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."

Comments

Yes, fine...

[ramblin billy]

but how long until the phone company - who owns the backbone somewhere up the line, puts its foot down?

billy - remembering DSL

Re:Yes, fine...

[md8mart]

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.

Re:Yes, fine...

[Dolda2000]

The great-grandparent seemed to worry about the phone companies trying to stop VoIP. The grandparent pointed out, with that advertisement, that that seems unlikely.

Re:Yes, fine...

[Doc Ruby]

That's the point: if TeliaSonera is now in the VoIP biz, won't they compete with the Asterisk network, blocking ports, lowering QoS, and making the telco attack on DSL look like "playing fair"?

Re:Yes, fine...

[Doc Ruby]

If TeliaSonera is now in the VoIP biz, won't they compete with the Asterisk network, blocking ports, lowering QoS, and making the telco attack on DSL look like "playing fair"? We're not worried about telcos stopping "VoIP". We're worried that the telcos will take over VoIP, stop everyone else from doing it, and screw it up as badly as they have POTS - and worse.

Re:Yes, fine...

[mamladm]

First, there is no such thing as "the Asterisk Network". Asterisk is a device.

This means, service providers are not in direct competition with Asterisk as you suggest. To the contrary. Due to its multi-protocol support, Asterisk is probably the most service agnostic device there is in this space. Service providers can easily gain by embracing Asterisk, at least those providers who support open standards.

In a world with closed services, it is very difficult for service providers to win business from customers of their competitors or to win lost customers back, simply because customers have to switch equipment to change providers.

In a world with service agnostic devices like Asterisk, it is very easy for service providers to get a chance to win the business of other providers' customers and if only as a secondary service. Not only does Asterisk make it easy to change providers, but it can handle multiple concurrent providers. As a result, a provider can more easily win back a lost customer's business. In fact, a provider may not lose the customer's business in the first place. Properly configured, Asterisk will use another provider's service at times when a given provider has problems to complete calls. This means, the user will not feel the outage and is less likely to change providers as long as the mix of providers used delivers an overall positive experience.

With a single closed service using proprietary standards or locked devices, once the provider loses a customer as a result of quality problems, may they be temporary or not, that customer is usually gone forever. Quite often such a customer may become a foe advocating strongly against the provider they have left behind.

As far as measures to make competing services perform worse are concerned, again, because of its flexibility and multi-protocol, multi-codec support, Asterisk is the device that's probably better suited to cope than most others.

This can be as simple as changing port numbers, which locked devices and service will not allow you to do. It can be more sophisticated such as tuning the QoS parameters, also something which many devices won't allow you to do. Or it can be as neat as using Asterisk's secret weapon: IAX.

Not only is IAX a NAT friendly protocol, but it also is an extremely efficient and robust protocol. Quite a few people on the Asterisk mailing list have reported experiences using Asterisk in extremely bad environments where IAX did cope astonishingly well while other protocols went from severely degraded service to no service at all.

So, no matter how you look at it, you will find that Asterisk has a pretty good value proposition. There is a reason why it has become so popular.

Re:Yes, fine...

[Doc Ruby]

IAX makes "Asterisk networks", like FWD. Other than that contradiction, I don't see what your discussion has to do with my statement. Asterisk offers PBX features that many ISPs/telcos will want to charge you for instead, running them more centrally like traditional POTS. Asterisk has an excellent value proposition: PBX alone was a business revolution on the PSTN, VoIP is its own revolution, and Asterisk is a gateway with many other features. All the more threatening to telcos, which have many competitive advantages with nothing to do with value.

Re:Yes, fine...

[mamladm]

the point is that the choice for the telcos is this:

either they embrace the VOIP revolution and the resulting empowering of customers even though this may hurt a little here and there,

or they can fight it and in the process of doing so get wiped out and replaced by something like Skype.

Re:Yes, fine...

[Doc Ruby]

Or they can hijack VoIP for themselves, compete unfairly with anyone else offering the service, and do exactly what they've always done. We're lucky that we've got such a tough bastard as Jefferey Citron running Vonage, who can strategize and execute disruption of the industry. Unfortunately, he'll be the new (VoIP) telco, competing with open offerings, and we'll have him to contend with, too.

Re:Yes, fine...

[mamladm]

in my book that would fall under fighting VOIP and ultimately lead to some underground system that wipes them out for good.

As an example you might want to consider p2p filesharing. I remember when Napster was being sued, the word was "be careful what you wish for -- you're only grooming a new generation of distributed p2p that you can't fight in court" and this is precisely what happened.

The more efficiently traditional telcos try to fight or contain VOIP, the more efficient their foes will become in defeating them.

Consequently my conclusion is the only way for telcos to survive is to embrace the new without trying tricks to contain it.

In other words, it is not so much about what technology they use, it's more about _how_ they use it.

What is asterix?

[sandstorming]

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.

BV = Poor Support

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:BV = Poor Support

[Munrobasher]

Call quality varied from good to extremely poor. Your mileage may vary

Was this for internal or external telephone calls? I don't think we're quite ready yet for the later in a business environment. But on an internal PBX - isn't that okay assuming your LAN is up to spec?

Rob.

Re:BV = Poor Support

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, very poor support, and generally poor service. Great price is the only plus.

