Now, we need someone to package Asterisk in a form that democratizes telephony to people without Federal Excise Fees (taxed for the privilege of doing local communications), Transit Taxes (paying for mass transit despite the fact you're not using it because you're using the phone) and many other "Taxes" or "Non-governmental Taxes" (things that are called "taxes" but aren't mandated by any governmental organization. (See http://www.cavtel.com/support/Taxes_and_Fees.shtml for all the shenanigans.)
Get rid of "phone numbers" and just give everyone as many 160-bit "numbers" as they want for their phone numbers. Allow people to change these numbers whenever they want. If they experience harassment, make it easy to set up whitelists for conditional forwarding (if the originating call isn't on the whitelist, forward it, tell those on the whitelist what the new number is, etc.). These calls could be forwarded to the "Internet enforcers" that are so keen on outing Internet douchbags. Use DHT's for directory services/yellow pages and set up a gigantic overlay "network" on the Internet (using strong encryption where allowed).
Then you can start destroying the $~500B telecom industry with a "software application." $7B is nothing, go for the big fish. Don't attack hardware (in this case, PBXen), attack systems. Here, we're just going to cut out earmarked taxation and faux earmarks from your phone bills and corporate inefficiency (How much of your phone bill is going to all that marketing to convince people to use something they already know they want/need?) It's far more gratifying.
Here is one way to approach the transition, starting today.
If you can leave Asterisk running somewhere and you already have say a domain name that you use for a blog or personal website, then you can point iax.domain.com to your Asterisk and start telling people to contact you at for example: user:pass@iax.domain.com/2000
To make it more readable just use your first name as the user, and your region or some other keyword as the password; its meant to be given out to the public anyway.
Client software to make and receive calls using this approach is called iaxComm. If you wanted your Asterisk installation to forward your calls to your cell phone at certain times of the day, or when your iaxComm wasn't signed in, then you'll have to subscribe for an outgoing voip service.
Eventually most people would be accessible through iax and you wouldn't have to subscribe to any service to reach the prior infrastructure.
* $7B is nothing, go for the big fish*
if 10% of Hacker News readers morphed a $7B industry of a $ 7 B piece of any industry we would be talking about an impact in the trillions. how big is the fish you are pursuing?
Now, we need someone to package Asterisk in a form that democratizes telephony to people without Federal Excise Fees (taxed for the privilege of doing local communications), Transit Taxes (paying for mass transit despite the fact you're not using it because you're using the phone) and many other "Taxes" or "Non-governmental Taxes" (things that are called "taxes" but aren't mandated by any governmental organization. (See http://www.cavtel.com/support/Taxes_and_Fees.shtml for all the shenanigans.)
Get rid of "phone numbers" and just give everyone as many 160-bit "numbers" as they want for their phone numbers. Allow people to change these numbers whenever they want. If they experience harassment, make it easy to set up whitelists for conditional forwarding (if the originating call isn't on the whitelist, forward it, tell those on the whitelist what the new number is, etc.). These calls could be forwarded to the "Internet enforcers" that are so keen on outing Internet douchbags. Use DHT's for directory services/yellow pages and set up a gigantic overlay "network" on the Internet (using strong encryption where allowed).
Then you can start destroying the $~500B telecom industry with a "software application." $7B is nothing, go for the big fish. Don't attack hardware (in this case, PBXen), attack systems. Here, we're just going to cut out earmarked taxation and faux earmarks from your phone bills and corporate inefficiency (How much of your phone bill is going to all that marketing to convince people to use something they already know they want/need?) It's far more gratifying.
[/rant-off]