I've started the work to get my telephone setup to be more suitable to my current working environment. The hard part about what I have now is two big phone bills, lots of time spent on conference calls, and a real need to have a flexible configuration that accomodates moving between two offices and a coffee shop.
What I've found so far is pretty good luck using the X-Lite softphone with Jeff Pulver's Free World Dialup, with a headset plugged into my laptop that has a wifi connection back to a DSL line. Voice quality was good enough that I did a 30 minute call and didn't have appreciable comments about it being horrible. I'm assuming that there will be periodic glitches depending on what else is going on over the DSL line at the time but it's worth the try.
The next things to try out are a block of SIP to real phone minutes from Telesthetic, and one of the analog telephony adapters (ATAs) that either Cisco or Grandstream sells or is about to start selling. That would end up with something more like "cordless VOIP" since it would let me use a regular desk telephone for IP calls.
A last bit I haven't figured out is how to get a VOIP bridge line that can also be called into from land and cell lines, so that I can do hour-long conference calls for less. Conference call quality has to be good enough, but honestly if it's $0/minute I might be able to just stay on a bridge all day and wait for discusssion to pick up around me.
Most of the links in this page go back to the voip-info wiki, which is a handy reference source.
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