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Comment by StudentStuff | Hacker News Reader

The largest VOIP companies in America today are the cable companies, ACN (pyramid scheme with a few million VOIP customers), Vonage (a first mover) then a few dozen minor players that are near the half million customer mark. IMO its a big (but unsurprising) marketing failure.

VOIP as a product never really made it into the home, despite all its features and enhancements. Instead, it is limited to the realm of businesses, where it is in most hospitals, medical facilities, chain stores, call centers, and so on.

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All landline phone connections sold by Telekom in germany are VOIP, it's just mostly hidden from the subscriber. The technology is doing perfectly fine.

VOIP and specifically SIP in its least secure form became the replacement for old tandem circuits. Sadly, rather than pushing SIP hardware out to the endpoints, most lamdline carriers chose to just provide twisted pair service.

VoLTE is as close as most consumers will get to proper VOIP service.

Giving everyone SIP phones is expensive, and forcing your subscribers to purchase SIP phones will ensure a number of them flee to the competition. Putting the VOIP hardware in the modem makes much more sense, because you have to provide that to your subscribers anyway.

I actually have my own Cisco Phone adapter to connect my old analog phone/answering machine. I'd assume that a true SIP phone would work as well. What's questionable is whether I could authenticate from a different network than my home network.

I know, however, that both Vodafone and Telekom in Germany offer products that allow connecting VOIP phones from anywhere to a virtual phone appliance.

That's interesting. In the Netherlands, all the telcos (with the notable exception of XS4ALL) lock down the modems and don't give you the settings and logins to use your own equipment (although the Consumer and Market Authority is still researching whether this is actually legal).

Locking the connection to a provided modem is not legal in Germany since 2016-08-01 by law (FTEG, replaced by FuAG in 2017) The provider is obliged to hand you the required credentials to connect your own hardware, though getting the actual required configuration may require some puzzle work, but most providers give config examples for at least the most common hardware. My setup for example consists of a draytek modem with unifi network hardware and above mentioned Cisco phone adapter. I don’t even have a piece of Telekom-provided hardware here. Took a bit of googling to get IPTv working, but other than that it’s a perfectly stable and capable setup. Many people use Fritz boxes which are a bit less capable but easier to set up.

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