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Industry-Standard VOIP Phone Using All Free Software
Ralf Ackermann writes: "Voice over IP on a HardPhone running Linux and
just using Open Source software became real. We have sucessfully installed and tested (interoperability with Cisco
7960 as well as Pingtel xPressa in an environment with a partysip SIP registrar and proxy) the linphone SIP phone on a StrongARM based
TuxScreen.
Here is the link describing the steps for others
to use the setup as well: TuxScreen running SIP. All the infos for setting up a comparable installation can be found on the
URL, please also feel free to ask or drop opinions. Many thanks to the linphone developers as well as to my student Florian
Winterstein (for working on a console linphonec version). The setup (on a StrongARM system) is well suited for PDA (iPAQ) or
wearable environments as well."
SIP is an open protocol, so what is special about this?
With a VOIP WiFi "cell phone" you could conceivable talk to anyone in range (peer-to-peer) at no cost, and to anyone connected to the internet if you are in range of a base station.
You even already have an MPL'd H.323 protocol library to provide communication with NetMeeting and GnomeMeeting users. In fact, I've been looking for something like this which could compile on the LinuxARM architecture, in order to turn my iPAQ running Linux into a WiFi cellular phone.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Check this out for another linux-based VoIP, standards-compliant (both SIP *and* H323) phone.
It's been out for quite awhile, over a year. My company is a reseller. They're cheap (~ $199 each) and they rock.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
But I'm still coughing up $20/month for basic phone service. That's $240/year folks. And where's that $240 going? Maintenance? I'll enjoy seeing these fat dinosaurs be replaced by VOIP.
Where did you steal that from?
BTW, your link to beardedlinuxhippies.org is broken.
They just -had- to include the Xeyes in the screenshot.
void women (int money, time_t time);
One of my friends from IRC once mentioned that his employeer, a CLEC, was deploying wireless internet, and that he aparently had some sort of cell phone that also would talk with the wireless gear, and would allow him to make VoIP phone calls. Sweet eh?
The setup (on a StrongARM system) is well suited for PDA (iPAQ) or wearable environments as well."
But can it turn a cell phone into a PDA?
How would I go about replacing my regular land line with VOIP? Do I have to sign up with a VOIP phone service provider? I've looked at all of these pages, but none of them actually tell you how to use them.
The company I work for has been looking at VoIP for several months now. Since we have several offices across the country, it would be very advantageous, technologically, for us to use VoIP for the end-user phones, rather than the hodge-podge of systems we use today.
Unfortunately, the prohibiting factor has been the cost of the phones themselves. The cost for an actual system is within reason, but some VoIP telephones run into the $700 range.
At this pricepoint, it seems much more affordable and reasonable. And while the GUI would need work to make it dummy-friendly, we have no shortage of graphics designers and programmers who could make that work.
One step closer to VoIP from beginning to end makes me happy. And I know it'd make our CFO happy, too. =)
jrbd
However, a recent bill had local charges of $36, long-distance charges of $2.88. And state/federal/fcc/usf charges of $11.36!
a 29% tax rate on a more-or-less necessary service!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I used to run something like that on the dark side of OSes, but now my cell phone plan is so cheap with practically unlimited nationwide long distance and free roaming, I have *zero* need for such a thing. The only time I could see that it might be useful nowadays is if I were making a lot of overseas calls.
Just mix in a few 1000 digit primes.
Chop fish into 128 pieces, add and blow.
Simmer and stir, and allow 1-3 secs for CPU to cool.
Talk when done.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
For the first time in my life I think I believe that some censorship is OK, and that the government isn't intrusive enough. I wish slashdot would just erase this horror.
I do not understand why IP phones
a) have so low market penetration
b) cost so much
-- I know part of the problem with a is b.
What I think really is needed is a low cost, high quality server system for one of these systems. Based on what little research I have done, it costs almost as much, if not more, for hardware for a small office system as it would to get a real small PBX like phone system.
I don't think a phone really needs a 9" LCD screen, or whatever was in the screen shot, but the "Java Phone" from the other company has a screen size perfect for the company phone directory. That I think could be the "killer app" for these things.
Anyway, anyone know of low cost PBX software (if that is even what is is called in the IP phone world)? Open Source, under a BSD like license would be cool, and lower the barrier to market entry for companies wanting to roll a system like this out. Of course, cards to hook up to a POTS connection would also be needed. Voicemail over the web, via shoutcast or something would rock. I havn't listened to my voicemail at work in 3 months. With a better interface, I may stop refusing to use it.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Asterisk
VOCAL
This is fine for intraoffice communication, but what about the real world? I think that a solution for connection VoIP -> POTS could be easy, with a little knowledge of Linux drivers.
...)
Get an older box (P2 400 or so), with plenty of PCI slots, and preferrably an onboard NIC also. Get some Winmodems equal to the # of pci slots.