The only codecs they allow are alaw and ulaw, which are bandwidth hogs, leading to poor call quality.

3/10'th the time they can't complete my outgoing call for one reason or another, sometimes I even get error messages in russian(?).

The worst part is their SIP implimentation changes regularly. One day everything works fine, the next day they've changed something and I have to fiddle with your configuration for a few hours to get it working again.

Good luck getting in touch with support, they don't answer e-mail and rarely answer the phone. I've called them a total of 27 times in the past, and got a rep on the phone only once. The rep was nice and tried to help at least. I am now trying to cancel my account to no avail. I'm putting a stop-payment on it tomorrow.

In short, don't use BroadVoice unless you are a bit of a masochist. There are other services such as VoicePulse Connect and SimpleTelecom that work MUCH better, and are fully supported.

Look for a provider that uses IAX instead of SIP. IAX is great for people behind nat, and the fact that they allow IAX connections means they run Asterisk too so compatibility is almost guarenteed.

Re:BV = Poor Support

[WindBourne]

Got to agree with some of this.

I am part of several companies of which one is doing * set-ups in the Denver region. We have been using BV do to their low prices and their attitude towards * (Vonage and the RBOCs do not want to work with you).

We have had 4 outages. In each time, trying to get a hold of them is next to impossible. In addition, in one case, we noticed that accounts came up seperately over a period of a couple of hours (hinting at a DB change-over/lose with account info).

When we call them, it takes for ever to get support, and it is rarely as good as you want (you feel like you are talking to comcast or MS support (what is this internet thingy that you talk about?)).

We have taken to using 2 providers with each and ever install (each install has no less than 3 phones). Sounds expensive, but it is not. What is nice is that if they lose one provider, the other carries the load. In addition, we set-up the answering service at each to tell about the other phone number (You have reached so&so, Please try our other number at xxx.xxx.xxxx).

The company that we use is Teliax. They are owned by several ex-Avaya folks who are running it the right way. When you need support they have been prompt and helpful. We have found them to on top of things. and they are on a different network.

Re:BV = Poor Support

[mod_critical]

At my business all of our outgoing calls travel over virtual lines provided by the VoicePulse Connect service. We get to set up the line(s) as an IAX connection and all you do is buy minutes. Better yet, for outgoing calls you have as many lines as you attempt to use, it just uses 1 minute each minute per active line.

I didn't look through the article to see if you can do this with DV, but with Voice Pulse the quality of service has been superb! Kudos to them!

Re:BV = Poor Support

[bardothodal]

I don't think the pricing is good at all for voice pulse. It's basically $30 for 1000 minutes PLUS $7.99/month for a number PLUS the cost of your data connection(mostly likely @ $30/month. My Verizon cell phone is 1000 minutes for $60 plus unlimited long distance at nite and during weekends . ( did i mention it was wireless?) Doesn't sound like a cost saving to me.

Re:BV = Poor Support

[Linuxathome]

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.

Although I agree that their service is spotty depending on the type of broadband service you have, my experience with customer service was actually good with BV. I guess YMMV. All I did was fire off an email and they replied within the next day to cancel my service AND credited me back the full month that I used with them. I went with their BYOD (bring your own device) plan, however. When I emailed them about a problem with voicemail, they were on the ball within hours and left me a voicemail on the system to inform me that they tested my setup.

Re:eliminate the need for the phone company.

[ites]

Exactly my thought. Telcos are amongst the most profitable companies around, especially in countries where they derived from old state monopolies.

I don't see governments encouraging the destruction of major industries, nor those industries happily watching, no matter how logical it may seem to the geeks involved.

Revolutions are possible but heading for full-frontal confrontations with powerful and rich interest groups is generally a good way to get yourself into serious pain.

If the telcos were bankrupt, inefficient, unable to provide a decent service, and already collapsing... yes, aim for the throat.

But given that's not the case, the smartest strategy is to move the fight to a different terrain (which VoIP attempts to do but which wifi is more suitable for). Guerilla warfare can bring down powerful interest groups.

Sorry for the metaphor of war, but if someone came along and told me that my $BIGbn business could be replaced by a bootable CD, there would be a certain reaction, yes.

...and for those in business...

[Alistair Cunningham]

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

Benefit for the average home?

[pinkocommie]

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?

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[timthorn]

I'm in the UK. I call the US a lot, from home or from my mobile. Asterisk allows me to telephone a UK number from my mobile, thus using my free talk time, but have the call routed to the US over IP. I can also use the server to deliver my home voicemail to my work email.

I'm working on a system where each of my computers (at home, work, and my parent's house) is fitted with a Bluetooth dongle which will discover if my mobile phone is nearby. If it is, calls to my Asterisk server will be routed to the landline phone I'm sitting at.

Geeky, I know, but I started my engineering life in telecoms and can't seem to shake it off...

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[Tony Hoyle]

Hmm.. interesting. You could apply the same to the room lights :)

I do the same, to Australia, Germany, US and the UK - all free. Of course being a geek I've spent more on hardware to do this than I've saved :)

How are you routing the UK calls from the mobile? I find that if I put a menu/pin on the incoming line people just get confused, so I'd like it to start ringing and also listen for a pin code... haven't found out how to do that though.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[edudspg]

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.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest one I see is that it's cheap to have an unlimited VoIP account which allows multiple calls. And you can add a second DID (unlimited incoming) for dirt cheap ($5 or so).

