Read the F*cking Fine Print. Unlimited Data service has a lot of exceptions. I'll bet you the streaming radio service becomes an exception if anybody actually uses it. I signed up for unlimited data, then saw that it was unlimited only with one phone, and NOT when you used the phone as a modem for your bluetooth-connected laptop, and not when you wore brown shoes, or drove a Swedish-made automobile. All of that vented, Virgin Radio is cool, they have always been a leader in internet streaming, since the beginning (1995, when I helped get them started)
Lewis Hine was truly a great American. He used his technical skill and his artistic eye to expose the awful conditions the poor and unknown lived under. Learn a tiny bit more about him at:
I would not do anything in production with the FXO/FXS cards. My experience with these has been marginal, or worse. If I needed a bunch of these, I'd get a channel bank, and use Asterisk with that.
In a sense they are glorified modems (barely), and as such inherit all the analog flakiness.
I have used the PRI/T1/E1 cards, in a bunch of places, with 100% success & reliability.
Just to prove I am not a total Digium fanboy (except for Asterisk itself!), I can state categorically that their little IAX client box, the iAXY, is an unmitigated horror.
This feature is called Local Number Portability. (LNP). Broadvoice claims to support it in most parts of the country. I haven't tried doing it yet. But I will be, soon.
They do long-distance and international, it's all pretty much the same. Recording? Are you John Ashcroft or something? You can set up Asterisk to record calls. The services don't do this. (I sure hope not!).
You can drown yourself in SIP information with a few minutes of Google-searching.
The site I use for most of my reference is http://voip-info.org which is very well-maintained. It might not be the best starting place, but there are links to everything there, related to Asterisk, SIP, and IP telephony in general.
The way I described it, there is no analog leaving your house. Those companies like Broadvoice take a SIP (ordinary UDP) connection either from an Asterisk server (if you want or need that) or directly from a SIP phone or SIP adapter (which converts a normal phone into a sip phone). The low-end Sipura adapter works great, it's what I'm using now. Or you can use a 'soft phone' which turns a computer into a SIP phone, but that usually sucks, you need a microphone/headset, or something, and you look/feel like a wired monkey. Check out store.voxilla.com to see a selection of the hardware. For simple cases of personal use, you really don't need to mess with Asterisk, just buy a SIP adapter and use the Broadvoice coupon that comes with it. You get the signup and first month for free, and there is no cancellation penalty, so it is zero risk. [I have absolutely nothing to do with Sipura, voxilla or Broadvoice, just a satisfied customer!]
Typically you deal with some kind of TELCO, who gives you phone number(s). These days, you'd go with Broadvoice, or VoicePulse, or NuFone, or any of the myriad VoIP providers. Typically you get an inbound number with your account, and get additional numbers for a smallish fee (2 bucks/mo). You can easily set up asterisk to treat these inbound calls differently, it's not like some old-fashioned crap PBX where you call the main single number, and then enter an extension when the robot requests it. (Although it's easy enough to do this if you have to). Dialing out is an easier proposition. There is no concept of 'lines'. You can make as many outbound calls as you like, within the constraints of your bandwidth. Ditto for inbound. If I get a call while I'm on my VoIP phone, asterisk kicks the call to a second phone (AND I get a call-waiting beep in my ear, as well). This stuff Just Works. If you are at all facile with Linux, you gotta use Asterisk as your VoIP platform. If not, buy a VoIP adapter at voxilla.com, and get a nice Broadvoice coupon. Broadvoice is Asterisk (and any other self-supplied hardware) friendly. Vonage is the opposite, you pretty much have to use their sealed boxes (that sucks). And the use of soft phones (meaning anything that is not THEIR locked equipment) is heavily restricted and taxed. Plus, they cost considerably more. I'm just a happy customer, not some astroturfer....
PhotoGuy definitely gives the essence of what Asterisk is: Pretty Damn Simple. Totally nukes the business model of the special-hardware, special-closed-software proprietary phone world.
The Allison Smith recordings that PhotoGuy refers to are worth the price of admission. Request a bogus extension? She tells you straightaway: "Weasels have eaten our phone system!"
I really do not recommend using the FXO/FXS card method of interfacing to the phone company or analog phones. That is pretty cheesy under all circumstances. Trunking to PRI or plain old T1s with the appropriate Digium cards is a snap, and the lines do not go 'stupid'.
