Things are moving quickly around here at Archatechs. You may have noticed that we are using WordPress to host this site. We’re quite impressed with WordPress as a hosting service and platform in general. We have decided there are a few advantages to hosting the site on our own servers using WordPress’s software. The good news is that we’ll make the DNS change late on a Sunday and hopefully by Monday no one will notice. One of the biggest motovators was the inclusion of Google AdSense Adds- hey we gotta pay for all this tech we are testing for you!

I’m also exicted to announce that we’ll be testing the new Linksys WIP330 very soon and posting our findings here. This thing is so new there is not a lot of info out there and we hope to be one of the first to bring you a detailed review. While it appears to be a quite capable cordless wifi phone for the home we are hoping that it will function well on public hotspots too.

Ok, back to our year in review. I’ve mentioned Asterisk@home and Linux. Asterisk@home is a downloadable CD that you put into an old or spare PC and reboot. When it first boots the CD formats the hard drive (yeah, that means erase everything) and installs Linux, Asterisk and some fancy add-ons (like fax and text-to-speech support). After about 20 minutes it reboots a final time and you have a fully functioning Linux server with Asterisk running. The configuration is all web-based so you just point your browser to the IP address of your new Linux/Asterisk server.

For our experiment we needed a spare PC. You don’t need much in the way of hardware- a 1.0ghz box with 512mb of RAM will do quite nicely; and the careful E-Bay shopper can probably find one for around $100. I did what any good nerd would do- rummaged. I found an old PII 300mhz Gateway tower with 128mb of RAM. It was missing a hard drive so I slapped in an old 20gb drive. Since the Asterisk@home CD compiles Asterisk from scratch, it took about 35 minutes to load. When it was done I used the X-Lite softphone (a VoIP phone that runs as software on your computer) to do some testing. I checked my voicemail (I didn’t have any) and I put myself on hold to hear Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. I knew I needed more. I had a lot of trepidation about messing with our phone service. After all, when the phone works, it just works. When making calls gets hard it can be very painful for both parties. I did a little research and found out that there is hardware to tie existing copper lines (know as POTS) into your Asterisk server. The cheapest way was to e-bay two x100p cards for about $10 each. Each card supports one traditional copper phone line. These cards are older technology (at least by VoIP standards) and have a kludgy reputation around the net; but they worked for me. I could receive calls from both my home and business lines on my Asterisk server. (note: we’ll discuss some better hardware options later for interfacing your existing Ma Bell lines into Asterisk)

Now I needed phones. There are several options when it comes to phones and VoIP. Perhaps the easiest option is a device called an ATA or analog telephone adaptor. An ATA has an Ethernet network jack and a regular phone jack and effectively turns your regular pone into a VoIP phone. They work great, especially the Linksys PAP2 (the same box Vonage will send you), but if you want each phone to have its own extension then you need an ATA for each phone in your house. They range from about $40 – $100 depending on options and vender. There are also VoIP phones, they often look like an office phone often with a large display and options like speaker phone. VoIP phones range in price from $60 – $400. Brands like budgetphone tend to be featureless and cheep while Cisco makes the top of the line models. The good news for consumers is the prices are dropping almost daily. Since Cisco purchased Linksys and Sipura (a major VoIP player) they have introduced a consumer level line of Linksys VoIP phones that are virtually identical to their Cisco big brothers, but at a fraction of the cost (a two line version will run about $140). There are even WiFi enabled phones for a cordless option; but they tend to be pricy and have poor performance. So it was back to e-bay for me. I did a search for SIP phone (SIP is a VoIP protocol or language) and voip phone. I was able to find a Cisco 7940- a fantastic 2 line model- for about $100 and a wireless Zyxel 802.11b phone for about $100. I also found a fairly old Philips IP phone for $40. That gave me two hard-wired and one cordless, more than enough for my small house.

Configuration of the phones was fairly simple, the Cisco phone came pre-loaded with the SIP software (some Cisco phones are loaded with Cisco’s own call manager software, but can be re-flashed for SIP). The Zyxel WiFi phone proved to be a large disappointment. I’ll save the Zyxel story for our discussion of WiFi SIP phones. The short version is that it worked fine but lacked a lot of features including a flash button for call waiting and support for any kind of wifi security. The Asterisk@Home web interface provides some configuration tools for Cisco phones which came in handy.

I was up and running! And that’s when the problems started. The x100p cards do work, and sometimes quite well. But they can also produce a lot of echo- for either ends of the call, or both. There are several ways to combat the echo including Asterisk’s built-in echo canceling logic. 90% of the time the echo was on my end. It sounded like hearing myself through a guitar distortion effect. The other party never complained so I tolerated it….my wife did not. We also lost the ability to pick up call waiting calls. Asterisk is great for multiple calls; it can put one call on hold and play music for them while you take three more calls. You can conference lines together, transfer them around, send them to voice mail… what ever you want. The problem is the antiquated POTS phone system. Call waiting- for most of us- involves flashing the line (pressing the flash button or depressing the hang-up button on the phone quickly). The phone company then receives the flash, puts one call on hold and gives you the other call. VoIP phones don’t work the same way. They don’t have a flash button- at least in the traditional sense. So, with the x100p card hooked up to the phone line I could hear the call waiting beep, but there was no way to answer it. I know, I know… you just did a google and there are a ton of sites addressing that problem. There are ways to make Asterisk flash the line and pick up the other call. But honestly, what is the point of having Rilo Keily as hold music if you cannot put people on hold and listen to it?

Enter Broadvoice. Broadvoice is a SIP (remember, that’s a VoIP protocal) provider. Think of SIP providers as the wild west of the phone world. Anything is legal but you are a long way from the home! Broadvoice offers a Bring Your Own Device lite plan. The plan is about $7/month and includes unlimited incoming calls and 100 minutes of outgoing calls. Signing up was easy. They didn’t have a number in my town, so I chose one from the next closest area code. I followed the instructions from the Geek Gazette. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed my new Broadvoice number… my phones rang. So what does this have to do with call waiting? I wasn’t about to switch to a new number, let alone in a different area code. I’d had my home number for years- it was part of my identity, but we needed call waiting. My POTS phone company offered a lot of services- I guess they had to justify that $80/month they were charging me. I called them up. “Say, can you do a ‘call forward on busy’?” In 24 hours they turned my call waiting feature into call forwarding- to my new broadvoice number. Since I also had unlimited long distance I wasn’t getting charged for the forward to a long distance number. Now when callers called and I was on the phone they got transferred to my broadvocie number and right into my Asterisk box. If I wanted to answer it I just pressed the right button on my VoIP phone or I could let voicemail pick up. The other added benefit is that Broadvoice will allow more than one incoming call at the same time. No more busy lines!

Things were really working out well. I had call waiting, a voice mail box for my wife and one for me. I had separate work and home lines. It was just the damn echo that was making our lives miserable. But that is the subject of part 3 of this saga…