WinModems, even in all of their Microsoft-sponsored godless evil towards open source platforms, are basically A/D and D/A converters hooked to a phone jack. It should be relatively simple to talk (no pun intended) to them in software and use one as an interface to POTS. It has all of the neccesary hardware, and writing a sound driver for it shouldn't be too difficult. A brand of WinModem with fairly standard hardware could be decided on by the implementer, and drivers written for that. (Winmodems? Standard?
Client software with available source code could be modified to use those, as well as control the phone-line functions. Just run an instance per WinModem.
Honestly, I think that this could work, and it would be a great hack to accomplish. Anyone fancy a go at it?
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
I could not find any mention of the TuxPhone hardware (phone) itself on the site other than the photo, and discussions about the embeded lcd/strongarm thing. No mention of how it links with the phone in the picture, etc.
Are there any "low cost" IP telephones in the market today? $600 (what looks like the going rate) seems like too much to me.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Yeah but do you think things will be any different? Who will regulate VoIP when it is ready to replace what we currently have?
:)
Maybe I'm being pessimistic here, but I think that when VoIP is phased in, we may see lower prices but the system will still get the shit taxed out of it. Essentially, the only thing that will change is the technology underlying the means of how we communicate. Then again, that's just my opinion.
(shameless plug) Take a look at Speex, an open-source, patent-free speech codec (Speex is to speech what Vorbis is to music). Speex should soon be available in Linphone too!
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Although it seems liek VOIP has little or no market share in north america, it is a completely different story in the developing world.
I was travelling through asia and later in south america. Callign home using a conventional calling card was ridiculously expensive.
But, a lot of little businesses were around offering international calls for very cheap. From Laos to canada for 15 cents a minute. Sure there was a little delay, but it was well worth it. All of these were using some sort of VOIP box./
In places without much telecommunications infrastructure, especially when most of the peopel own cell phones and not land phones, VOIP allows the convergence of all sorts of telecommunications traffic onto one simple infrastructure.
And by using open source software, free to all, the third world can much more easily afford it.
Until you start getting network congestion messages every time you make a call.
Am I imagining things or is net traffic and latency going to be a real serious problem before these can become used abound?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
The TuxScreen phone itself was selling for $99 not too long ago. I have one in my closet (which I will now have to drag out so I can play with this project).
IMHO that's what makes this implementation so revolutionary. Other posters were asking why this is newsworthy? Well, a $100 phone that runs open-source VoIP is pretty newsworthy to me. I've done both VoIP and voice-over-frame-relay installations, and you're talking about thousands of dollars for even a small implementation (using IP phones or regular digital PBX phones, special cards in the PBX and the router, special software, and so on).
Compare this to $100 phones and a gateway running on a cheap Linux box.
like
Oh yeah, here's the link to purchase one. Tim says they still have more than 200 phones left at $99 each (but read all the way down the page; you may want to have him unlock the flash chip and/or reflash with a Linux-compatible bootloader for you, which costs a few bucks more)
Any info on VOIP for a regular PC? I need international long-distance access. I saw this Ask Slashdot article that recommended Speakfreely, but I haven't had time to try it.
Any advice?
Kind of off-topic, but does anybody know of a voice chat package that works on both Windows and Linux? Preferably usable over slow (4 KB/s) connections. I know about Speak Freely, but it gives my friends (who use Windows) only noise.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Actually, there's a simpler device that satisfies local peer-to-peer calls (at least my experience with WiFi range). It's been adapted to long range communications, but I prefer this neat hack is a bit more portable.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Open Source VoIP and telephony is tracked at http://www.linuxtelephony.org.
VoIP hardware (PCI cards) is IIRC $79, gateways are $179, drivers have been in the kernel since (again IIRC) 2.2.16. http://www.quicknet.net.
VoIP in the U.S. is almost pointless because the PSTN is too good. No one wants near perfect when perfect is cheap and easy. In the third world, if you can get a phone circuit it averages $1.27 per minute, whereas VoIP through a hop-off provider like Net2Phone (http://www.net2phone.com) runs average about $0.23 per minute or less. Straight IP to IP (like across a VPN from company branch to branch) is just the cost of the ISP (usually flat rate). So VoIP cafes are a popular way for the non-super-rich and powerful to make calls to their relatives in the first world.
Personally, the VoIP calls I have made have an almost imperceptible latency problem and sounded *far* better than any GSM call I have ever heard. Then again, these calls were during business hours so net congestion was not an issue for me.
The Ogg Vorbis has a low bit rate mode that is useful for VoIP telephony, and is grossly better than GSM to my ear.
Finally, VoIP is used by the big players here in the US. Qwest and Sprint use VoIP in preference to ATM due to cost of the equipment (Bits per second/price of hardware. IP is more efficient than ATM due to less overhead). Any cross-country call is VoIP nowadays.
