I have been a little obsessed with VOIP over the last few weeks. The more I look into it the more it seems that lots of companies and individuals stand to save money by adopting it. Having said that there are substantial hurdles to get over if your needs are more than Skype has to offer (for example call forwarding).

Adoption of VOIP in the US is ahead of the UK, probably due to the larger more competitive market. I get the impression from reading other blogs like Rich Tehrani's that lots of people can see the potential but everyone is just sitting back waiting for someone to come up with an elegant solution that doesn't require uber geek knowledge to implement. There is a lot of energy going into this but it is focused across a broad range of solutions. Possibly the process is not as urgent as it might be if we didn't already have the good old PSTN to see us through in the meantime.

To try and progress things at work I have had my second in command of the broom cupboard download and install Asterisk onto White Box Enterprise Linux and put on the Asterisk Management Portal which is basically just a web GUI. Now we are looking for an IAX2 provider that can offer us some 0845 numbers. I think it is safe to say VOIP is far from being a commodity in UK.