It’s a long story, but sufffice to say that India has the highest density of PhoneGnome boxes of any single country after the US/Canada and those customers are thrilled with how much they are saving thorugh 100% free calls with no monthly fees to US, UK, and elsewhere. If ‘Indianight’ simply follwed the instructions we have provided (over and over) he could be doing the same now too.

Earlier today, I was talking to Martin O’Donnell about a plug-and-play VoIP terminal called PhoneGnome. PhoneGnome is a small appliance that you can use to make Internet telephone calls, but you “buy and own it” and no monthly subscription fee…

But in these comments suddenly its full of protected, proprietary and patent pending technology, with accompanying threats of legal action.

To make sure we understand correctly: you buy and own the Phonegnome. But you’re still locked into the service – presumably because Phonegnome wants to make margin on the pstn minutes, and build a customer base for future monetization.

Nothing wrong with that, but good to understand clearly.

Thanks, Steve

David, can you please clarify if your use ENUM and is your “service” P2P – similar to Peerio’s?

I think you have a winner here!!!

A few days back Om told us about PhoneGnome and commented mostly about the box. Most of the follow up comments were about the novelty (or lack there of) of the box and mostly they have been dismissive. Even I…

Hahahahahaha

Don Richards-Boeff, those are good ideas for other options for packaging PhoneGnome. We will be looking at such things for those that prefer a monthly payment model. There are all-you-can eat plans you could add to PhoneGnome now, but there are no providers offering to subsidize the PhoneGnome cost as part of a subscription (yet). PhoneGnome already offers prepaid minutes a la Skype/Gizmo (except through partners), so I might be missing the question on that one.

Carl, the patents are filed, but aren’t on the USPTO website yet (USPTO is so slow).

1) By offering the user the ability to use a phone plugged into the SPA-3000 to be routed over various low-cost VoIP carriers. Hopefully this feature will soon or does already have least-cost-routing.

2) Allows the user’s incoming calls over their regular phone line to be intercepted by the SPA-3000 so that value-added-services such as telemarketer blocking can be provided. Maybe even blocking some unwanted people or sending them directly to your PhoneGnome voicemail.

David, if I have incorrectly stated any features of PhoneGnome please clarify.

Om and Aswath pass comment on the latest generation of VoIP telephone adapter, called PhoneGnome. On the downside, this product can’t be saving many potential users much money as they still need a POTS line. The self-provisioning of this device&#…

PhoneGnome goes far beyond the “shunting to the PSTN” capability described above that is part of Sipura’s standard hardware/firmware load. Our technology is patent pending.

PhoneGnome’s automatic self-configuration and phone number binding likewise goes beyond simply pointing at a provisioning server and likewise is protected and proprietary.

These technologies are unique and novel. If one were to attempt to replicate them, TelEvolution will pursue all disciplinary and legal remedies to protect its property and rights.

The CPE hardware is not any diffferent than a stock SPA-3000. They way we use that base feature set is, and certainly the out of the box user experience between a stock SPA-3000 and PhoneGnome is dramatically different.

I will simply conclude that (a) telEvolution has invented some things here. It’s not the chips, or the plastic. I will defend that, sorry, because it’s true. (b) PhoneGnome is what it is, and it probably isn’t right for everyone. That’s okay. (c) Hopefully it will expand SIP addresses to a new audience, making all of our SIP/VoIP systems more useful, and bring the benefits of VoIP to a lot of new people.

Initially, I’m calling… myself? Or any of the other people who move to purchase a PhoneGnome in the first couple of months?

I understand the benefits as you spell them out on the site, but again, until everyone has a PhoneGnome (or other open-standards based SIP ata/address), I’m looking at paying a per min. charge. How about doing both — hardware only for $XX, or hardware + plan for $XX/month, or even pre-paid minutes (ala Skype/Gizmo, et al).

This sounds like an SPA-3000 that fetches it’s configurations from some central database. Easy enough; everyone who deploys Sipura products can do that with a programmer who can grok Perl.

The failover nonsense is not revolutionary; it’s part of Sipura’s standard hardware/firmware load, and several other vendors do the same thing. If the remote server is unreachable, then the call gets shunted out the PSTN port, or if it matches “911″ or other special call sequences. See the press releases on this “new” technology elsewhere (http://www.fiercevoip.com/archives/voip060204.asp)

So, what is new here? The newness seems to be something that is almost impossible to extract from the “ease-of-use” fluff surrounding the product, but which is totally non-obvious on the website: you can choose what SIP termination provider you want, and shift between vendors without changing hardware. However, it’s extremely unclear how this works from looking at the site, so I am uncertain if this is the case.

PhoneGnome is what Sipura should have done when they launched the product: create a good user interface for the initial configuration (optionally) to allow consumers to choose between multiple PSTN termination providers in an unbiased manner (and to take a cut of the subscription fees!)

As to the question of “is this really an appliance”: NO. It’s functions will cease on failure of PhoneGnome’s service platform, and it will become simply a passthrough to your PSTN carrier.

I’m willing to be proven wrong, if a more detailed explanation can be linked here or given, but this is nothing but clever marketing and a simple interface – no special technology sauce here. That may be all that’s required, though. David should be less defensive of how the CPE is so different than a Sipura, though, since that takes away his credibility to those of us who know better. Everyone who thinks that the VoIP market has a high barrier to entry should look behind the curtain of what is being touted as the next greatest thing. This system could be replicated in not too much time by a very small group of motivated Perl wranglers in Ukraine who knew what SIP was.