Dear JT,

Its not as scary as you describe.

One of the most funniest thing about our law is that companies trying to sell telephony services must have license whereas consumers can buy whatever they want to and whatever is cheap.

Which means selling skype service as a company under company's act need you to have license, but as a consumer you can buy the service using any legal means of money transfer (cheque, card etc)

Eventually this results into the fact that a company in india can sell a product (just like selling a gun) but with an exception that these companies need not have any license to sell such goods. And even more interesting Democracy allows every indian the right to choose to buy these products from any company whichever he/she find comfortable to use. (telephony product and telephony services are two different things)

FYI, we have launched our own embedded Single port PRI appliance IPPBX supporting 30 SIP extensions, any one interested can buzz me.

Regards, Mitul Limbani Enterux Solutions (P.S.: We are actively looking to build the partner network here in india for this product )

jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in wrote:

On Wednesday 06 October 2010 09:28:17 Gourav Shah wrote:

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There are several. slfphone Ekiga gstreamer

I use Ekiga a lot. We had written some for customising lots of things in Ekiga. Rather than skype, Imo Ekiga would be a better bet.

Ekiga is great. I may also suggest Qutecom, formerly known as wengophone ( http://www.qutecom.org/), a easy to use and great looking softphone.

However, the objective of our appliance project is not to provide a SIP softphone for a desktop. Objective is to have a appliance to which, one could connect their regular phone instrument using a voip adapter such as Linksys PAP2T (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10029/), make and receive calls from anywhere in the world. Think of it as a affordable alternative to Vonage like VoIP solutions which are very expensive and have vendor lock ins.

Connecting a voip network to a phone network is prohibited by law. L&T paid a whooping Rs.350 Cr. as fines. So be careful with whatever it is you are planning.

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Typical use case would be: Folks who have their son/daughter's/relatives abroad, need high volume calling, and do not want to start their desktop and use some app to make and receive calls.

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They could just pick up their landline like instrument, dial a number which lands either on one's skype application on computer/cellphone/landline. Skype provides skypein number and skype out credits which makes it capable of receiving and making calls to landlines/cell phones, and provides very affordable calling plans than subscribing to a SIP provider's plans. Similarly, google has made calling US numbers very affordable with their google voice/gtalk integration after acquiring grand central project. Thats the reason for choosing skype. If there is a alternate libre solution aailable, I would be more than glad to use it as it would save lot of complexities integrating skype.

All of the voip providers pay fat licencing fees to the DOT.

-- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers