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Flashphone: If You Can See A Web Page, You Can Use It
Sunday, April 13, 2008
If you've tried to use voice over IP service from behind a firewall--particularly a corporate one--you might find yourself having problems. I've tried Gizmo5, SightSpeed, and many other SIP-based clients from my corporate laptop, and no dice. The reason? The firewalls simply don't forward most traffic to the Internet. However, you can get out to the Internet through an HTTP Proxy.
Skype has been the only thing that's worked in just about any environment I throw it in. It even traverses my HTTP Proxy. But what do you do when your corporate computing policies prohibit you from installing applications on your PC?
Enter Flashphone. Flashphone utilizes Adobe Flash within your web browser to allow you to make and receive calls over VoIP. This is nice because 98% of web browsers out there support Flash. This means you won't have to install software.
Flash even works on mobile phones. However, Flashphone is only supported on Windows Mobile if you load the appropriate version of Adobe Flash--provided on the Flashphone site.
The other thing that Flashphone does that ensures it will work in most all situations is that it talks only in HTTP packets. This means it will traverse pretty much any firewall or web proxy that permits HTTP without any special configuration necessary.
Flashphone tunnels HTTP packets to their backend servers where they will speak SIP. They will even allow you to program in your own voice over IP service configuration to allow you to make inexpensive long distance calls.
The idea is pretty neat. They're not charging anything for use of the service. I do wonder where these guys are going to make money with this. Licensing deals, maybe? What say you?
