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Getting Started with VoIP Devices
Kerbo writes "If you have been wondering what kind of devices you need to use a voice-over-ip (VoIP) provider or Asterisk PBX, the guys at Geek Gazette have been doing up some reviews of different devices. These allow you to use a standard phone with VOIP providers. The newest review is of the Sipura ATA-1001 ATA." Before you get too happy with the possibilities, though, note what an anonymous reader submitted: "Several VoIP providers have started adding 'regulatory recovery fees' to their users' bills, even though the entire industry is unregulated. The latest one to do this is Packet 8. The whole reason so many are moving to VoIP is to avoid these kinds of bogus fees; it's unfortunate these providers haven't figured this out yet."
Sound almost like the Spanish American War Tax that we've been paying for the last 100 years on our telephone bills.
How the hell do thes companies get away with these idiotic taxes?
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10.
The Polycoms IP500 are decent phones, I love them.
re: Voip
VoIP's main draw isn't that it's cheaper, or at least, it shouldn't be. It may be, but that can change on a dime ( heh, hat trick pun! ). It's a matter of usability. My asterisk server is far more useful to me than the old partner ACS system we used to have.
I have my voicemail emailed to me. I can record conversations on the fly. I can move my phones and have my number follow me. I can make any changes I need on the fly ( within minutes, typically ). I can train others to do the same with little trouble.
And when people say VoIP ( and asterisk in particular ) is difficult to learn, they are really referring to the POTS aspects of it. Old phone lines are complex, no doubts, and the parts of asterisk that are carry overs from a traditional pbx are similarly complex. However, asterisk itself is incredibily easy to work with. Have you ever setup samba? Apache? Asterisk is easier.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I recently switched to Vonage from a standard phone, and I'm very happy. With regard to hardware, they ship you a Linksys router that is pre-configured with your details, so all you have to do is plug it in and it works. The router replaced my previous router for my home network, and seems to work great. The hardware hasn't caused me any problems.
The harder part was re-wiring my house so that all the phones would work using voip (instead of just having one phone plugged into the Linksys router). Even this is not too bad: just disconnect your internal wiring from the Telco, and then plug the voip router into a wall-jack, so that all wall-jacks are now connected to it. (Be sure to disconnect from Telco wiring properly, or you'll fry your voip hardware!!) Even getting my alarm system to work with voip was pretty easy (just had to invert its wiring...).
Serious geeks may want to shop around for the coolest hardware, but honestly the box that Vonage ships is good enough for most people. I think voip is fast becoming accessible to the "average consumer" and I'm now recommending it to everyone I know. For a low price you get every telephone service imaginable, free long-distance calling... The Vonage ads (phone bill going from 60$ to 20$) are not exagerations. So my hardware review is: you can use whatever the voip provider ships and you won't have any hassles!
Lots of non-former-Baby Bell ISP's will give you a DSL line without a telephone line.
Shop around.
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The ATA's should all be able to handle quite a few phones. A lot of people connect them to the phone wiring that runs throughout their house, there should be a grey De-marc (or whatever they're called) box somewhere outside your house. Feed a line from the ATA to one of the lines in this box (usually they have the capacity for 4 lines) and you home phones wil lbe live on your voip. There are also ATA's (the sipura 2's and 3's) that support two liens each...
Have you never heard of Skype? It's exactly what you describe.
However, the vast majority of people are still attached to the old telephone, myself included. I can't see using a PC with a headset or a microphone as a normal communications tool.
Why can't someone make a device that records my voice in real time, sends it to a different computer, where it is played?
Because VoIP really isn't a Voice over IP service, it's a service that links a normal phone number to a digital audio channel. "devices that record your voice in real time and play it on a different computer" have been around for a long time, at least a decade. Any voice chat program (MSN, SpeakFreely...) does exactly that. But you can't get incoming calls from a regular phone number.
In short, VoIP is a misnomer.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I want a PBX replacement with voicemail, call accounting "for hotel guest phone charges". The last item is where I don't see an Asterisk based solution is workable. I would like to be wrong, any suggestions?
I moved my nuber to Vonage from Verizon. I thought it was a legal requirement now?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
For Skype->Skype communication, yes. Calling regular telephone lines range from 2c-15c/minute.
I'm sure other VoIP providers have as good or better number porting abilities.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
The number of phones depends on a number called the Ringer Equivalency Number. (see also here for a quick definition.)
Basically each phone will "use up" one REN to make it ring. Newer phones actually only use 0.5 REN or something like that. A typical hardware box can supply REN of 4 or 5 or something (for example this Linksys box has REN 5). This is more than enough to run most modest domestic setups. If you load the box too much, none of the phones will ring. Then you just turn the ringer off one phone at a time, until the system is able to ring. You can have lots of phones, but only so many will ring when a call comes (the box can only supply so much power). In most homes, this is fine... you can still hear the phone ring if only 4 of the 8 phones are ringing.
The short answer: a decent box should work for a normal home setup (with 4-6 phones). If in doubt, check what the REN number is.
I use a Grandstream Handy Tone ATA-286 - it's small, I'm using it with asterisk, it has worked w/o issue since last November. When you first get it you have to set the IP address with the analog phone (which is pretty wild, a little box going "to change IP address, press 1", etc) but from then on you just use a web page to configure everything else. There were a bunch of options I didn't even get into, just setup sip user and password, match it to an asterisk extension and go. If it loses connection to asterist the button flashes red, etc. Just google grandstream ata-286 for the manual in pdf.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Is the on site documentation good enough or are there other resources you would recommend?
voip-info.org is like the bible of the VoIP/asterisk world. I definately recommend browsing around there before getting started, and keeping it bookmarked while you're installing and configuring asterisk.
