Google bought Internet-calling service from VoIP Inc.

 

Our favorite search engine Google.com is furthering their reach into VoIP. Should make for some interesting services in the future...think they might have bigger plans for GoogleTalk? Of course they do.

In an 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, VoIP said Google agreed on Sept. 1 to test voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VOIP, services offered by VoIP's VoiceOne Communications unit on Sept. 1. Then in October, Google moved into implementation phase, buying VoIP's services and putting in place direct Internet links between the two companies at multiple locations.
VoIP did not disclose the terms of the deal but said it expects material revenue from the pact during 2006. It didn't not gain any material revenue from Google last year, the company said.
Founder Steven Ivester declined to say what services VoIP is providing the Internet giant, citing a non-disclosure agreement.
"We've been working with them for quite some time," he said, and are developing services for Google, which he declined to discuss.
VoIP provides Internet-calling services as well as features like e911 calling and voice mail to carriers and large companies, including Customers Broadwing Corp. (BWNG) and Pac-West Telecomm Inc. (PACW).

Asterisk@Home Upgrade / Restore

 

As I promised in a past post, I'm working on coming up with an efficient way to upgrade an already-configured AAH box, without losing any of it's configuration. As of now, I have not devised a way to do this that I am satisfied with, but getting closer. One of the things I wish Asterisk & AAH would do better on is documentation, but it's only a matter of time. Asterisk is such a high-quality product, I'm certain its popularity is only going to increase, and better documantion along with it. I'll keep you posted (literally :) ) as to my sucess in getting my AAH box easily upgraded. If anyone has any ideas on an easy way to accomplish an AAH upgrade, please comment to this post.

SIPFoundry’s sipX 3.0 IP PBX Virtual Machine

 

This virtual machine is meant for playing/testing purposes only. The zip file is 764MB, unzipped it’s about 1.74GB. The OS is CentOS 4.2. Root password is voipjots.

I haven’t yet done anything with sipX as far as connecting gateways, phones, etc. I’d be very interested in hearing comments about sipX verses Asterisk or Asterisk@Home from anyone who has experience with both.

Logging into the sipX web interface on this virtual machine seems to be a little flaky, though eventually works. This probably has something to do with the SSL / DNS requirements and the fact that the virtual machine uses DHCP, as well as me not having a DNS record for it in my DNS server as suggested by SIPFoundry – for distributional purposes. SIPFoundry has pretty good documentation on how to set all of this up for a production machine here: http://sipx-wiki.calivia.com/index.php/HowTo_use_sipX_3.0_on_CentOS

To open this machine, you will need either VMWare’s VMPlayer (free), or VM Workstation version 5 or higher.

Download the virtual machine here, and view readme.txt in the zip file for more information.

12.1 Million US Households Using VoIP by 2009

 

NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Mill Hall, PA, 01/29/2006 - 45 percent of U.S. businesses and organizations will be using VoIP by the end of 2007 (Osterman Research) and 12.1 million U.S. households by 2009 (Jupiter Research). What plan best fits your needs?


With broadband Internet service growing by 38% over the past year, both the telecom and cable companies will be scrambling for your VoIP business. " With over over 80 residential VoIP plans and 23 VoIP business plans there was a real need to be able to independently compare these plans to find what will work best for the customer. That is why we added the free to use VoIP plan comparison tool to our VoIP Research site." says Mike Considine owner of Home Base Service Company.

As the number of VoIP providers continue to grow the customer needs to look at more than price to determine who's service they should purchase. One of the big advantages that VoIP telephony service has to offer over your regular phone service is the abundance of enhanced and useful features associated with VoIP technology.

Basic Features like: Call Blocking, Caller ID, Caller ID with Name, Call Forwarding, Call Waiting, Fax, Last Number Re-dial, Local Number Portability, Voicemail, 3-way Calling, 411 Directory Assistance, 911 Service,

Advanced Features like: Anonymous Call Block, Area Code Selection, Call Transfe,r Caller ID Blocking, Change Phone Number, Contact Lists, Distinctive Ringing, Do Not Disturb, E911 Service, Enhanced Voicemail, Extra Virtual Numbers, International Blocking, Keep Number for Life, Repeat Dial if Busy, Return Call, Speed Dialing, Telemarketer Blocking, Toll Free Numbers, Travel Globally Unlimited to US/CAN

VoIP Research's web site helps you compare over 80 residential VoIP plans and 23 VoIP business plans from over 25 different VoIP service providers. This extensive database provides end users with a simple and intuitive mechanism to find the VoIP plan that best meets their telephony needs.