Now why would a home want this? Daughter can talk on the phone all night long to her BF and you can still make calls. BF can call at all hours of the night and either by using a second DID or by using Caller ID matching - it only rings her phone.

Those are the biggest advantages I see, beyond the obvious one -- cost. If you make a lot of long distance calls, it's usually cheaper.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[timthorn]

Ok, I'll confess. I've spent way too long designing a circuit that would fit in a light socket based around the Philips LPC2100 series ARM microcontroller and TDA5051 mains modem. My car has a bluetooth handsfree, so... Ok, I'll stop!

I perform CLI grooming, so Asterisk knows that it's my mobile calling. Only I get the menu.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[timthorn]

My UK line is from BT - Broadband Voice. They gave me a free Cisco ATA-186 with my subscription, so that's why I chose them. My US number if from Iconnecthere. No problems with voice quality, although I have had occasional problems getting a line from them.

Because both lines are IP, the hardware for incoming calls is just my ADSL modem.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[adelporto]

You might enjoy an article written by Heison Chak for the February edition of ;login:

The article is only available in .pdf form; the link is halfway down the page. Heison describes how he uses his home implemenation of Asterisk.

Beforegoing to bed, I dial ext. 100 from any phone in the house to request a wake-up call, and the voice of Allison Smith (Allison is the voice of Asterisk) prompts me for the desired time. At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Asterisk called the auto-answer extension of my IP phone in the bedroom. Besides telling me that it was a wake-up call and announcing the current weather in Toronto, Allison also challenged me to repeat a four-digit number after her. If I failed to respond or if I hung up after three tries, Asterisk would call for help, playing back my own recorded voice begging her to wake me up on that same autoanswer extension. The last resort would usually get me the unpleasant voice of my mother.

I work for, but don't speak for, USENIX.

Blatent commercial plug: Heison is the instructor for a training on Asterisk and VoIP at our Annual Technical Conference in Anaheim CA.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[Glendale2x]

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.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[Tony Hoyle]

The problem with BT is they're so expensive you could have paid for the ATA-186 yourself after a few months.

They even charge for VOIP->VOIP calls!

Try sipgate, gradwell, etc. - all are much cheaper than BT.

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[Tony Hoyle]

DOH! Checking the CLI... why didn't I think of that!!

Re:Benefit for the average home?

[timthorn]

I'm about to migrate away as my contract comes to an end, but it was about £10/month for 10 months - so it was very comparable with buying my own adapter and using a cheaper provider.

Sounds like a vonage commercial

[Wil]

"My sister's in Italy. My parents are in Florida. My brother's in New York. I'm in Maryland. We need a cheaper way to talk securely..."

Right now we're using Skype with good results. I'm the only one in the family running Linux, but we've all got broadband and the audio is often better than a regular phone call.

My real evil plan, however, is to run a PBX (my own little Personal Branch Exchange) with VoIP subscribed PSTN numbers in Maryland, New York, Florida, and maybe Italy. Dialing in and out supported for authorized users (just the fam plus maybe a few friends if they want to add some lines to elsewhere.) My parents want to call my sister? Dial a local phone number and:

"For [Wil's Sister], press one. For [Wil's Brother], press two. For the most annoying sound in the world, press three. For Wil, press three..."

So far, the whole asterisk project is in the toy stage, but Skype is going strong already.

Re:Sounds like a vonage commercial

[LinuxHam]

"For [Wil's Sister], press one. For [Wil's Brother], press two. For the most annoying sound in the world, press three. For Wil, press three..."

Hey Wil, did you notice you're the most annoying sound in the world?

j/k :)

Re:Sounds like a vonage commercial

[Jeet81]

So far, the whole asterisk project is in the toy stage, but Skype is going strong already. You want to make sure it's not the other way round

Re:Maybe a dumb question...

[Wil]

You can set up your own free pseudo-micro-telco with Asterisk and a bunch of software phones. Asterisk, afaik, runs best on Unix, although I think I remember seeing a Windows version around recently. Software phones are available for many platforms.

Seeing as how featureful, small, internet-connected telephone switches might just attract some phr34ks, you may want to run your Asterisk on an older, dedicated machine.

I have been playing with it on a Debian machine recently, and it was really easy to install. The configuration has been non-trivial, but not too terrible.

I like the idea because you are in complete control of an entire PBX, including switching, extensions, and voice mail. You can even include on-hold music of your choice.

The best advice I can give is to install Asterisk (behind a firewall, to start) and begin playing with it.

BroadVoice has been excellent.

[Futurepower(R)]

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

PING -n 100 google.com

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.

Re:BroadVoice has been excellent.

[BAKup]

I've had problems where asterisk wouldn't register, and of course when that happens, I can't call them, unless I use a different provider, and hold times have been over an hour. And even after getting someone on the phone, they've not been helpful, and it's taken a long time to fix the problem. And we can't afford this since it's our office's main phone line.

And I know it's not our ISP, we've got a 20Meg connection, with no problems with ping times, email, webpage loading, nor internet radio.

So I don't have a problem with BV for home use, but never use it for your company.

