I've been reading and looking at the forums for a bit, and I'd like to throw my 2 cents in for what it matters.

I'm thinking "we" need a voip system that is serverless, along the lines of something peer to peer. I've come up with a couple of ideas, and wanted to see what if anything anyone else thinks.

one is a softphone - Ekiga it does work on a lan without setting up a user on the Ekiga servers, Ekiga uses a SIP protocol. And for the most part to make a call across the LAN you just use the IP address of the computer you are trying to reach, of course both machines have to be running Ekiga. the down side as I see it is it's a softphone, which means you need a computer to run it. The up side is it is serverless, and works pretty good.  I think it also supports video - but I have not tried that just using the LAN.

the second thing I came up with is something called a Konnect made by Aksys networks, these are IP phones (SIP??)  that were meant for office use, don't require a PBX or hosted service. They look fairly simple to setup watching a few of the videos on the website (konnectoffice.com). The downside that I see is they are expensive phones, even used (I found a few on eBay), the upside is they don't look they require any addition computer or server, and it looks like it would work on a LAN as a standalone.

I am going to try and save a little cash up and see if I can't get one of the konnects for a decent price.

The third thing is there are quite a few p2p voip projects on sourceforge - the most complete looks like something called F-Talk P2P Encrypted Secure VoIP,  I don't know if this would work for the needs of the mesh, but it does look like an interesting project. and Does have an Android client, as well as Windows Linux & Mac OS, the downside to it is it's flaky, I've tried it a couple of times with my Android. You also need a code to enter to call teh other machine (Works something like join.me or logme.in) It is also a softphone so you need a computer to run it. At this point I don't see an upside to it, however I personally plan on keeping an eye on the project and see if it does improve and become more useable.

Any thoughts? Any addition ideas? Anyone have access or own a Konnect phone?

-LeRoy, KD8BXP

SIP is strictly speaking a server less protocol hence why some devices and soft phones can be dialled without the need for a server. Asterisk et al bring a 'known point' enabling a level of end user management.

The mesh potato / village telco project designed a way to use asterisk on every device and create a distributed exchange. It does this by using the last quad of an ip address in decimal form as the extension number eg 192.168.1.034 gives an extension of 034 for that mesh nodes location.

What this needs however is a bit of co-ordination so that all mesh nodes have a unique ip (easy to do in a 'village') and a manual way of circulating the new number (again easy in a village). Once circulated all asterisk is doing is prefixing the '192.168.1" part back onto the 034 thats dialled by the end user and sending out the SIP string, same as the soft phones mentioned.

What Serval seems to have achieved is a way of self aware distributed directory enquiries AND equally as importantly to give first chance to the handsets mobile number to become its identifier on the mesh network.

This is what will allow an uncordinated mesh to create a VoIP network, if our callsigns were pure numbers this would be easy, but they are not..

Both projects seem to have been initially funded by Shuttleworth foundation and are supposed to be on open source terms, in fact Serval is borrowing parts of MP2.0 tech to make its 'mesh extenders'. Hopefully once its done its community funding and its commercial arm is set up the source will be made available. Unless I have missed it somewhere.