VOIP Question

Aug 10, 2005 1 Replies

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I'm not quite understanding what the deal is with the charging for a SoftPhone by these various companies. The network traffic sent out by your hardware VOIP router has to conform to TCP/IP standards, right? I'm not sure I am understanding how these providers can detect the traffic is being generated by the hardware device or a software device? Techincally, isn't it possible to sniff the outbound traffic from one of these hardware devices and pull out the necessary information from the packets, plug those settings into a SoftPhone and then disconnect the hardware device and utilize the SoftPhone?

Could someone explain what the technical limitation of this is, or direct me to a site which can explain it to me?

That's not that easy, because the password is not sent in clear. Usually the authentication is based on a challenge-response mechanism where the server sends a random string (nonce) and the client sends back a cryptographically secure hash of the nonce with the password. As reversing a secure hash is computationally hard, recovering the password is not trivial.

Still, providers which charge on metered basis for anything different from calls to or from the PSTN (regardless of the device used to place them) are just asking to be dumped... In fact, thanks to open standards like SIP or IAX, users can follow a DIY approach by buying their own equipment (or using softphones) and then choosing separate providers for PSTN termination, DiD numbers where to receive incoming PSTN calls, and registrar function for (free) Internet-to-Internet calls (e.g., FreeWorldDialup). Bundles may sometimes offer some savings, but in that case I'd recommend to choose providers offering flexibility and no restriction on number of simultaneous calls. One I can personally recommend (although I can't comment on DiD numbers because I'm not using them) is

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Enzo

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