Asterix just saved me $4000

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how applicable Asterix is to the home user but it has just saved me a great deal of money. I own a medium sized enterprise in Melbourne, Australia and up until 2 months I was running a "key system" - small PBX - until it went on the blink. The vendor quoted me $4000 to replace the failed parts. Unfortunatly for the vendor I know a damm good IT consultant (actually he's worth a plug, his name is David Ankers) who after much persuasion convinced me to go with Asterix and broadvoice.

An old PC, some Linksys boxes and two days of Dave's time later and I have saved a lot of money. Not only that but I have way more features than I used to have. This is my first venture in to using open source, I think my Windows machines will be going soon.

Asterix is a great product, if it is configured correctly (apperently it isn't that friendly), it works perfectly, has saved me money already and I based on last years bills from Telstra broadvoice will save me even more.

Asterix & broadvoice are a killer setup.

Re:Asterix just saved me $4000

[Munrobasher]

(apparently it isn't that friendly)

Hey - have you ever tried to configure the Meridian (Nortel) PBX? I cannot believe that any other system is more unfriendly that it's command line interface. The GUI isn't much better either.

My theory is that any software PBX must be easier than proprietary systems as it's coming from the computer world (which I understand) compared to the telecoms worlds (which has its own language).

Rob.

Re:Asterix just saved me $4000

[not-real-sure]

Yes I have.. My company has a Meridian setup with the MICA and it blows huge chunks..

Broadvoice rocks, Skype is hype

[glomph]

Having a half-decent (as long as you don't need customer service) outfit be completely compatible with Asterisk (or ANY OTHER SIP-capable client) is fantastic. Broadvoice has been great. You may also want to check out sipphone.com, which is also an open provider. Once you have one or more good providers hooked into your Asterisk box, you virtually ARE a telco.

Skype on the other hand, it a nasty hack which somehow got onto lots of Windoze boxes. Explicitly closed system, will not play with anybody else. Lowest-common-denominatorware. Fuk'em.

Asterisk is NOT a Linux only thing

[mamladm]

"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.

Re:eliminate the need for the phone company.

[Munrobasher]

Sorry for the metaphor of war, but if someone came along and told me that my $BIGbn business could be replaced by a bootable CD, there would be a certain reaction, yes

Ohh isn't the internet an evil thing for all these mega-corps. I love to see them cringe when their lovely little monopoly starts getting threatened We've got the music industry cringing that they're going to loose a lot of money because we're all downloading music for free. And now the telecoms are quaking because we're all going to start getting telephone calls for free even mobile when wireless is all over the place.

I develop software for a small business. If a rival company comes along with a better product, well that's tough - but entirely our fault for letting it happen.

I don't see what's so bad about it being the end of the road for the big telecoms and music companies... You had your chance mate, now move over, you've been out-evolved. They certainly should not be able to get legislated to prevent it happening, certainly not in the telecoms area (music is a lot more grey).

Rob.

Asterix as a teaching tool

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach in a small community college and would love to create meaningful labs/problems/projects to teach telco protocols. I realize Asterix does VoIP but it looks to me like it may also be able to communicate directly with a telco switch rather than just through a line card. Very exciting.

Could Asterix + minimal equipment be used to simulate two switches talking to each other?

How would you use this as a teaching tool?

Concurrent Calls

[peu]

Yes... shame on me I read the article...:

Before we get started I want to point out that the agreement with BroadVoice gives you one concurrent connection per account. Although you may be actually able to make concurrent connections (multiple simultanious phone calls) you might incur an extra service charge for the extra connections.

I browsed the broadvoice site and found no mention about this, which are these costs?

any idea?

Coolest stuff I've seen in a while

[DanielMarkham]

Perhaps since WiFi.

Does anybody know if there is a open-source Windows PBX program?

The one bad part is the 30-40 bucks BV and others charge you with for what seems basically a large internet directory service, right? I mean, if I have the PBX and am willing to share my land line, all I want to know is a list of other people who will do the same. So it seems to me the only real expense should be the cost of the land line (if you want to share). In a world with long-range WiFi and mesh networking, perhaps even this cost goes away. Perhaps I missed something.

Really neat stuff! I wonder if the standards support both video and audio conferencing?

Re:Coolest stuff I've seen in a while

[mamladm]

With the help of Cygwin, a Unix compatibility API layer for Windows, you can now run Asterisk on Windows. Keep in mind though that this has only been a very recent development, so it is probably less mature than Asterisk on other platforms such as Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Solaris.

There is also OpenPBX from Voicetronix, a Perl based PBX which runs on Windows, but it doesn't have the IP capabilities Asterisk has.

The sharing of landlines between Asterisk users is already happening on a community basis. It's an initiative by Jeff Pulver's Free World Dialup, aka FWD, a free VOIP network, and it's called FWDout.

And, yes, most of the open protocols Asterisk supports can be used for both audio and video, namely SIP, IAX and H.323.

Re:Coolest stuff I've seen in a while

[SquadBoy]

Yeah. Cause nobody ports free software.

http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/

Assuming that they have written good portable code compiling it for any OS should be pretty easy. See here for why.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/index.html

Re:Coolest stuff I've seen in a while

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Cause nobody ports free software.

Many people ports free software, to free plataforms.
It's ethically wrong to port free software to propietary plataforms. You are heling exactly what you are fighting if you do.

