canadiancreed

First off, please bear with me, as I am an n00b in matters of telco and non-residential type matters, hence my question.

After searching in vain for a VOIP company that offers service in Canada thats' not named Vonage, I"m seriously debating starting my own. The problem is, what the heck is needed to do such a thing? Residential setups I can do liek the back of my mind, but when it comes t what IS's would have to do to offer VOIP and what not, I'm completely lost.

Hence why I'm here.

Basically my beefs are with the following:

What is needed to offer service in an area? For the only VOIP provider that I could find in my search (Vonage), the nearest town that you coudl get a phone number is over an hour away. That's no good to me as everyone that wants to get a hold of me locally has to call long distance. I thought that if you ahd broadband, you could get a local number as well?

NOt being able to transfer numbers? That seems quite odd, although my knowledge of telco laws in Canada is slim to none (like I said, n00b here)

Trying to find out information on what is needed to provide VOIP is slim to none. If you want residential info there's tons of it out there, but finding out hwo to roll your own VOIP provider? Good luck. Granted I havent' finished searching this site, so this question may become void.

SO tehre it is. If anyone has any info that would help me out with this, I'd greatly appriciate it.