pulver launches bellster

i must say i'm not entirely convinced of jeff pulver's latest voip venture. bellster is a peer-2-peer phone sharing network that works like this: you install a local asterisk server, connect it to a phone line, and share that line with other people. in turn, other people let you use their phone lines. routing of the calls is managed with the distributed universal number discovery protocol or dundi, developed by the company behind asterisk: digium. i don't see the idea catching on in europe any time soon because (1) it assumes that you have free minutes on your phoneline, which we don't have a lot of in europe (2) it requires a relatively expensive server (about €500 at least) and the knowledge of how to configure asterisk on it. expect a reconfigured FXS/FXO router with embedded linux on it, in the coming months, which allows you to do exactly that for less than €150.