creating a telephone gateway

[dwhawley]

has anyone out there ever tried to write a telephone gateway application? i've been looking into this and there is extremely little information out there. the only stuff that i can find is third party that you have to purchase. for those of you wondering exactly what a telephone gateway is, it is a computer that uses your isp as a long distance carrier. a good example of a working model of this would be a website like dialpad.com. any input?

[SteveCRM]

I can't think of a way to make it long distance without a lot of servers. Because no matter what, the call will be long diistance, unless you have a server in the area that you calling that you can send the info to. Sorry this didn't have much to do with your question, but do you know how this works?

[dwhawley]

no, unfortunately i'm not sure how this works. i've seen a lot of different articles that discuss the theories, but i have been unable to translate this into any sort of plan. i've found several products that facilitate this sort of thing, but they all require an account somewhere. my theory is that there are a very limited number of people who have figured out how to route phone calls over the internet, and they have all capitalized on this. i'm not blaming them or anything. i spend much of my day posing as a capitalist pig.