[Freeswitch-users] mod_g729

[Steve Underwood]

Hi Raul,

Raul Fragoso wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> My point is more towards the high import taxes here. A foreign company
> won't pay as much taxes to export to Brazil as brazilians would pay
> import taxes for such goods.
> I will give you a simple example: a Snom 320 phone would cost roughly US
> $180.00 if bought in the US. Here it would cost at least double the
> price, but usually more. We pay almost 100% for importing taxes + GST,
> excluding the greedy profit that dealers and resellers usually apply,
> but Snom (or their distributors) would pay only a small fraction of that
> to export phones to Brazil. The irony is that we don't see where all
> this money is spent, as the country still suffers of a huge social and
> economical dissimilarity among their people.
> On the other hand, our current government seems to be making some
> progress to make exporting from Brazil easier, specially for small
> companies (international trade is known to be very bureaucratic here). 
> Anyway, this is turning into a politics discussion thread and I know it
> can annoy some people. Just to stay in the subject thread, I also
> endorse the support for open codecs rather than paying millions for
> G.729 licenses.
>   

Well, any discussion of trade immediately has a political element. 
However, this discussion is quite interesting from an engineering point 
of view. Engineering is never separate from politics, as so much 
engineering is working around artificial barriers erected by politics. 
To many engineers, a lot of decisions seem wacky, because they can't see 
the political angle. The different pressures guiding decisions like buy 
local/buy foreign, use ISDN/use MFC/R2, and so on can be quite illuminating.

Steve