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Using BroadVoice with Asterisk How-To
Kerbo writes "With all the hype surrounding open source PBXs (telephone switches) such as Asterisk, the user community is clamoring for more help in getting these systems up and running. The Geek Gazette has published an article on how to configure Asterisk to work with BroadVoice VoIP service and eliminate the need for the phone company."
What Is Asterisk?
Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.
Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the Features section for a more complete list.
Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. For interconnection with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk's sponsors, Digium(TM). Digium has single and quad span T1 and E1 interfaces for interconnection to PRI lines and channel banks as well as a single port FXO card and a one to four-port modular FXS and FXO card.
http://www.sandstorming.com
I had BroadVoice for two months.
Call quality varied from good to extremely poor. Your mileage may vary.
BV also seems to have a problem handling DTMF (Touch-Tones). I had consistent trouble using many call routing systems, including my bank's customer sevice line.
The worst came when I tried to Cancel my BroadVoice account. I followed BV's support page instructions and emailed billing with the exact information necessary. NO response. I called support several times to no avail.
Ultimately the only way to terminate my BV account was to call my credit card company and have them block BV's continued attempts to charge me for service that I no longer wanted.
For those who are interested in VoIP for business, I've written some online guides:
VoIP for business
How ISPs can sell VoIP services to their customers
TeliaSonera, old state monopoly operator in Sweden and Finland, plans for a large IP-based network (article in swedish) with an "IP jack" installed in every home within 2 years, replacing the phone jack.
Internet Speed test
The Slashdot story How Do You Make International Calls? drew 420 comments. The best suggestion by far, I found, was BroadVoice. It's amazing: $25/month for unlimited calls to land lines in 35 countries.
The BroadVoice service has been excellent. Note this comment earlier in this story: BV = Poor Support, #11989921. It's very important when using any VOIP service to test your internet connection quality. It's easy. Linux users need no help, probably. Windows users left-click on Start/ Run/. Enter CMD and press the Enter key. In the Command Line Interface (DOS) box that appears, enter
and press the Enter key. The times may be about 60 milliseconds, and should all be below about 300 milliseconds, and there should be no times far (5x) larger than the average time. Hold down the control key and press the C key to exit from Ping before the 100 tests are completed.
If you get highly variable Ping times, you will have trouble with VOIP, both in dialing and in talking. Call your ISP and tell them to repair their equipment. I did that with Telefonica here in Brazil, and, after hours of talking to many people, they did do the repair.
If you call your ISP, I suggest you don't complain about VOIP, because that is a painful issue for some ISPs. Instead, complain about these things:
1) Ping times definitely show there is a problem. Tell tech support to try it themselves.
2) Web pages give error messages or don't load unless they are clicked on more than once.
3) Email cannot be received or sent except by trying several times.
4) Music on internet radio is periodically interrupted.
BroadVoice customer service has been excellent for me.
"I'm the only one in the family running Linux ..."
Asterisk also runs on *BSD, MacOS X and Solaris. With the help of Cygwin it even runs on Windows now.
In fact, talking about an easy to set up home PBX, you might actually find MacOS X to be far more likely to suit your needs.
There is an Asterisk installer for the Mac, so you don't have to built it yourself and there are GUI based setup wizards, or assistants as they're called in the Mac world, which allow non-geeks without tech skills to set up a basic home PBX in just a few minutes.
A driver for using the Mac's built-in modem as a voice port to connect to a POTS line is on its way.
But even if you don't have a Mac nor want to buy one, I assume that similar tools will eventually show up for Windows now that Asterisk runs under Cygwin.
Asterisk on Linux will probably remain a "mostly for geeks" affair. Then again, there are some promising efforts under way to package Asterisk and Linux in a "works out of the box" fashion, for example Asterisk@Home.
Anyway, you shouldn't compare Asterisk with Skype because Asterisk is a _server_ application that can be linked to just about _any_ service and Skype is a _client_ application that is _locked_ to one single service.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
"What I would like to know is how I may build a free (as in speech) Skype-like network with my friends, using Asterisk (or something else)?"
That's rather easy to do with Asterisk.
The first thing to do is - surprise - to set up an Asterisk server. Next, you configure a user account for yourself and one for each of your friends.
Then you tell your friends your server's address or DNS name, username and password and ask them to download a software phone that supports any of the open standards Asterisk supports, eg. SIP, IAX and H.323 to name the most important ones.
For Windows, your preferred choice would probably be the Firefly softphone, which supports both SIP and IAX, another one is called X-lite which is SIP only. For Linux there are quite a few open source softphones supporting various protocols, SJphone, Kphone, GnomeMeeting and more. For MacOS X there is X-Lite and the cross platform iaxComm (Win/Lin/Mac). All those are free.
Then all that remains to do is to tell those softphones how to find your Asterisk server and what their username and password is. In some cases a little fine tuning may be needed. For example, if someone is behind NAT, you may have to work around NAT traversal problems.
The easiest way to avoid NAT problems is to use the IAX protocol and a softphone that support IAX, eg. Firefly or iaxComm. IAX doesn't have NAT issues, so no work arounds are needed.
Note, that Asterisk supports multiple protocols concurrently. So, some of your friends might come in using SIP while others use IAX and yet others use H.323. The overhead for Asterisk to translate between protocols is negligible.
Everybody can now call everybody else by their username, which could be a nickname or an internal phone number. If a user isn't logged in, calls will go to voicemail. You can also set up chat rooms for multi-party voice conferencing.
