Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Google Voice. Skype. VoIP-to-PSTN providers. SIP-to-SIP calls. All of these technologies and products allow you to make calls that are either free or much cheaper than on your landline. Wouldn’t it be great if you could escape the clutches of your Telco and connect your home phone to these services? A phone server like Asterisk can help you realize this dream."

In a world all a twitter with text-style messaging, it is easy to forget that many of us have voices to communicate. Us old-school people sometimes use a phone to talk to other people and while it is slow and not quite multi-tasking friendly, it can be effective. Of course, with VoIP, calling people far, far away has become really cheap and with services like Google Voice, its practically free. If you have a free weekend, some extra hardware lying around, and the urge to prove your geeky prowess, you could do worse than setting up your own home phone service.

"Whether you use them for business communication, talking to family over long distances, or just fragging your friends over the latest FPS, communication has been revolutionized by voice calling apps. Here's a look at the five most popular options for having voice conversations over the internet."

Whether it be on your desktop or your mobile device, VOIP applications are becoming more and more popular. This is a good review of some of the best. Which one is your favorite, and why?

"We've gone through a few ways to ensure a fast internet connection when you need it, but if your voice and video chats are of sub-par quality, there are actually quite a few different settings you can tweak for optimal connection.PC World has a great guide to tweaking the more advanced settings of your router for optimizing your router for VoIP and video, though the same rules can apply for any bandwidth-heavy activity like file sharing or video games. While we've discussed a few of the options before (namely QoS and port forwarding), PC World also mentions a few settings we haven't touched on before, like using a DMZ, splitting your traffic between two wireless networks, wireless multimedia extensions, and wireless intelligent stream handling."

If you use video chat a lot, but experience choppiness, or lag, or even just general poor video, then there may be some tweaks you can make on your router to improve this. Lifehacker found an article on PC World about settings that you can change on your router to improve voip and video streaming.

This is pure geeking-out: me exploring a VOIP phone/Web console from iRiver. It's a neat device, but there's no information yet on the pricing or availability.

Scary. What about customers who use VOIP phone services? Or online gaming such as Xbox Live? Or download songs from iTunes? I see a lopsided profit-driven pricing model like the one that Ubergizmo is suggesting, in which 95% of users pay the regular flat rate fee, and the 5% of "heavy users" pay extra per GB. Of course Time Warner could just adjust the bandwidth "cap" depending on how much profit they need to make each month. Sounds like the ISP makes more money while the consumer gets screwed.