Just my two bits.
-C
How often does your Internet connection go down? How often does your router or Ethernet switch crash? Do you ever get a guarenteed or consistant data and latency rate?
Now how often do your telephone systems crash? How often does the quality of the call degrade or drop during the call?
Traditional phone systems are consistant, rock solid stable, and can handle a large user base.
This is what Vonage gives their subs....I've had it for about 3 months and the quality is indistinguishable from a normal phone... http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/pcat/ata18 6.htm
actually I have recieved the recorded message saying that all the lines were busy several times. Granted the phone companies network is more stable than my isp's, but the phone company has been around longer.
I'd love to see good evidence to the contrary, but I've always heard the single largest cost for the telecoms is the billing infrastructure and it sounds quite reasonable. The billing adds all kinds of cost intensive human resources to the infrastructure that is supposed to be entirely automated. It requires receptionists, cashiers, accountants and all of the associated business crap. And how many hours do they spend arguing about bad bills and other make work? While the customer argues on their own time, they companies have to pay their represntatives. And so the customer not only has to argue about bad bills on their own time but is paying the salary of the person they are arguing with. That's where monopolies no longer serve the interests of the people. Simply because telecoms evolved from a labor instensive model doesn't mean they get to stay that way in order to create busy work. This is always the argument against communism is that state run enterprises create all thes useless make-work jobs. It seems the private telecoms of the US are striking example of this same make-work inefficiency. The argument of socialist -vs- free market is misleading and off-topic, the point is that any institution that affects the majority of the people and is clearly failing to function for the benefit of those people it influences over a period of decades should not be supported by the society. That has nothing to do with socialist -vs- free market. It's just common sense.
I don't know if it is true or not that billing
is the single largest cost for a phone company,
but even if that were true it would still be
necessary. Otherwise, what is to stop some people
from hogging huge amounts of capacity by making
thousands of long-distance calls every month?
VoIP using only Open Source isn't new, nor is interoperability with Cisco equipment, nor is SIP, or even embedded VoIP using Linux.
The OpenH323 Project (http://www.openh323.org) has had a H.323 protocol stack availble since 1999. This stack works with Cisco gear and most other commercial H.323 products, and works on Linux, *BSD, Windows and other systems.
A full GUI Linux client using this stack can be found at http://www.gnomemeeting.org.
There is also a SIP stack available as part of the OPAL Project available from the same site. Others are also available (see http://www.vovida.org) for one example.
Lots of companies (including my own) have been doing "real" VoIP using Open Source for years.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of OpenH323)
...head over to TuxScreen.net. Be quick there are only a couple of hundred left. They are $99 each. Have Fun.
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
All of the phones put out by Cisco and Call Manager (the server that runs everything) don't use SIP, they use the open protocol SCCP or Skinny. If you hook up a SIP phone and try to register with Call Manager, it won't even work, as Call Manager dosen't support SIP. Nor is Cisco too hot to trot on SIP, as you can do less with SIP than with SCCP or even H.323. I've spoken to Cisco about SIP (including CCIE's) and SIP isn't anything special, especially in the enterprise market.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
they already have it:
r _ip.html
Symbol Technologies and they work pretty good:
http://www.symbol.com/products/wireless/voice_ove
Also check out IP Blue, a company that sell IP Phones for your IPaq. It works over an 802.11b connection.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
I purchased the $5/mo phone plan in my area. After all of the taxes and line charges, the bill is $14/mo. I'm paying $5 to the phone company and $9 to the government (Philadelphia, US). My stomache hurts.
Drop the fucking gun. Now!
You're missing the point. If billing IS the cost, then who gives a shit where people call? Look up Voice over Packet and familiarize yourself with the ethernet/sonet debate before you go around thinking --"if it was expesnive twenty years ago, it must be expensive now!"
You're not one of these fascist libertarians are you? You know . . .
Everybody pay money now, you all owe the monopolies. Pay pay pay you fucking hippies. What do you want, a just society? Why you fucking deviants! Burn the fucking bastards. Make them pay. Pay pay pay pay!!!!!!
Yeah, the government really wants their cut. My service is $8, including the line and unlimited local calls. My bill? $19. Why? Taxes.
It's a bit difficult to figure out, imo. The taxes, you have to remember, go to the government, which supposedly then earmarks it for return to the industry. Supposedly. Originally, this was to subsidize expansion into rural and near rural areas. Now, I think most of it is equivalent to income tax--at one point it was necessary (income tax was used mainly for feeding the war machine) but then was expanded for more and more bloat and profits (which then get kicked back to campaign funds).
Lovely, isn't it?
"Now how often do your telephone systems crash?"