In addition, you can set up so called SIP URIs, which is akin to an email address. In fact, your email address may well be identical to your SIP URI. Using that SIP URI, anybody with a SIP device can now call anyone on your DIY VOIP network, if you want to allow that.
Your friends can also register their ordinary phone numbers with a directory service like E164.org and if somebody with an appropriately configured IP-PBX calls that number, the call would not pass over the PSTN but over the internet via your Asterisk server to the owner of that number.
All this is not very difficult to do and you don't need a very powerful box either. So, all I can say is: Go for it!
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
This has been on Broadvoice' own website for months. There's also a good guide on voip-info.org.
Why is it suddenly 'news' because some hack reporter republishes them?
(Of course with asterisk you don't use a single provider... you work out the cheapest routes to different places and write them into the dialplan).
The benifits as I see them:
Multiline. Several people can be calling at once. (Provided the voip provider doesn't mind. Unlimited plans usually forbid this, but per minute plans have no such restrictions.)
Multi-mailbox. You can assign a different mailbox to different members of the household.
Multi-number. You can have multiple phone numbers in different geographic areas. You can even get cheap 800 numbers that cost 2cents/min. All these can be funneled to the same phones.
Telemarketer avoidence. You can have a top-level voice menu that asks people to press 1 for person-a, 2 for person-b etc. If they don't press anything the call is dropped. The predictice dialers that telemarketers use won't press anything, so the call never rings any of your phones.
Per-callerid call-routing. Calls from people you'd rather not talk to can go direct to voice mail or get blocked. (jokingly refered to as the ex-girlfriend option in the asterisk documentation.)
Better voice quality on the voicemail. Most home answering machines compress the crap out of the incoming and outgoing messages. Computer disks are cheap enough and voice only takes 64kbits/sec uncompressed anyway, so you can just keep it in the native telco-format and not lose any voice quality on the messages.
call accounting. If you do consulting, you often want to keep track of how long you spent on the phone with each customer. Asterisk automatically logs every incoming and outgoing call with the exact call start and end times.
Yes, all of that is very doable (not that I've done it on mine since I don't have callerid). You'd just need some logic to check the value of the ${CALLERIDNUM} variable.
Take a look at the Asterisk wiki, particularly the variables and commands pages.
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
Yes, Asterisk is an excellent tool for what you want to do.
It has quite a few neat tricks for telemarketer avoidance. First, there is a thing called Zapateller, which if enabled, sends a so called SIT sequence on the line when a call comes in and telemarketer's equipment hangs up on that.
Those telemarketers who don't have equipment that hangs up on the SIT sequence, eg. telemarketers located overseas, can usually be blocked just as easily by sending all calls without caller IDs or with unknown caller IDs to a voice menu that asks the caller to press a touch tone key. This is because telemarketers use so called predicitve diallers, systems that dial and only connect the call to their staff when there is somebody human on the other end of the line. If a predictive dialler hits your voice menu, it will just hang up and call some other number.
Likewise you can do all kinds of smart things with calls from callers you do know. For example, some you may want to forward to your mobile, to some others you may want to announce an alternative number to call, yet others you may want to forward to someone else or to voicemail. Asterisk can send voicemail to you by email as an attachement and it can send you an SMS to your mobile phone with the number of the caller and the time of the call.
You say you aren't keen on using the VOIP features, but VOIP isn't only about making long distance calls over the net. It is also about extending the reach of your home phone line. For example, you may be out of the house but as long as you have internet access, you could still be picking up your phone at home when a call comes in. Or you could make a call using your home phone while you are some place else.
It's pretty addictive. Once you've started using something like Asterisk, you keep using it in more and more interesting and innovative ways.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
This may seem a bit naive but if someone has this setup at home, what features do they actually use? I mean stuff like three way calling / voice mail etc are already provided with most if not telephone lines. I'd love to tinker with it but would love to hear opinions on why an average home would want this?
I'm running Asterisk in a home environment. Although it's being fed by two POTS lines, how Astersk connects with the rest of the world doesn't actually matter.
First advantage: ghetto hunt group. With busy call forwarding ($1/mo instead of $5/mo for call waiting on a single line), if the main number for the house is busy, the calls ring over to the other line. Cheaper and way better than call waiting because the calls always ring through. If nobody answers, it ends up on voice mail.
Second advantage: Asterisk picks a free line when someone wants to make a call. It does this automatically with the simple "pick up and dial" method. No more talking on the phone only to have someone else in the house barge in on a call or start dialing numbers. No, you can't listen in on conversations anymore. That has to be done at the PBX level or the demarc box outside. But it's good for simple privacy.
Third advantage: invididual voicemail boxes. For free. The phone company (SBC, in my case) charges for all these extra things. Asterisk already has them, and therefore they are free. It can email them to you, too. Plus you can check the voicemail from any phone in the system, or with a little extra config, outside the system.
Fourth advanatge: direct dial. Rather than ringing the whole house, people can direct dial in. Or if they do call the whole house, and whoever is not home, you can just transfer them to the extention they want and leave a voicemail with that person.
Fifth advantage: the good ol' extention-to-extention calls. No more shouting across the house at someone for a simple question, only to not be able to hear it anyway. A 5 second call is way more convenient.
There's many more useful features for the home environment, such as routing calls based on caller id numbers (we don't have caller id on the outside lines, so I just inject something like "Incoming L1" as the CID if a call rings in on line 1), routing outbound calls, restricting long distance or toll numbers, and pretty much anythig else you can imagine.
I'll tell you one thing I can't imagine: going back to telephony in a multiuser environment not managed by a PBX. Whether it's 4 or 400 people, you will find it useful.
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