Comment by bja
9 months ago
This just seems like another VOIP service wrapped in nostalgia. There are MANY cheaper and better options. I say this because I recently added a VOIP line for exactly this reason to give my kids a way to call their friends without a smart phone.
Here are many good options https://www.ooma.com/blog/home-phone/best-voip-service-for-h...
How easy is it to manage the calling allowlist for those providers? That seems to be the key value proposition here; the parent app that controls the allowlist.
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> It's not. bja is yet another who rushes to the comments to ACKSHUALLY provide an "alternative" that is no such thing.
And again. Please avoid this kind of fulmination and sneering. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Keep in mind, the main use case is allowing kids to call their friends and family and no one else.
VoIP nerds out there, is there any simple PFSense equivalent for VoIP that would allow you to DIY this? Basically restrict inbound and outbound calls to a whitelist?
You might like FreePBX[0] for a PFSense-style "PBX appliance" with easy WebUI. Just grab the ISO (or shell script to install on Debian). It's built on Asterisk, and more than adequate for the task. Whilst FreeSWITCH is awesome it's way more complex and overkill for this use case.
[0]: https://freepbx.org
Awesome, thanks! I'll check it out.
Yes, get a trunk from someone like BulkVS, SignalWire and run your own freeswitch or asterix. You can set up arbitrary “allowed” lists. Hell you can even get fancy with lookups and decide on the fly to allow a call or not.
There are other comments about providers, but my way is way cheaper and you can run you EPBAX on a pi or even get a pre made VM from Azure, Amazon, etc.
Damn I hate paying rent.
Whoa, love this. Do you have any recommended resources if I wanted to try this out? Any comments about FreeSWITCH vs Asterisk, or BulkVS vs Signalwire for a simple setup like this?
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Some of the providers on that link have “allowlist” as a feature, but I am curious how easy it is to manage. The parent app seems like the real value proposition here.
Why is preventing them from calling other people an important feature? The market for people who care about that sounds extremely tiny.
And that’s fine. It’s cute. It’s fun. Looks like they are optimizing for UX, design, and marketing.