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You can do most or all of this with APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) via ham radio. I had it in my CUCV M-1009 (A military Chevy Blazer with a diesel engine and tough enough to go anywhere) while I was living in Colorado. During my daily commute the other hams could see where I was and my wife could too. During snow storms if I stopped in one place for more than 5 minutes someone would call me on the repeater we used to make sure I was OK.

There have been at least two cases where embedded APRS units were used to recover stolen cars. In California a man was able to give police (once he convinced them he wasn't crazy) the exact track and location of his car. It was recovered with minimal damage while the suspects were still driving it. In Canada the signal was lost as the vehicle drove into a large industrial warehouse. The RCMP went to the location and found a large chop shop with 100+ vehicle in various stages of disassembly.

It was great fun and I'll be installing it in my Bronco and the wife's Mustang over the holidays.

The TNC (terminal node controller), a Kantronics KPC-3+, I usually use has externally controllable outputs (password protected) that you could use to unlock your doors and/or shut off the fuel pump. I don't plan to tie into the fuel pump, but door unlocking would be very nice. Its a simple password system, but you just change it after you use it each time. How often do you lock your keys in the car?

With some creative hacking of Asterisk you could probably get the system to at least read you back the closest cross street of your vehicle's current position. The Bronco will be getting a Toughbook CF-27 to do such things.

Why didn't you just use Asterisk ?

Asterisk is an AWSOME PBX system that doesn't get mentioned enough on /.

It's supported features are equivalent to a PBX costing several thousand bucks. Including support for VOIP and T-1(E-1)'s

Some of the other features include Voicemail, Conference calling, Caller ID, an Auto Attendant (press 1 for sales, 2 for support,), Call Queuing (for call centers), Call Detail Records, more

The documentation is a little sparse but they are currently working on the
Asterisk Handbook Project (warning PDF).

I also found the Getting Started With Asterisk Guide by Andy Powell very useful.

And there's a IRC channel #Asterisk on FreeNode (try irc.debian.org) (argh /. mangles the irc link)

There's some more links to support pages including a Wiki at the bottom of this page

Why didn't you just use Asterisk ?

Asterisk is an AWSOME PBX system that doesn't get mentioned enough on /.

It's supported features are equivalent to a PBX costing several thousand bucks. Including support for VOIP and T-1(E-1)'s

Some of the other features include Voicemail, Conference calling, Caller ID, an Auto Attendant (press 1 for sales, 2 for support,), Call Queuing (for call centers), Call Detail Records, more

The documentation is a little sparse but they are currently working on the
Asterisk Handbook Project (warning PDF).

I also found the Getting Started With Asterisk Guide by Andy Powell very useful.

And there's a IRC channel #Asterisk on FreeNode (try irc.debian.org) (argh /. mangles the irc link)

There's some more links to support pages including a Wiki at the bottom of this page

Why didn't you just use Asterisk ?

Asterisk is an AWSOME PBX system that doesn't get mentioned enough on /.

It's supported features are equivalent to a PBX costing several thousand bucks. Including support for VOIP and T-1(E-1)'s

Some of the other features include Voicemail, Conference calling, Caller ID, an Auto Attendant (press 1 for sales, 2 for support,), Call Queuing (for call centers), Call Detail Records, more

The documentation is a little sparse but they are currently working on the
Asterisk Handbook Project (warning PDF).

I also found the Getting Started With Asterisk Guide by Andy Powell very useful.

And there's a IRC channel #Asterisk on FreeNode (try irc.debian.org) (argh /. mangles the irc link)

There's some more links to support pages including a Wiki at the bottom of this page

Why didn't you just use Asterisk ?

Asterisk is an AWSOME PBX system that doesn't get mentioned enough on /.

It's supported features are equivalent to a PBX costing several thousand bucks. Including support for VOIP and T-1(E-1)'s

Some of the other features include Voicemail, Conference calling, Caller ID, an Auto Attendant (press 1 for sales, 2 for support,), Call Queuing (for call centers), Call Detail Records, more

The documentation is a little sparse but they are currently working on the
Asterisk Handbook Project (warning PDF).

I also found the Getting Started With Asterisk Guide by Andy Powell very useful.

And there's a IRC channel #Asterisk on FreeNode (try irc.debian.org) (argh /. mangles the irc link)

There's some more links to support pages including a Wiki at the bottom of this page

If you can swing $99 then this might be something to check out. I use one very sucessfully with the asterisk open source PBX and it does quite well. To do what you want to do the configuration is quite trivial also. You would have to supply the audio source in either mp3 or gsm audio and could even create a simple menu that would allow them to select a story to hear.

Take a look at Asterisk

VoIP is not offered in my area but I'm itching to build a homemade PBX. And there is a bunch of features for voicemails and transfer that you would be able to use with the provided SIP or H323 calls.