MOD PARENT UP!!!!!!

[trinity93]

smae issues... same response from broadvoice... no suport and imposable to cancel

DIY-VOIP-Network

[mamladm]

"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!

voip service providers

[edudspg]

For the people that just want to try things out on the cheap, there is no reason to sign up with a company that charges a setup fee and/or a high monthly fee. Several voip players have no setup or monthly fees and a relatively cheap 2cents/minute. In most cases thats comes out much cheaper that the places that sell you "unlimited" service for $20/mo - $40/mo and then get mad at you if you use over 1000minutes per month. One example of a provider that makes it painless to try out voip is gafachi.

Here is a relatively complete list of voip service providers. The voip market is still very much in flux and the offerings are always changing. It is a good idea to check that list periodically.

This is news?

[Tony Hoyle]

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).

Re:This is news?

[Tony Hoyle]

Hmm just RTFA. It's just a blog, and he's copy/pasted from voip-info.org *including* all the errors!!!

The minimum required in sip.conf is actually a lot less than posted:

register => <phone number>:<sip password>@sip.broadvoice.com

[broadvoice]
type =peer
host=sip.broadvoice.com
fromdomain=sip.bro advoice.com
fromuser=<phone number>
username=<phone number>
authuser=<phone number>
secret=<sip password>
canreinvite=no
dtmfmode=inband
insecu re=very

You might also have to limit the protocols to ulaw/alaw (disallow=all,allow=ulaw,allow=alaw).

Re:This is news?

[Kerbo]

The base information on voip-info as well as BroadVoice's own website do not work anymore. There are a few tweaks to make it work properly now.

Re:eliminate the need for the phone company.

[Tony Hoyle]

If the telcos were bankrupt, inefficient, unable to provide a decent service, and already collapsing... yes, aim for the throat.

A lot of them *are*. Some of the european ones barely survived the last few years. A lot of the big carriers got bought out (KPN, etc.)

Anyone who could call a telco 'efficient' has never had to deal with them. The incumbents are used to being state monopolies - they have whole departments that are just money sinks (in a previous job we had software that replaced one or two of these departments with a single PC - that's how inneficient they are).

Dumbish question about Asterisk...

[shic]

I'm not especially interested in using VOIP - I make very few outgoing calls... I seriously doubt that I'd find any cost saving myself. I would, however really like a full-featured voice mail system... I do want to be able to tailor responses depending upon which number is calling. For example I'd like all "number withheld" callers to only be able to leave voice messages... after a brief automated warning that I do not accept unsolicited commercial calls. I'd like callers with valid caller id to ring the phone for 10 rings if and only if I'm at home... before going to voice mail. It would be great to patch messages from my home phone through to my mobile from "known" numbers. I'd like to be able to access my voice mail over an internet VPN - so if I'm at work I can choose to securely check to see if I have messages.

Is Asterisk the right tool for this kind of job - or should I be looking at Bayonne or something else altogether?

Re:Dumbish question about Asterisk...

[fuzza]

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.

Re:Dumbish question about Asterisk...

[mamladm]

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.

Never mind ...

[mamladm]

let's just say that any publicity for Asterisk is good news, belated or not ;)

Asterisk Rocks

[prisoner]

Its biggest strength is its weakness: there are literally a bazillion different options for damn near everything. The good news is that with a minimum of effort you can have a fully-functioning phone system for almost nothing. We had to buy a $40 "modem" card (I don't know what the difference is between that thing and a "hardware" modem but it works so I don't care) and that was it.

We only have 1 phone line for our business - (small IT company, mostly cell calls) but we wanted to have voice mail boxes for everyone as well as an "emergency dispatch" mailbox. Asterisk provides this in spades. An equivilant system even at Office Depot or the like would have cost around $250 at the cheapest. Bigger companies would save a ton of money.

Next order of business is to get rid of the soft phones. I hate those things.

Re:Asterisk Rocks

[bluGill]

IF you don't run too many calls at once, a mini-itx system might fit your bill. They can be very low power, and the single PCI slot is likely enough for most purposes. Look close at that site, they sell (or at least have sold) 12 power adapters, so you can use a car battery as your power supply, and have a very long lasting UPS (perhaps changed from solar panels) just like the real telcos. Well not quite, real telcos use 48volts, but I have seem some of the smaller ones use 4 car batteries to get that power.

Bad experience with broadvoice & asterisk

[n0w0rries]

* Service was unavailable a lot * Dropped calls * Terrible customer service--can't get a hold of them * They changed their config, then suspended my service because I didn't change mine. THEN they continued to bill me for it! I had to dispute one of the charges, they would not refund it even though they denied me service! I use a phone line with an unlimited dial plan for $25/mo. Sure, it's not as slick technology wise, but it always works, and Cox even knows how to spell customer service!

Re:Bad experience with broadvoice & asterisk

[mamladm]

So you actually meant to say you had a bad experience with Broadvoice full stop. At least I can't see anything in your post that would even hint at something going wrong with Asterisk and the technology behind it.

To the contrary. With Asterisk you can connect with any of a few hundred service providers with next to zero effort. Thus, you can change providers in a heart beat or even use multiple providers concurrently and have Asterisk automatically fail over to another provider when your call doesn't go through. How do you think your local telco achieves quality of service? They do the same thing: using redundant routes.