That is totally cool, then. Just get the Digium PRI card (assuming you are trunking), or any of the many supported BRI cards if you are going that route. It's really easy to get PRIs to work on Asterisk.
Bullshite. --- Replacement parts = generic PCs and line cards, if you are interfacing to a conventional PBX or TELCO lines. Some warehouse, 12 cards would fit in a shoebox. --- This is a Linux app, not Windoze. It does not break by itself, just sitting there, or under use. I've had it in worldwide production for almost a year. It is 100% solid, even in very complex modes.
For audio security, you do NOT (or better not) rely on something in the phone switch (Asterisk/Avaya/whatever) to do it. You need endpoint-to-endpoint encryption. Sipura equipment (among others) does this as a standard feature. Then the switch just shuffles the bits along.
In my multioffice/worldwide Asterisk setup the various sites connect to each other via CIPE or Open VPN tunnels, so at least the bits that leave the office are scrambled.
Yes, you certainly can have multiple adapters behind NAT. If you want this to actually work, don't use some crapball home-NAT-router, you will need one that prioritizes the voice packets above all else. I suggest a cheapo linux box using iptables.
I'm doing EXACTLY that right now. We set it up almost a year ago. The biggest cost is when you have to interface Asterisk to an existing conventional PBX (IF you need to do this, we did). Because then, you have to deal with the specially-trained people who install & provision the trunk card on THAT end. This can cost anywhere from $1000 - $12000 depending on equipment & locale.
If you can just do it with new IP phones on everyone's desk, it gets MUCH simpler.
Check out the Sipura SPA-841 ($90. at voxilla.com, etc.). That is MUCH BETTER than the Fujitsu 'office-class' overpriced phones in common use in my 1000-line office.
Slashdot Mirror
Rule number 3: Don't get caught breaking rule number 1 or rule number 2!
Read the F*cking Fine Print. Unlimited Data service has a lot of exceptions. I'll bet you the streaming radio service becomes an exception if anybody actually uses it. I signed up for unlimited data, then saw that it was unlimited only with one phone, and NOT when you used the phone as a modem for your bluetooth-connected laptop, and not when you wore brown shoes, or drove a Swedish-made automobile. All of that vented, Virgin Radio is cool, they have always been a leader in internet streaming, since the beginning (1995, when I helped get them started)
Lewis Hine was truly a great American. He used his technical skill and his artistic eye to expose the awful conditions the poor and unknown lived under. Learn a tiny bit more about him at:
i ne.html
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_05.07.98/art/h
The hardhats were all secretly diverted to undisclosed locations in Iraq, same places all those WMDs were hidden.
Like my favorites, the Lewis Hine photos of the Depression-Era construction of the Empire State Building. Anybody who says photography is not art should view them.i nex/empire/empire.html
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/h
Not slashdotted at the moment.
SINCE WHEN has lack of field experience stopped a hasty, expensive deployment?
Where here is Jacksonville FL,
St Cloud MN,
Abilene TX,
Daytona Beach FL....
that your tongue sticks to it!
I would not do anything in production with the FXO/FXS cards. My experience with these has been marginal, or worse. If I needed a bunch of these, I'd get a channel bank, and use Asterisk with that.
In a sense they are glorified modems (barely), and as such inherit all the analog flakiness.
I have used the PRI/T1/E1 cards, in a bunch of places, with 100% success & reliability.
Just to prove I am not a total Digium fanboy (except for Asterisk itself!), I can state categorically that their little IAX client box, the iAXY, is an unmitigated horror.
This feature is called Local Number Portability. (LNP). Broadvoice claims to support it in most parts of the country. I haven't tried doing it yet.
But I will be, soon.
They do long-distance and international, it's all pretty much the same. Recording? Are you John Ashcroft or something? You can set up Asterisk to record calls. The services don't do this. (I sure hope not!).
You can drown yourself in SIP information with a few minutes of Google-searching.
The site I use for most of my reference is http://voip-info.org which is very well-maintained. It might not be the best starting place, but there are links to everything there, related to Asterisk, SIP, and IP telephony in general.
The way I described it, there is no analog leaving your house. Those companies like Broadvoice take a SIP (ordinary UDP) connection either from an Asterisk server (if you want or need that) or directly from a SIP phone or SIP adapter (which converts a normal phone into a sip phone). The low-end Sipura adapter works great, it's what I'm using now. Or you can use a 'soft phone' which turns a computer into a SIP phone, but that usually sucks, you need a microphone/headset, or something, and you look/feel like a wired monkey. Check out store.voxilla.com to see a selection of the hardware. For simple cases of personal use, you really don't need to mess with Asterisk, just buy a SIP adapter and use the Broadvoice coupon that comes with it. You get the signup and first month for free, and there is no cancellation penalty, so it is zero risk. [I have absolutely nothing to do with Sipura, voxilla or Broadvoice, just a satisfied customer!]
