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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."
but how long until the phone company - who owns the backbone somewhere up the line, puts its foot down?
billy - remembering DSL
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.
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.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
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
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?
"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.
Wil Langford - opinionated bastard - Linux rules
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.
Wil Langford - opinionated bastard - Linux rules
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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?
smae issues... same response from broadvoice... no suport and imposable to cancel
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
"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).
let's just say that any publicity for Asterisk is good news, belated or not ;)
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
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
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.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm