This project brings phone calls to the wireless network. Specifically, when this project is completed, you can use your telephone and place and receive calls to/from any other telephone in the world. Your phone will plug into a special antenna mounts under the eave of your roof. Out of this antenna drops four phone lines and one ethernet line, which then get mounted into a wall jack in your home/office.
You can call another person with a similar antenna -- in which case there is no cost to the call -- or you can call any telephone outside the network, that is, a plain-old telephone. Lastly, you can receive calls (which means we'll have to come up with a numbering scheme, which should be entertaining).
This is all similar in concept to using your PC as a telephone, just like the numerous PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone services out there do. The difference with our network will be that you don't need your PC to be on, to make a phone call, because you use your plain old telephone.
We will add valuable features like voice mail, call forwarding, and all that. This will become possible by our support for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). By standardizing on SIP, which is a standard Telephony API, we can support all sorts of clients that provide all sorts of useful features. Here is a list of SIP Products maintained by Pulver.com: http://www.pulver.com/sip/products.html.
There are two phases to this project. One phase is to install proxies and gateways at a Network Operations Center (NOC) that connects to the PSTN. This will probably be at Chicago, co-located with a major ISP there. PSTN calls can go out of these gateways or come into these gateways. In other words, a SIP client can initiate or receive a PSTN call, using these gateways.
The second phase of this project is to produce an antenna that has the SIP client built into it. This will be an antenna that you mount on your roof, and 4 phone lines drop out of it, and get installed into wall jacks in the home/office. You can plug these lines into a PBX, or you can plug a regular old telephone set into any of these lines.
Now you have a VOIP telephone. You go offhook, get a dial tone, dial a destination, and the call is made. The audio is packetized and sent to the gateway in Chicago, and audio received at the gateway is packetized and sent to the telephone.
We can handle incoming calls, outgoing calls, conference calls -- the whole gamut.