As far as charging disputes go, Asterisk generates what telephone folks call CDRs, call detail records, one for every single call. This can help you to backup your claim that you have been incorrectly charged.

So don't blame it on the tool.

Re:Bad experience with broadvoice & asterisk

[WindBourne]

Well, I will blame the provider. * itself has been solid.

Similar Broadvoice rates in Canada?

[Sark666]

I notice broadvoice has a 9.95 rate for just in state.

This is something I would like in Canada say province wide. Vonage is already available here but is 34.95 (last I checked) but that's includes all of north america.

I don't really make much long distance calls so I'd like something competitive for just local with voip.

Is there any provider for something like this providing service in Canada?

Incorrect answer

[mamladm]

Did you read the question?

The parent had asked if and how he could build his own skype like service with a tool like Asterisk.

I could name at least half a dozen skype like services that one can just join, but that wasn't asked for.

Re:Maybe a dumb question...

[WindBourne]

asterisk@home

Repost just a teeny bit.

[Necromancyr]

So basically this is this exact post : http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/06/194 5210&tid=126&tid=218

Just that the guides on a new server...right?

You meant to post to this story:

[Futurepower(R)]

Wrong Story! You meant to post to this story: Your Rights Online: Orrin Hatch to Lead Senate Panel on Copyright, Patents.

Yes, he is another example of U.S. government corruption.

For more on that subject: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

1-800 voip

[Bishop]

A number of VOIP providers offer 1-800 numbers at rates that are only slightly higher then the regular per minute rate. It may be more economical then several local numbers.

I am considering getting a 1-800 so that friends and family can easily call me. I would also configure it so that I could easily and cheaply place long distance calls while on the road.

I'm using VoicePulse

[bahwi]

I'm using http://connect.voicepulse.com/ VoicePlus Connect! For devs/etc. 4 incoming/4 outgoing simultaneous, 7.95/local DID, free incoming minutes, per minute charges, 2.59/min, money in your acct never expires. Great for testing, works for simultaneous ring, works great with asterisk, and sound quality is great(even better if you QoS it).

Re:I'm using VoicePulse

[zoid.com]

You might want to mention that it is 2.59 CENTS/min not dollars like it looks in the post. I also use Voicepulse connect and think it's a great service.

Re:I'm using VoicePulse

[aminorex]

Teliax offers local DIDs for 5.00, and
charges .029 for toll-free incoming.

Voipjet.com offers outgoing US for .013.

I use nufone.net because of low latency (for me,
since I'm close to Chicago) and the ability to
pre-pay via paypal. I do not like convincing my
CC company to stop recurring charges when I cancel
a service.

Re:I'm using VoicePulse

[bahwi]

http://voicepulse.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/voicepulse. cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=77&p_created=1 097635679&p_sid=jljcAWAh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX 3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD0xMjkmcF9 wYWdlPTE*&p_li=

If that link doesn't work check out their knowledgebase. But no increasing the number of inbound calls currently. (I'm sure demand will prompt them to hurry it up though).

Re:I'm using VoicePulse

[bahwi]

Sweet. =) Thanks for the reference.

I like the quality of Voicepulse, I looked at TelIax but completely missed this part:
Unlimited Channels/Calls

Heck yeah. =) I like the free incoming from Voicepulse.

Voipjet just didn't interest me, the free test is good but I can't figure out the rest of the site at all.

Nufone isn't accepting new customers at this time. =/

Thx for the links though, I'm always on the lookout for new stuff. =)

Re:I'm using VoicePulse

[aminorex]

I haven't tried Teliax.

Voipjet is mainly of interest due to their very low termination charges, and IAX2 support. I've not yet seen anyone who could touch them for low-cost outgoing calls.

Stanaphone offers free unlimited incoming, with
free New York state DIDs. Teliax had the lowest cost and widest coverage for local DIDs that I've seen so far. If they took paypal, I would have signed up with them.

I do not use credit cards for online purchases or recurring charges.

BV Could Be Better

[Jeet81]

I had signed up with broadvoice since they are the only ones i could find who had a BYOD(Bring Your Own Device) plan. Fisr of all the configuration on their webiste did not get anything to work. After tinkering around a little bit I could make outgoing calls. Serveral emails to their tech support and half-an-hour to an hour holds on the phone did not provide any clue. Then two or three days later the good people on the asterisk IRC gave me some help with which I was able to recieve incoming calls. All worked good for two days after which BV would randomly send some calls to VM and some calls would go through. Tried playing around with for another month but still no luck so had to disconnect and ask for refund.
I thought i would have a hard time getting the refund back but the customer service for the refunds replied back much faster than the tech support.

So if you want a line by which people can reach you and not your voicemail even if your available then try other options as vonage or such.

Be careful not to use the name 'Asterix'

[mamladm]

It may seem a little paranoid, but I really believe we should take care not to use the incorrect name "Asterix" when referring to Asterisk.

Evidently, the publishing company of the popular French comic books with the famous character Asterix are extremely litigious. They have sued a German Linux company over the use of the name Mobilix for a Linux distro that was aimed specifically at mobile computing, hence Mobilix.