Gog

>Is VoIP the same thing as these FREE (ad supported) PC-to-phone services which existed before the tech bubble burst?

I never encountered ad supported PC-to phone services but recall absolutely dreadful pay services with echoes and long delays. Thankfully things have moved on a long way from there. VoIP is like talking on a cellphone in terms of quality and delay. With something like Free World Dialup you can talk, Geek to Geek, across the Internet for free, and there are underlying standards such as an agreed upon international prefix to access VoIP.

If you browse the FWD mailing list you'll discover other goodies like POTS->FWD gateways down a large chunk of the East Coast of the US. There's also gateways in other countries, Washington State numbers that reach your FWD line etc. etc.

Then there's the Linux-based PBX, Asterisk.


Welcome to the maze of twistly little voiceprompts that are all subtly different.

Kudo's on your family's safety. You might want to contact your local telco to verify the information in E911 is correct. Screw up on their end could impact response time.

I use Vonage. Although sometimes the quality is sub-par, they were able to request my # from BellSouth and have it transferred to them. Also, they, as I'm sure others do, have the ability to link your address to 911.

Personally I'd roll my own asterisk server and utlize someone like VoicePulse for incoming 800# and local access, but in the event my net connection is down, so is incoming voicemail. Vonage handles that for me and the email notification.

Anyone know of a way to use an IAX or IAX2 provider and have them handle the PSTN termination and voicemail while allowing me to connect my Asterisk server to them?

A lot of what you are requesting has already been done by the Asterix open source pbx project. They recommend using their sponsor's (Digium) hardware to interface your computer with your phone/phones but apparently other hardware is available.

Actually Asterisk would make more sense.

You are a complete fucktard.

• Telecom giants join Linux effort
• Carrier Grade Linux
• Nortel Succession Communication Server 2000
• Cisco SIP Proxy
• Mitel 3050ICP
• Morotola Carrier Grade Chassis
• Motorola HA Linux
• Motorola VoIP
• Zultys Phones
• Zultys PBX
• SNOM Phones
• SNOM Media Server
• Asterisk
• Vovida

Asterisk: the open source software PBX, which runs on Linux, and has a hardware company to back it up with support and equipment?

We use Asterisk at our office, and it's fabulous. You don't have to be a large company to reap its benefits. *sales pitch* Everyone should check it out! *end of pitch* :)

There are a number of 802.11b VoIP devices currently available on the market.

Cisco makes the 2920 but still requires Cisco call manager as a back end.

and one of the more affordibale and interesting products is the Pulver Innovations WiSIP Phone. (short for WiFi SIP).

As well as other products made by companys like Symblol

Between these and Asterisk, "The Open Source Linux PBX" (which works quite well btw) you can come up with great solutions, and some really neat applications.

You can use Asterisk as your home PBX, and for $100, you can pick up a card to let you use your analog phone. Or, you can also interface it to your IP telephones. It can do automatic recording for you, including the mandatory beep tone.

steve

Asterisk can solve that for you. I am playing with it now. It can do different things based on the received CID and even do things like play the "disconnected line" tone sequence before passing the call to you if the CID is unknown.

Just a word of advise: Don't use Quicknet's cards -- the cards work fine but the asterisk developers seem to have something against them, almost forcing you to use Digium's FXO/FXS cards instead. The PhoneJack/LineJacks will work fine for a little while and then you'll get weird problems like oddball rings, CID not being passed through, DTMF not being passed through, all kinds of little issues that you'll have to restart asterisk or reload the modules to fix. The standard answer on #asterisk is "Use Digium cards instead." Right.

Asterisk uses the IAX protocol which goes through NATs without problems. That might be the way to go.

Or some such?

Tunneled through ssh?

Sharp Zaurus
tkcPhone
IPSECon Sharp Zaurus

I would imagine that you could get a SIP phone to compile for the Zaurus or some one that uses another VOIP protocl. As someone above suggested, connect it through an Asterisk server. I've got a test one setup myself on an old PIII 500 w/ 256 MB RAM, a nic and a sound card working with software based SIP phones. Then, if you are near someplace with Ethernet, wireless access or have a phoneline handy, you can connect out.

Good luck with other PDA platforms. You might get this to work on a WinCE but I'd be afraid. I've never audited security on one of those. You'd be out of luck on a Palm until the next release of the Palm OS (they promise!) since the promise that that is when they'll let backgrounded apps run.

You could use gnuphone with a SSH or other VPN tunnel, or even a full blown asterisk point and use encrypted IAX transfers. Any old SIP phone would work too.

All of these are IP solutions. Any decent pair of phone encoders (where you encrypt and decrypt the audio stream) would be a lower-tech solution that might work better.

You could try to put Asterisk on it.

Sounds like this is a perfect candidate for a machine that can be a VoIP gateway while still keeping backward compatibility with pots.

