VoIP Telephone Service

Few rural communities in the Dominican Republic have access to landline phone service; and cellular service is spotty at best. This is particularly problematic in the mountainous areas, where towers are often placed down in the more populated (and less impoverished) valleys. Telephones are a vital community service, as well as facilitating income generation. The Ocoa South telephone system currently provides PBX-style dial service between El Limon, Los Martinez, and Los Naranjales. A gateway in Ocoa provides a single line connection to the public telephone system for incoming and outgoing calls.

Currently, all toll calls are blocked. All outside calls to cellphones, and calls beyond the free local area, require that the caller buy his own national (Claro) prepay card. Initially, all calls were charged at $ 0.03 a minute, at first manually, then with coin telephones. However, with the arrival of cellular service in much of the area, usage dropped off, and this fee is no longer collected.

The system uses a SIP-based Askozia (an Asterisk derivative) PBX running on a Soekris 4801 single board computer. The Ocoa gateway is a Sipura SPA-3000, with (mostly) Cisco ATA-186 telephone adapters.