They don't have any character by the name Mobilix in their comic books, but they claimed that Mobilix was passing off anyway just because it was similar in appearance as all their characters have a name ending in "ix". Worse still, they won the lawsuit and those poor Linux developers had to hand over their domain. AFAIK, the case is now awaiting appeal at the German high court, so not all is lost, but it's pretty scary nevertheless.

Now, if there is enough noise on the net where people use "Asterix" instead of Asterisk, those comic book people may get ideas and sue Digium. They may claim that there is proof of confusion with their Asterix trademark by merely pointing out how many times somebody used "Asterix" instead of Asterisk. And they may just find a judge crazy enough to go along with that.

So, I say, let's be careful, let those sleeping dogs lie.

Re:Be careful not to use the name 'Asterix'

[mamladm]

Well, someone seems to think this is funny, I don't. Whoever believes this is a joke, please check out the site below ...

http://tuxmobil.org/mobilix_asterix.html

It has details on the case I described with several links to other sources and it also lists other cases where this French publishing company has sued users of far fetched similar names as the characters in their comic books.

Those guys don't shy away from any frivolous lawsuit they can bring and they have the dollars to follow it through.

It would be very sad if Asterisk did show up on their radar screen.

Re:eliminate the need for the phone company.

[dickeya]

I don't think you can even compare the situation of a small business to that of a corporate entity. What if your competition owned the software you use to develop your product and changed their licensing in a way that made it prohibitive to your progress? Not necessary illegal but potentially very damaging.

I fully agree with one business out evolving another, but big business doesn't play on a strictly business field. They can compete on levels (financial, legal, political...) that a SMB can't touch. So while you are developing a superior product, they've lobbied for increased legislation, received $10 billion in federal funding, spent $100 million on advertising, bought companies and explanded into other key related areas, all while successfully selling their mediocre product.

Does it matter?

[mamladm]

Judging by the amount of comments this article has received so far, it would seem that there was enough interest to justify it showing up even if it wasn't all that "new" as you say.

Also, most of the publicity Skype is getting is more or less repetition, not always, but many times it is. So, shouldn't we be happy that an open source telephony & VOIP project like Asterisk gets it's share of free publicity every now and then?

Remember the saying "Any news is good news" ;)

Voicepulse =! Voicepulse Connect

[mamladm]

You are confusing Voicepulse (residential) with Voicepulse Connect.

The former has monthly plans, the latter is specifically for people/companies who run their own Asterisk servers and it does not have monthly plans.

Re:Coolest stuff I've smoked in a while

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Free Software is about Freedom.
If software A requires software B to run, and A is released under a free license, but B is proprietary, then we can not consider A really free, because it requires proprietary software in order to run.
It doesn't matter what kind of proprietary requirement it has, whether it's a library or an operating system, it's still wrong.
BTW: Do you have something against pot?, that comment, is discriminatory, at best.

Skype is unfortunately a closed system

[billstewart]

Skype seems to be a pretty decent system, and it uses good codecs, but unfortunately it's a closed proprietary system, so you won't be able to hook up your own PBX to it unless they come out with a PBX feature, or unless you want to relay it through a conventional phone line. They are adding "Skype In", which will let people make incoming calls from POTS lines, so at least the service is becoming more useful.

Beware of Asterisk Bootable CDs

[billstewart]

There seem to be several different flavors of Asterisk bootable CDs out there. Some of them you can boot and run safely, but some of them are designed to install themselves on a PC, wiping out whatever was there before. They don't do this without warning you, but they're designed for installation, not for live-CD use or sharing the hardware. It's not that bad a thing to do - typically if you're building a PBX, you were going to take a spare PC, put a bunch of audio boards in it, and run it as a PBX anyway, but if you were also using that PC as your print server or email server, you'll need to install Asterisk first and then add the other stuff.

Skype supports only one single codec

[mamladm]

... and that is ILBC, which you can have with any open source telephony solution, too.

as codecs go, there is no such thing as a good codec per se, it depends on the circumstances. Some codecs are good in some circumstances, some other codecs are good in some other circumstances. That's why most telephony solutions negotiate codecs depending on the quality of the connection when they connect with each other.

Skype is inferior in this respect because it can't adjust to a more suitable codec in the event that ILBC isn't a good match for the connection.

And since Skype is closed, there is nothing you can do about it. You just have to put up with the limitations imposed upon you by Skype.

Re:Bad experience with broadvoice ONLY

[n0w0rries]

Sorry--my bad. Only put * in the title because of the original post.

* rocks! BV blows!

Bothers Long Distance more than Local Telco

[billstewart]

The local telco gets to sell you wires to your house, and if they have to replace the technology attached to the wire and can charge you more money for it, and if you put a few IP bits on their DSLAM instead of using their old voice switch, that's fine too. The long distance telephone companies, on the other hand, are more annoyed by this sort of thing, because you've cut them out of the loop almost entirely (not quite entirely - if a VOIP company doesn't have coverage in a given LATA, they can hand off the bits to a long-distance company at wholesale per-minute prices, and if they get enough traffic that the cost bothers them, they can install a gateway instead.)

Consumer long-distance has been a depressing business for the last few years anyway. There's tons of long-haul fiber in the ground, and a reasonable fraction of the competition is using VOIP or Voice-Over-ATM to avoid having to buy conventional phone switches, and the business is a lot less fun at 2 cents/minute than it was at 25 cents/minute - especially when the local telcos get almost 2 cents/minute for delivering calls on the last mile.

