PhoneGnome lets you have two interconnect providers --> one for in-country long distance, and one for international long distance. I am not sure why they did it that way.

I knew that they allow one in-country and one international long distance. I was suggesting more freedom. For example, I may need one interconnect provider for India, another for Country X and so on. Since I can provision it on My Account page, there is no need to place any restriction.

Perhaps the Long Tail in VoIP will surface when we truly have widespread deployment of services, instead of the common basket of services the phone companies provides now. Signalling in the VoIP field is fairly open, the signalling within the PSTN needs to be opened up to allow this long tail. PINT and SPIRITS, anyone?

I agree with you Aswath. I want the freedom to do much more.

AFAIK, PhoneGnome is the first product to attempt to give both control/flexibility to the consumer and ease-of-use. I believe it is the only "complete solution" that that let's one select third-party providers at all. To say nothing of letting one pick different providers for LD vs. Intl.

This is the first production release of PhoneGnome. We wanted to find a sweet spot of features and still keep it simple to setup and use for the first pass. One could add features forever and never release a product.

PhoneGnome will continually be improving with new features and functions. What gets on the roadmap and when is very much driven by demand. We often have a major struggle between keeping things simple and practical for real people, and providing a lot of flexibility and control for advanced users. These are two diverse constituencies with different needs and wants. Even the current level of flexibility in selecting multiple PSTN terminatiion services is challenging for some users who would want *fewer* choices.

In terms of providing more discretion in selecting different providers for different regions, it's on the roadmap too, but again, it has to be weighed against all the other feature requests and the ease-of-use component.

Also, there is a reliability component in adding complexity and features. As they say when buidling race cars: "if the part isn't there it can't fail." A key factor of PhoneGnome is that it be easy to use, and that it just works. If we make things too complex for people, they themselves can break their own PhoneGnome (say if forwarding is too complex, or even the multiple PSTN termination provider thing we're discussing).

Anyway, in short, anything you see with PhoneGnome today doesn't mean it is the last word. PhoneGnome features and capabilities will continually improve and expand. If you have ideas, please let us know and I assure you that we will use that feedback to inform our future development decisions.