary to complete the call using your own phone line.

An article entitled Can the Internet take the place of a pair of copper wires? (which was put online in response to a previous /. article!) makes the case that with the proper hardware, the Internet could be used to extend personal telephone lines. In this way, people could access their own personal or business telephone line from anywhere in the world. As the title implies, the idea is to use a pair of (as-yet-unbuilt) hardware devices, that would use the Internet as an underlying transport mechanism but would simulate (as closely as possible) a bare pair of copper wires to external telephone equipment.

Note that we are not talking about allowing "the public" to use your line - this would simply give you the ability to access a telephone line that you are already paying for, from locations other than the place where that line is terminated. For example, you could access your home phone line from the office, or vise versa. Or, you create a point-to-point "ringdown" circuit between two distant points, without having to get a private circuit from Ma Bell. How you use your "virtual copper pair" is up to you.

For those that understand telephone system terminology, the article makes the case that under certain circumstances, such a device could be used to provide the functional equivalent of at least four different types of service now only available (to most of us) from the phone company. These are Off-Premises Extensions (OPX) (also known as Exchange Service Extension (ESE)), Off-Premises Station (OPS), Foreign Exchange (FX), and Ringdown. The article even points out that it's completely legal to extend your own phone service in this way, thanks to a federal appeals court decision in 1990 (discussed in an archived TELECOM Digest article).

What's needed is for someone to design and build these devices. I think whoever does it first will find that it's not at all difficult to sell these, provided that they are easy enough to install and configure that the average computer owner (or, at the very least, anyone with enough intelligence to install and configure a Network Interface Card) can do it.