I'm actually one of the developers for AMP, which is the web GUI that asterisk@home uses, and one of the biggest things I see is that there's a lot of people that want to just jump in thinking they don't need to know anything to get started. I'm not sure why this is, but you most definately need to understand basic concepts of a PBX, and some telephone technology, and how asterisk itself works in relation to those things. Most definately do not setup a mission-critical phone system (and I'd argue that any phone system used in a business instanly becomes mission-critical) without testing - a lot - first. Some people even setup test systems in their homes before hand.. and since the entry cost is so low, this is entirely possible. It's hard to recommend how much and what method to use for testing, since it varies depending on the size of your install. voip-info has some deployment tips though, that are probably very useful.
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At least with Vonage, these fees are miniscule -- only a couple bucks a month, and I wouldn't consider them to be bogus. I would expect that the money taken in by these fees to ultimately pay for the necessary infrastructure for E911 service. But at any rate, these fees are definitely not why I switched to Vonage. Some of the other fees (like the per-minute federal taxes) had something to do with it, but the most prominent reason for me was the fact that Verizon is trying to get every last cent out of its customers. Forgetting the regulatory fees for a moment, consider that until Vonage (and other VoIP services) began to provide some serious competition, Verizon didn't even offer a flat-rate package that included unlimited long distance. Consider also that the unlimited long distance package for Verizon is something in the neighborhood of $55 (before the regulatory fees), and that Vonage charges only about $25 for essentially the same thing. This is all about a monopoly, and VoIP services are the first real competition that the well-entrenched Baby Bells have had.
The break-up of AT&T did a lot to reduce the costs of long distance, but it seems that absolutely _NO_ progress has been made on the cost of local access. That's primarily because there is no competition. Even though you see advertisements for other local phone carriers, they are still enslaved to the Bells because the Bells own the last mile connection to your house. Years of trying has not eliminated this problem, and it has taken VoIP to finally put on the cost pressure. As much as I don't want to see archaic regulatory fees imposed on VoIP providers, the related costs pale in comparison to the extra overhead that the local carriers are charging.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
The DNS type scheme you are asking for is called ENUM aka E164, it exists today, it's an open standard and Asterisk supports it already. Roughly speaking, ENUM uses DNS to translate phone numbers into IP addresses.
;-)
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/enum/
You could sign up for a free account on e164.org and enter your existing telephone number. The system will call you back and an automated message tell give you a verification code which you type into a form on the web site to verify that you are in fact at that phone number. Then you enter the DNS name or IP of your Asterisk server or IP phone and anybody dialing your phone number from a VoIP device which supports ENUM lookup, like for example Asterisk, will then be connected directly peer to peer to you, without any phone company or VoIP service provider involved.
http:www.e164.org/
So if everybody was to get a VOIP device with ENUM support, we get rid of phone companies and VoIP service providers altogether
Asterisk also supports another similar but decentralised scheme called DUNDi, short for Distributed Universal Number Discovery.
http://www.dundi.info/
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
According to Gartner Group, VoIP is so much of a momentary fad that the last circuit switched telephone call on the planet will be made in the year 2020, a mere 15 years from now.
Besides, how do you think the large carriers are shuffling telephone traffic around the planet today? Much of that is VoIP based already, just that you don't know about it. Sure there is managed (private IP networks) and unmanaged bandwidth (public Internet) but the technology is steadily heading towards VoIP everywhere.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Skype is really an amazing service. I just purchased a phone number from them in my area code. One year $39. $13 for pre-paid credits that last for 176 days, and free voicemail for a year. Additionally, I have bluetooth dongle and headset that I use with Skype. Handsfree. The sounds quality is incredible. Better then land-line. Consider the technologies they are using: www.globalipsound.com From their website, it seems you can lose up to 30% of your packets without losing sound quality. And I lose packets out my wazoo! Since I run a webcam while I talk. I've been calling Malaysia for 2 cents a minute. Local calls are about that much as well. But still comes out cheaper then Vonage.. there's no monthly fees!
Ditto. I need a real telephone. I'm using a 5.8Ghz AT&T Exampandable up to 8 system. But, I am using VoIP. Haven't had a POTS line in years. With the D-Link DVG-1402s (unlocked from http://sipphone.com/adapters/ ) I get great quality. I work with asterisk a lot, so I've got my own custom set up, $11/mo incoming line w/ free incoming minutes, and 1.3c/min outgoing, but I rarely make any outgoing calls, so my bill is $22(2 lines, one in Houston, one in Dallas, although they both ring the same hard phone, and it's expansion, as well as my laptop softphone, and my cell phone after a certain number of rings).
VoIP is subject to regulation. Others have already mentioned E911. But there is also the issue of FBI wiretap access to VoIP phone calls. The VoIP Cos are gonna pass the costs of these "services" on to consumers just like Ma Bell and its kiddies have done since day one.
FreeSpeech.org
When they have a DID (Incoming #) They still get charged some regulatory fees, all they are doing is passing some along to regular users. Even with a T1 or colo at the CO you have to pay a bit of fees for incoming DIDs, they're just doing what the bells do and are passing it to you. But there are some fees they are excluded from.
I'm using AMP to manage everything. Everything I described in that post is fairly simple to do in the web GUI.
Speak before you think