I have been living in different countries for the last 10 years. Although I can get in touch with friends and family using gtalk, skype, or you name it, having an extremely cheap phone line to receive or make calls on can come in handy.

Given my love for technology, trying out VoIP (or voice over IP, or phone over the internet), seemed like the next logical step.

There are 2 things you need to do to get started with VoIP:

  1. Find a VoIP provider, what people in the industry refer to as an ITSP (aka Internet Telephony Service Provider). A fancy name for a company with tons of phone lines and good internet connectivity willing to turn phone traffic on good old phone networks (called PTSN, or public switched telephone network) into internet packets.

  2. Get a VoIP phone, eg, any sort of "telephone like thingy" that is able to route and receive calls over the internet using the VoIP protocol. We will talk more about this later, but what I mean by "telephone like thingy" can take many different shapes and colors: it can be an iphone or android app installed on your smart phone, a black box with a telephone plug on one side, and an internet plug on the other side (generally referred to as ATA - Analog Telephone Adapter), or something that pretty much looks like a phone from the 60s but happens to have an ethernet plug rather than a telephone one.

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Mar 31, 2015 | Technology/Protocols