About Mike Considine
Mike Considine has been building marketing websites and integrated marketing systems for companies for over nine years. He has helped thousands of individual marketers promote their programs, products and services.

About VoIP Research
VoIP Research's web site is everything VoIP... Articles, News and now compare 31 different VoIP service providers.


Agency / Source:


Availability: All Regions (Including Int'l)

Distribution: [+] Press Release & Newswire Distribution Network. via PRZOOM - Newswire Today (NewswireToday.com)

sipX - Open Source IP PBX

 

We've talked a lot about Asterisk@Home as a free IP PBX. However, there is another one I've known about for awhile, but have done nothing with at this point.
sipX is provided by SIPFoundry as a free IP PBX. It runs on a normal Linux server, and is listed as having about all the features we've come to expect of an IP PBX. It is my intention to get a sipX server up and running in the next few days to play with. Maybe I'll follow the example of vmwarez.com and create a virtual machine to share here, and maybe see if they would consider adding it to their collection of pre-built virtual machines. At any rate, look forward to reading about what I expect to be yet another good (and free) product in the exciting world of VoIP.

vmwarze.com's Asterisk@Home 2.4 virtual machine

 

If you're looking to play with Asterisk@Home, vmwarez.com has a pre-built virtual machine of AAH 2.4. You'll just need VMWare Player (free download), or VMWare Workstation 5.5 to run the machine. See here for more details...
Since AAH can be a little difficult to upgrade, I'm planning to use this virtual machine to test my upgrade procedure before implementing on my physical AAH box. I'll let you know what happens!

Packet8 VoIP Phone Service

 

I've been using Packet8 VoIP phone service for about a year and a half now, and couldn't recommend it more. It's a bit cheaper than Vonage, and provides good service, and all the features I need. The call quality over my 1.5 Mbs DSL connection is great, and in the time I have been using it, there has been less than 2 hours of downtime that I've noticed. Most of this downtime was due to upgrades while they were preparing for their updated E911 service, and they always sent an email beforehand. My family occasionally makes calls to Singapore & Mexico, and the calls are usually around $0.03 a minute, and of course unlimitted long distance in the US and Canada is nice too. For $20.00 a month, it's unbeateable in my opinion.

GrandStream BudgeTone 101 SIP phones

 

I’m using three of the GrandStream BudgeTone 101 SIP phones in my home phone system, and must say that I’m satisfied with them. There are only a few minor problems I’ve found with them, one of which their technical support helped my correct:
1. Conference button did not work, but does now that their support had me update the firmware with a yet-to-be-released firmware version (v. 1.0.7.11). The current firmware version available on their website is v. 1.0.6.7.
2. The message button I haven’t yet gotten to work just right, but it may be that I haven’t played with it long enough. The way it currently works for me is that it just calls the extension number as if you were calling it from another phone, and getting the extension’s voicemail greeting. Not really a big deal though since you can just press the * key to log into your voicemail.
3. The speaker phone works decently, but not perfectly. You sometimes get a little bit of an echo when using it.
4. The sound quality is good, but just a tad bit “dull”.
All-in-all though, for the price (a little less than $60 typically), I’m satisfied.

Sipura SPA-3000

 

I can’t say enough good things about this device. The sound quality of the calls through it is excellent, it has a ton of settings (most of them we don’t need to use with asterisk, but it’s nice to know they are there), and a neat power-loss failover feature. This feature patches your analog phone line (trunk) through to the analog phone (extension) should power to the device be lost, maintaining a phone with a dial-tone for you. Very nice.
To read how to configure this device to work with Asterisk@Home, and vice versa, click here. The only problem I ran into that wasn’t mentioned in those instructions is to change the dial plan on the Advanced Line1 page. Otherwise, the analog phone you connect to the SPA-3000 will not know to send the dialed digits to the asterisk box for handling, and will try to handle the dialing itself. The Dial Plan at the bottom of the Advanced Line1 page should be this (at least it worked for me):

(*xx[34569]11<:@gw0>000[2-9]xxxxxx<:@gw0>1xxx[2-9]xxxxxxS0xxxxxxxxxxxx.)