Business long-distance voice still makes money - but VOIP is a real threat there, especially since businesses often have enough users to justify putting in hardware, and since new PBXs are almost always IP PBXs (there's usually no sense putting in a non-IP PBX, and old non-IP PBXs eventually need replacing.)

High level overview?

[Hard_Code]

Ok, can somebody give a high level overview of why someone would want to run their on PBX? Is there some savings over just getting a VOIP phone/service? Is it simply so you can gain greater control over voicemail, and other options, etc.? This seems like a cool project, but I'm not sure what the point is.

Re:High level overview?

[mamladm]

It is both savings _and_ greater control. Which one of those two is more predominant for you depends on the way you are using the telephone.

Often people get interested mostly for the savings potential at first and only learn to appreciate the additional benefits once they got to use them for a while.

As far as savings go, you may ask how can Asterisk save more money than just another VOIP adapter or IP telephone that in the end may connect to the very same service?

The difference is that Asterisk can connect to multiple services at the same time and automatically pick the one with the best rate for any given call. It can also automatically pick another service if a given service has difficulties to complete a call. This increases the level of service but it also saves you money because if you have to make an important call when your provider can't complete that call, then you are less concerned about savings and more inclined to use some expensive POTS service.

Further, Asterisk generates a so called call detail record for every call you make. This can help you resolve billing disputes with your provider such as may arise when there are many dropped calls or calls that did never complete but showed up on your bill anyway.

Last but not least, Asterisk can save you money by providing a free "inhouse" VOIP service to your friends and family. You never have to pay a dime again talking to friends and family on your private network.

When it comes to more control and additional features you never knew you wanted, you may ask why you would need those.

You may want to think of Asterisk as the telephone equivalent of your own mail server/web server/router combo. You don't necessarily have to have one as you could connect your PC directly to the DSL or cable modem or whatever other device delivers your broadband service and then use the services your provider offers, but if you have your own, there are quite a few benefits.

You can share the connection amongst multiple devices and you can do things which your service provider either charges you for or won't offer the way you want it or perhaps won't offer at all.

Asterisk does the same for you in respect of telephone services. You can have multiple phones in your house or elsewhere sharing the services Asterisk is connected to, you can use features you would have to pay the phone company for and you can use features the phone company doesn't even offer.

One of those things that your phone company cannot offer you is becoming fairly independent of location. If you are frequently in different places, like visiting your parents or in laws, or spend time in a weekend cottage, travel on business etc, Asterisk extends the reach of your home's or office's phone line. As long as you have a suitable internet connection where you are, you can use your own phone line at home or in your office to receive and make phone calls while you are away.

I tend to think that one day every household will have a device like Asterisk in the form of a small affordable appliance and most phone calls will go directly from one household to another over the net without phone companies involved at all.

You can already get a taste of that with Asterisk today. There are two technologies available today which translate ordinary telephone numbers into IP addresses and Asterisk has support for both.

One is called ENUM which uses a service record in the DNS to point a calling device to the called device much like how an email client finds a recipient. You can register your POTS phone number at E164.org and have it point to your Asterisk server. Other people with Asterisk servers who call you on your POTS phone number will then automatically be routed from Asterisk to Asterisk over the net bypassing the phone companies.

The other is called DUNDi, short for distributed universal number discovery. This is a lot like ENUM, but the mechanism is distributed which avoids the need for a central database. The effect is the same: if the number of the party you are calling can be discovered, the call will go over the net bypassing the phone companies.

I didn't do it - I swear!

[octalgirl]

I assure you- I was under the right story. I didn't even read this one and have no idea how it got here. I hit submit and it never showed up. Now I find my first try here?

I feel like one of those users who swear they didn't anything while sitting in front of a dead computer.

It's a common bug in Slashdot.

[Futurepower(R)]

Don't worry. It's a common bug.

An amazing social phenomenon: All these technical people using the buggy Slashdot software, and not fixing it over a period of several years.

And Mozilla doesn't render Slashdot pages well, after about two years.

Re:Maybe a dumb question...

[dclxv]

Another group of friends wanted to do this and did:

http://www.freeworlddialup.com/

I use this free service constantly to call home when on the road.

While we're on the subject, I also use VoicePulse [http://www.voicepulse.com] and can recommend them as well. However, although cheap, it's not as *good* as a standard POTS line.

Re:eliminate the need for the phone company.

[Munrobasher]

So we agree - it doesn't seem cricket for them to be able to get legislation to protect themselves or use their overwhelming power (money) to give themselves an unfair advantage.

Smacks of the Microsoft anti-competitive cases.

Here in the UK, the legislation occasionally works the other way. BT, the monopoly until very recently, is actively legislated against to prevent them undermining the competition. They cannot undercut on price and they have been forced to "unbundle" the local exchange. The success of the later has been varied.

Rob.

Have you used Teliax?

[lorcha]

Have you used Teliax?

Do they offer free incoming calls on their local DIDs or just unlimited channels?

What is the deal with the $0.02 connection charge they talk about on their website?

Are you happy with the quality?

I'd really appreciate it if you have that information. I'm looking to replace my landline and I'm trying to choose between a few different options. :)