Typically you deal with some kind of TELCO, who gives you phone number(s). These days, you'd go with Broadvoice, or VoicePulse, or NuFone, or any of the myriad VoIP providers. Typically you get an inbound number with your account, and get additional numbers for a smallish fee (2 bucks/mo). You can easily set up asterisk to treat these inbound calls differently, it's not like some old-fashioned crap PBX where you call the main single number, and then enter an extension when the robot requests it. (Although it's easy enough to do this if you have to).
Dialing out is an easier proposition. There is no concept of 'lines'. You can make as many outbound calls as you like, within the constraints of your bandwidth. Ditto for inbound. If I get a call while I'm on my VoIP phone, asterisk kicks the call to a second phone (AND I get a call-waiting beep in my ear, as well). This stuff Just Works. If you are at all facile with Linux, you gotta use Asterisk as your VoIP platform. If not, buy a VoIP adapter at voxilla.com, and get a nice Broadvoice coupon. Broadvoice is Asterisk (and any other self-supplied hardware) friendly. Vonage is the opposite, you pretty much have to use their sealed boxes (that sucks). And the use of soft phones (meaning anything that is not THEIR locked equipment) is heavily restricted and taxed.
Plus, they cost considerably more. I'm just a happy customer, not some astroturfer....
PhotoGuy definitely gives the essence of what Asterisk is: Pretty Damn Simple. Totally nukes the business model of the special-hardware, special-closed-software proprietary phone world.
The Allison Smith recordings that PhotoGuy refers to are worth the price of admission. Request a bogus extension? She tells you straightaway: "Weasels have eaten our phone system!"
I really do not recommend using the FXO/FXS card method of interfacing to the phone company or analog phones. That is pretty cheesy under all circumstances. Trunking to PRI or plain old T1s with the appropriate Digium cards is a snap, and the lines do not go 'stupid'.
That is totally cool, then. Just get the Digium PRI card (assuming you are trunking), or any of the many supported BRI cards if you are going that route. It's really easy to get PRIs to work on Asterisk.
Bullshite.
---
Replacement parts = generic PCs and line cards, if you are interfacing to a conventional PBX or TELCO lines. Some warehouse, 12 cards would fit in a shoebox.
---
This is a Linux app, not Windoze. It does not break by itself, just sitting there, or under use. I've had it in worldwide production for almost a year. It is 100% solid, even in very complex modes.
For audio security, you do NOT (or better not) rely on something in the phone switch (Asterisk/Avaya/whatever) to do it. You need endpoint-to-endpoint encryption. Sipura equipment (among others) does this as a standard feature. Then the switch just shuffles the bits along.
In my multioffice/worldwide Asterisk setup the various sites connect to each other via CIPE or Open VPN tunnels, so at least the bits that leave the office are scrambled.
Yes, you certainly can have multiple adapters behind NAT. If you want this to actually work, don't use some crapball home-NAT-router, you will need one that prioritizes the voice packets above all else. I suggest a cheapo linux box using iptables.
I'm doing EXACTLY that right now. We set it up almost a year ago. The biggest cost is when you have to interface Asterisk to an existing conventional PBX (IF you need to do this, we did). Because then, you have to deal with the specially-trained people who install & provision the trunk card on THAT end. This can cost anywhere from $1000 - $12000 depending on equipment & locale.
If you can just do it with new IP phones on everyone's desk, it gets MUCH simpler.
total bullshite. The T1/E1 cards are great. I run a bunch of Asterisk boxes worldwide, using these cards. Never a problem.
Check out the Sipura SPA-841 ($90. at voxilla.com, etc.). That is MUCH BETTER than the Fujitsu 'office-class' overpriced phones in common use in my 1000-line office.
This sticker has been around for at least 30 years, probably much longer.
on the pickup trucks with the gun racks:
"Gas, Grass, or Ass, Nobody Rides for Free!"
Yeah, and I think with a lot of unemployed street goon brawlers, er... I mean NHL players, there is some muscle behind your threat!
And Americans would -never- start a war on trumped-up pretense. No way.