For screen shots of one of my configured SPA-3000s, see the below links. You may have to save them to your computer and open with a viewer that has a zoom function.

Line 1 screen shot 1, 2.

PSTN Line screen shot 1, 2, 3.

Setting up Asterisk@Home as my home phone system

 

I recently finished setting up Asterisk@Home as my home PBX system, and I love it. I was concerned about its reliability/performance since I’m running it on a very low-end, pieced-together PC, but in the month or so that it’s been in use, it’s been rock-solid. Currently, I’m running Asterisk@Home 2.1, but am hoping to upgrade to the recently release 2.4 version this weekend (I promise an interesting post concerning the upgrade next week).

I’ve been playing with Asterisk@Home since version 1.0, but mostly in a virtual machine environment with no trunks, and only soft-phones (such as CounterPath’s X-Lite) extensions, just to get my head around it all. Before I implemented it at my house, I bought a couple of the cheap cloned X100P PCI cards to use as my FXOs while playing with it on a physical machine. Those cards where enough to make me want to scrap the idea completely – they were horrible for sound quality. Then a friend and co-worker of mine who was also playing with Asterisk at the time was looking for a reasonable deal on an all-in-one device to provide him with both an FXO and FXS. He came across the Sipura SPA-3000 -an awesome product. You plug your analog POTS phone line into the FXO Port, and your analog phone into the FXS port. After plugging the SPA-3000 into your home network, you can then configure Asterisk to use the SPA-3000 as both a SIP trunk, and SIP extension. I’ll provide the information on how to configure the SPA-3000 to work with Asterisk and vice-a-versa in a later post.

I ended up buying two of the SPA-3000s to use for both my incoming analog lines (one is actually a Packet8 VoIP line), and also to provide a couple of extensions to cordless analog phones. I needed more than 2 extensions, so I also bought 3 of the GrandStream BudgeTone 101 SIP phones. Even though they are the cheapest SIP phones on the market, after using them for a month, I would say that I am 90% satisfied with them. I’ll provide more info about these phones in another post.

Asterisk@Home comes with a very handy (although not yet flawless) web interface called Asterisk Management Portal or AMP, which was the primarily method I used for the basic configuration of the box. Without going into the step-by-step process I took to set it all up (since I didn’t think to take any notes at the time), I’d like to just point you to the resources that were a ton of help to me.

This link will tell you just about everything you need to know to get you’re A@H box accepting/receiving phone calls:
http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=62#amp

Once you get the bare necessities functioning, check out this link for fine-tuning the box.
http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=63

So for those of you out there who have been thinking about setting up an Asterisk@Home PBX, I hope you feel a little more comfortable about the idea. I have been very happy with mine, and know others who are just as happy with theirs. In fact, I don’t know if I could go back to just plain old analog phones plugged into analog lines anymore. Not only would I lose the ability to check the weather forecast by simply calling an extension, but also the Wakeup calls my Asterisk@Home box provides that I’ve become so reliant on!

Soon to come...

 

Welcome to VoipJots...

With this blog, I hope to create a one-stop place for learning and finding information about VoIP and its technologies.

Some months ago I became interested in VoIP when a friend of mine showed me information about Digium’s open source PBX software, Asterisk. I started playing with it which required me to do a lot of reading about VoIP and its related technologies such as SIP phones, ATAs, VoIP providers, Asterisk, etc. I find VoIP to be a fascinating subject, but also having aspects that are very dificult to find information about. This is the goal of VoipJots. To electronically "jot" down any helpful, relative information I come across in my experiences, and to share them with my visitors.

My next post will be a recount of my experience with setting up Asterisk@Home as my home PBX system. For any of you that are toying with the idea, be sure to check back and read about it. It took me a little while to get it working the way I want it, but it was worth every effort! I'll try to remember and list the chronological steps I took, and list where I found the information I needed from initial setup of the PBX to the final tweaking.