Hopefully the thing is powerful enough for a home with a few cheap SIP phones.

CC

I'm surprised that noone mentioned Asterisk yet. Its a soft pbx that handles sip/h323 and even pri/t1. We currently have a 4 port T1 card with a 23 voice channels on 1 T1 with a bunch of Cisco 7960 phones loaded up with SIP firmware. It works great, and we saved a bunch. (I don't work for digium, btw)

You could possibly install Asterisk and use this sip service as a gateway.

There is an open source public branch exchange solution already. Supports SIP phones, conferencing, etc.

Check it out. It's stable, easy to work with, and the mailing list is very active.

...this will be the start of the demise of telephone networks - at least over in Africa, anyway. VoIP is getting more and more refined, along with more and more applications, such as the GPL'd Asterisk software PABX system. Most of the larger PABX systems I've seen around give the capability for VoIP links to other offices and if suitable gateways become more widely available, the move to VoIP will slowly but surely become more widespread as the larger companies that deal with the countries that have widespread VoIP penetration start to use those links to reduce the cost of making phone calls.

And you've got a CLEC in a box. Stable OS, hardened hardware, and a kick-ass piece of application software.

First and foremost I'm a wireless guy, landline is pretty much a black hole to me these days....

Telecom has been undergoing many changes at the lowest levels for a few years. Most UNIX systems in telephony are used as SCP's (Signaling / Service control points) / HLR's VLR's.. etc. A SCP will provide a service such as SMS, E-911, prepay, or something over the SS7 network. The SS7 network is at the lowest levels very similar to DAP, being a heavyweight protocol that requires its own circuits (ISDN, T1, ATM, etc.). While SS7 has been fabulous for creation of large and wonderful telecom networks it is becoming harder and harder to find people who understand even the basics of it. What's worse is the SS7 solutions of yesteryear (produced by say Lucent, NewNet, and Tandem) are no more. The newer SS7 solutions (say SignalWare, Distributed7, etc.) haven't really been able to cut the mustard. Things have been getting worse for a while, and people know it... but the fine people at ANSI and IEEE, Lucent, Nortel, IBM, and the like have come up with a solution. Make SS7 lightweight (I.e. IP based like LDAP).

Many things have happened in order to get SS7 (a very demanding protocol indeed) to work over IP. The first milestone was essentially dumping TCP for SCTP/IP. Much has been going on in this realm, the lk-sctp project has been busily cranking out code for the 2.5 series kernel, and will likely make Linux one of the first *NIX based operating systems to have a NATIVE SCTP implementation. Adding SS7 to the top of this is about as easy as creating an SCTP daemon.

While SCTP and the Sigtran suite of protocols (M3UA / SUA ) are moving ahead quickly there are other projects that are working on implementing a heavyweight implementation of SS7 - such as openss7, and even the PBX / softswitch project asterisk.

While all this may be nice and good, it may be worth noting that Inet Inc. has an SS7 network monitoring solution called GeoProbe. While some parts of the system run on a solaris server the actual cardcages and "proprietary" equipment actually run Linux. (at over 300k a site, that's a pretty big win for Linux).

As always I'd love to hear what's going on in other sectors of telecom with Linux.

We have developed our own IVR system using SIP and RTP (in Java) and it runs pretty well on both Linux and Windows. We're planning on getting an Asterisk system together with the boards from Digium to bridge from the "PSTN world" to the "VoIP world". It looked like a great solution for that, we want something that's reasonably cheap and that can just allow customers on PSTN lines to connect to our IVR systems.

Just to make it a little easier, Asterisk is the software solution to go with Digium. It's GNU.

From my limited exposure, the Digium folks are very helpful to potential clients.

Uh ... I work for a company that resels their cards, so take that last with the preferred grain of salt.

I just installed asterisk PBX software at home this weekend; not exactly a 'production' environment, but I was impressed. Bayonne looks promising too.

The company I work for is about to implement a full setup using Asterisk for all phone traffic in the company. A 4 span T1 card on a twin P3 1.0Ghz system with 1.0GB of RAM a 110GB raid 5 array (using ext3fs) is the system that will be driving everything. Needless to say, since this will be driving all telephone traffic it must NEVER be compromised. Ergo, this system is running Slackware 8 with minimally installed packages (only those essential to make the system run and allow compilation of software). Not even inetd is running on this server. The software has been compiled with GCC 3.2 that has had the IBM stack protector patch applied to it. Everything looks good, but the system will not be pressed into service until next week when the 2 T1s are activated.

linuxtelephony.org is likely of interest. It has some good information and, just as importantly, lots of good links.

Asterisk seems to be a strong, fully featured, GPL'ed PBX project which has some hardware associated with the project that seems to be pretty well priced.

I can't seem to find my other links but they're probably linked off of linuxtelephony.org.