You've GOT to be kidding me. Your argument may be valid, but no different than someone saying "Hey, I don't want to get an electric hybrid. I want to use gasoline at 18 mph highway (still not unusual in newly released SUVs)." Solutions depend on the viewpoint and what concerns you.
In my area, the phone lines cut out from time to time. It's not as bad as a cell phone, but I've had it cut 4 times in a month once and only talked on that line 10 hours total that month. Ironicly and I know, *highly* unusual, my Comast cable connection has been more stable than my phone service (has to do with an isolate problem when I signed up and they have 4 truck rolls to recheck the line, hardware, etc. before solving the problem--not comparably unusual given the problems I know friends have had in getting things hooked up).
The phone problems are not unusual in my area--I know of 3 houses served by the same CO that have this problem. 1 of those is in an area that is relatively dense (copper, no multiplexing) in population that has regular problems, from what I hear of the neighbors and see from the truck rolls Verizon has. If it's not interference from the copper, it's something wrong with the multiplexing, as that cuts out on about 4 hours timeframes, regardless of whether it's a voice or data call.
Isolated problem? Hardly. When I live in Chicago, there were no problems. But when I lived in DC, lines cut out as well. And interference was a huge issue.
Rock solid telcos? Hardly. What am I saying? Service depends on the area where you live. In my case, phone service is fairly reliable but hardly rock solid. I know of areas in PA where it utterly stinks. Meanwhile, my cable internet service is rock solid, which I KNOW is really unusual compared to other's folks experience. Conclusion? I would love a decent VoIP service in my situation.
Ok so someone figures out how to put phone call data over ip. I'm still looking for someone that has a clue and isn't going to make the excessivly difficult. I currently have two 3com NBX100 (with only a small part GNU code but you can't get source even though they link it all together). These things are 486 boxes (that will boot linux!) that run a complete crap Os/custom app. I've got a cyclades pr4000 but they can't seem to figure out how to dump an analog call into a socket. I can do it fine on a cisco 5200 or a 2600 but not the only device I've got hooked up to a E1 (read T1 for the north american folks). They cyclades people came up with some lame ass excuse that "we figured people wanted "standards" which we couldn't do so we fucked it off. How lame. Oh well, its the last cyclades box I buy unless they seriously get ther act together...
.wav files and figures out which buttons the press. Funny thing is I forgot all about h323 or h3 or any other protcolo but it does work. Maybe I sould got buy a few books on voip to find out how to do this right.
I can take most of the devices that I've got that hook to decent phone lines and if I get a 64kbit data stream in (aka a phone call), I can dump it to a port. That port can dump audio out in ISDN format (mulaw or alaw depending on its place in the world) and the callie can get a nice message of "press 1 to do splat and press two for garfarbinsplat". Its trival to do an fft that can figure out which touchtone they are pressing and then I can cope with it in one of seval ways. All of this just by redirecting any call taffic to a tcp port on a linux box. Funny thing is I have yet to take advntage of any call set up or three way calling features in this code. It jusst answers the phone, plays back
This is some funny shit.
Any more code examples ?
*correction* a 29% tax on a more-or-less monopoly.
This communication is secured using Rot-26 Encryption Algorithm, Unauthorized decryption will be subject to laughter.
Hooray, they've incorporated your hard work into their prodocts. Now what?
Just because it costs less doesn't mean they'll charge less.
oh man i dont even remember posting that... yeah theres more code, but unfinished.. next time im stoned ill finish it and submit it to the decss gallery
heh i wonder what else i did last night hmm
The system over all is pretty spendy to install. Servers for call manager, server for Voice Mail system, all new phones, retrofiting with Cat5e. I can't see a big reason for this if I just need to switch 3 phone lines between 5 people. But for a couple of hunded people in a few locations, it's a different story. Phone company here charges $100/hr for a tech to work on our system. That adds up quickly, and much of the work seems trivial. Move this line from this office to another. Change this or that extension. Blah blah $100 blah. We're basically doing this to squeeze the local telco out of our service costs. Now it's all soft, we control extensions, we control dialing rules, we control call blocking and such. All of this is fine because our IT staff isn't overworked, so adding this layer probably won't add any bodies.
Bottom line is if you are installing network infrastructure and are spending money for managed switches and other hardware, and have more than a handfull of employees, consider making sure your switches and routers are VoIP capable, i.e. QOS, VLAN, etc., and consider replacing your PBX with a VoIP server solution when it comes time to expand or replace. The primary beauty of VoIP for us is 1. Scalability, 2. Independence from local telco 3. More feature rich phones.
That said, IMO the VoIP revolution is of the LAN, not WAN type.
And then there was metered bandwidth, and the phone companies that had acquired cable saw the net bills, that they were even larger than the phone bills had been, and they grabbed their huge bellies and laughed....
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***