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.
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.
Anyone that runs a voip system can always have the system route UNKNOWN or ANONYMOUS callers to
a computer based screening tool. One bored gent
wrote an elaborate voice-mail maze for telemarketers to wander into.
So far the only prank SIP call I have received was one from a buddy that was testing his SIP knowledge and wanted to see if he could really make my phone ring.
If plextor is so committed to open source why is it I have to take my plextor px-708 drive out of the computer and over to an f-ing ms-dos box to upgrade the firmware? They are just like the wifi companies -- they pay lip service to open source but don't release the details needed to load firmware onto the drive.
Grandstream phones are really cheap inside, very shoddy manufacturing etc. etc.
I'm under no illusion with respect to their quality.;-) They seem to have some incredibly bad
software that is prone to drop packets from the intenal http server. I often need to hit the refresh button on firfox 2 or 3 times to get the screen displayed after saving a setting. Hitting
the http reboot button causes the phone to be stuck in the reboot light-on state until I connect to the built in http server again. Still, as a
phone for talking on, it is wonderful. The only
way to describe it "crisp and clear", well at least in ulaw 8k.;-) I haven't found a need to
limit myself to the compressed encoders.
I just bought a pair of these for a cross-country test from the SF, CA area to Northampton, MA. The most striking thing was how quiet the connection was. (Sort of like going from phonographs to well-recorded CD's.) The fact that the phone doesn't need any 2-wire to 4-wire hybrid can't hurt either. Lets hear it for true uni-directional talk paths without any transformers in the way to saturate and add other distortions and coloration.
As to pricing the system for 60 Grandstream's and 60 FX0's, isn't that a touch FXO heavy? I mean, how many people in a normal company are using an outside line at once? Normal ratios are only a few percent (unless the business is telemarketing or something like that).
The fact that VOIP phone calls can be done without any middle-man and they don't cost anything above and beyond what one pays for an internet connection, is going to be a strong driver for acceptance of this technology. Pulver already has just short of 500,000 folks signed up for his Free World Dial. He also has Packet8 and Vonage peering so one can call those company's customers for free.
I just started doing something like this too. I 'tail -f' the maillog and have a simple perl script add any spammer / viral site into a pf (packet filter) table to block at the packet level. The maillog entries I look for are any rejections that look fishy (eg. mail to non-existent accounts, mail with MS attachments, mail from hosts with hostnames that contain ".dsl."/".cable.".
In 7 days of operation I have accumulated ~20,000 machines that needed blocking and my spam-attempts have dropped from 7,000 per day to 1,400 per month. In a few more days hopefully the figures will be even lower. These spammers were certainly chewing up a large amount of my bandwidth. (And this is only a two-person home system!)
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Anyone that runs a voip system can always have the system route UNKNOWN or ANONYMOUS callers to a computer based screening tool. One bored gent wrote an elaborate voice-mail maze for telemarketers to wander into.
Telemarketer Torture
So far the only prank SIP call I have received was one from a buddy that was testing his SIP knowledge and wanted to see if he could really make my phone ring.
If plextor is so committed to open source why is it I have to take my plextor px-708 drive out of the computer and over to an f-ing ms-dos box to upgrade the firmware? They are just like the wifi companies -- they pay lip service to open source but don't release the details needed to load firmware onto the drive.
A preview of the world map after Bush his second term is over :)
You have that backwards. After Bush's term scrolling east will work. ;-)
Grandstream phones are really cheap inside, very shoddy manufacturing etc. etc.
I'm under no illusion with respect to their quality. ;-) They seem to have some incredibly bad
software that is prone to drop packets from the intenal http server. I often need to hit the refresh button on firfox 2 or 3 times to get the screen displayed after saving a setting. Hitting
the http reboot button causes the phone to be stuck in the reboot light-on state until I connect to the built in http server again. Still, as a
phone for talking on, it is wonderful. The only
way to describe it "crisp and clear", well at least in ulaw 8k. ;-) I haven't found a need to
limit myself to the compressed encoders.
Grandstreams Budgettone 100's are $65 from Pulver.
u cts_id=34
t _guide
http://voipstore.pulver.com/product_info.php?prod
I just bought a pair of these for a cross-country test from the SF, CA
area to Northampton, MA. The most striking thing was how quiet the
connection was. (Sort of like going from phonographs to well-recorded
CD's.) The fact that the phone doesn't need any 2-wire to 4-wire
hybrid can't hurt either. Lets hear it for true uni-directional talk
paths without any transformers in the way to saturate and add other
distortions and coloration.
As to pricing the system for 60 Grandstream's and 60 FX0's, isn't that
a touch FXO heavy? I mean, how many people in a normal company are
using an outside line at once? Normal ratios are only a few percent
(unless the business is telemarketing or something like that).
The fact that VOIP phone calls can be done without any middle-man and
they don't cost anything above and beyond what one pays for an
internet connection, is going to be a strong driver for acceptance of
this technology. Pulver already has just short of 500,000 folks
signed up for his Free World Dial. He also has Packet8 and Vonage
peering so one can call those company's customers for free.
http://www.freeworlddialup.com/support/quick_star
I think the ball is rolling and VOIP is picking up critical mass.
I just started doing something like this too. I 'tail -f' the maillog
and have a simple perl script add any spammer / viral site into a pf
(packet filter) table to block at the packet level. The maillog
entries I look for are any rejections that look fishy (eg. mail to
non-existent accounts, mail with MS attachments, mail from hosts with
hostnames that contain ".dsl."/".cable.".
In 7 days of operation I have accumulated ~20,000 machines that needed
blocking and my spam-attempts have dropped from 7,000 per day to 1,400
per month. In a few more days hopefully the figures will be even
lower. These spammers were certainly chewing up a large amount of my
bandwidth. (And this is only a two-person home system!)