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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."
We are all going to die anyway (see previous article)
but I can't keep my old phone number... I would love to lose the $50 plus a month fee.
I have a Cox phone number now.
... at least for us (a small business). Once you add in all of the per-line charges, the hardware, the setup fees, the broadband, and the fact that if you want to use DSL, you still have to buy at least one phone line from the phone company. Plus, of course, the reliability of broadband still isn't nearly at the level of hard telephone lines. After taking this into consideration, unfortunately, going through the local Ma Bell monopoly was still the cheapest and most reliable option for us (a business needing 3-5 phone lines).
I don't respond to AC's.
The reason packet8 and some are charging the USF fees is because they may be regulated in the future, in which case they want to be covered.. I can't blame them.. good grief it's what 50 cents or $1.00... it's still a TON cheaper then POTS...
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?
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
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!
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...
If VoIP is really Voice over IP, why are there any fee's, why are there any regulations? Why can't someone make a device that records my voice in real time, sends it to a different computer, where it is played?
I am suprised there is not some DNS type scheme where people use their computers like a phone. Instead of calling a land line or cell phone, you use your computer to call some IP. What else would we need? Voice mail? Someone could make a program to watch a port for calls, and if not anwsered, then the stream is recorded into a mp3.
The only thing which worries me is abuse. People sniff networks. People try and gain access of computers using open ports. VoIP would require some trust.
If people wait for the telcom companies to take command of VoIP, we can expect another phone bill. Maybe comcast will offer a combined package that is difficult to opt out of, like the $10 off broadband if cable is purchased. Maybe they will add $10 more to your bill if you don't buy their VoIP.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
the linksys stuff is all doorstops if you chance from the provider that has branded it. There are thousands of linksys voip boxes on ebay that are worthless because they are vonnage or packet8 locked.
the spa-2000 is the best module I have ever used, and after you are done with the voip provider it can be resold or used with asterisk or FWD.
I also will not use a provider that will not let me control the hardware or use asterisk, but then I'm not a typical customer.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Then and if regulation or taxation occurs, these lines get filled in with an actual amount that is the correct amount. Not only that, but users would know right away that the government has added fees as they shows up in the bill.
I'm betting all hell would bust loose when a $0.00 line suddenly clicks upward.
Yeah it's cheaper, but that doesn't mean they can't write an honest bill.
Letter To Iran
You're saying they're justified charging a fee because someday the government might charge them a fee?
Seriously?
In that case, the fee is too low! God bless them for only keeping it to $1.50! They're so freakin' generous!
You just know they're going to add a $4.00 surcharge for that new-fangled touch-tone service.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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?
But you can't call 911 from some VOIP
hack a day
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); }
I'd like to be able to call my mom, thanks
You can call 1-900 numbers on VOIP phones?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
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.
Speak before you think
Sure, it's cheaper right now, and needs to happen, just as a lever to get the telecom companies to quit holding back society and actually charge a reasonable fee for small-bandwidth voice communications.
However, it's a trap, and a nasty trap for a lot of networking people. A lot of networking people are going to end up getting 'scapegoated' and losing their jobs before this is over.
Why? The whole QOS thing. All VOIP packets get top-level QOS scheduling on the network, meaning VOIP data packets all get priority over all the other 'normal' data packets. Not a problem when VOIP is less than 10% of your network traffic.
However, all the PHB types see is that VOIP is way cheaper than normal telco methods, and they are starting to want all the phone lines in the company switched over to VOIP to 'save money'.
Problem is, once you get over a threshhold where there's a lot of VOIP traffic, the normal data packets take a huge backseat to the VOIP data. Suddenly you've got packet timeouts happening constantly with 'normal' data (Which the data networks were originally put in place to handle), and data transfer slows to a crawl. Packets are getting dropped all over the place. File transfers start taking 10 times longer than normal, if they don't just fail due to timeouts.
Now the network guys are in all kinds of trouble because critical business functions, which rely on the 'normal' data packets, are not working, or are insanely slow.
So, the network people get bitched out, and turn around with huge cost increases due to needing to massively increase the pipes between locations, and that still doesn't solve the problem in all cases. So you throw in extremely expensive high-performance routers to handle all the packet shuffling and scheduling. Pretty soon, you're back to costs HIGHER than it was to start out with with normal data networks and normal voice/telco connections.
To avoid being burnt, either demand completely separate networks for VOIP and normal data. Or just stay away from VOIP. In the long run, you'll be better off. But in the short term, enjoy explaining this to PHB types who only see the short-term cost savings that they are being force-fed by the VOIP vendors.
It's a scam, nothing is free.
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
--
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
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
We're going to be in Toronto during the VON Canada conference starting tomorrow and so will many VOIP thought leaders, including Asterisk/Digium founder & president Mark Spencer, who is delivering a keynote on DUNDi.
If you have any questions for them, we'll try to get interviews with as many as possible and pose the questions you ask.
Other speakers include:
Full speakers/session list.
Just post the question and who it's for below and we'll do out best to interview the people you want hear from.