Who is still with me? Anyone? Anyone? Ok, if you are still hanging in there then we’re going to try and wrap up my three part series here. So far we’ve talked a little about VoIP and specifically Asterisk@Home and our experience setting it up. In this final article we are going to get into some nitty-gritty details so hang on! Also, please feel free to contact us at info@archatechs.com or use the comments on this blog (yeah, we read em…er, ah, well we would if we got any). We are going to wrap this thing up with some details about our setup here at home and some of the problems we ran into- and how we worked them out!

With my call waiting problems solved I was pretty pleased. But as the saying goes “if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” and that was the case at Chez Archatechs. And, truthfully, I was having some phone problems that impacted my professional life. The main issue that plagued both our home and my work setup was this distorted echo I mentioned. Calls- mostly incoming- started out ok but within 30 seconds you could hear yourself through what sounded like a distorted guitar amp. It became really unpleasant. Imagine not only hearing yourself on a ½ second delay but having it sound so bad that you had to hold the phone away to talk. To be clear, this was only happening on calls coming into or out of our existing, traditional copper lines. Calls through our VoIP providers, like Broadvoice or NuFone were fine. But with this tribute to classic rock happening on each call, it was hard to convince myself, let alone my wife, to switch to an all VoIP set-up. I mean, despite my greatest of geek intentions, this project was not proving too successful.

We both acknowledged that we could do some pretty cool things. It was during this exercise in telephony frustration that we took a trip to Ireland where we used our server to make free calls between home and the Emerald Isle- including a work call that proved to be a defining moment for one of us. We both had our own voicemail boxes and could get copies of voicemail via e-mail; this is especially nice when you get an important call while at work (for those who work outside of that house, that is). For all intents and purposes the groundwork and potential were there but they came with a Guns N Roses guitar solo with every other call! I should also mention, albeit somewhat reluctantly, that I had amassed a small fortune in VoIP phones. We had 3 Cisco phones (various models) for the office, kitchen and bedroom, 2 wifi phones, an ATA and some other e-bay treasures for testing and playing. While my wife not committed (and I had my doubts too), I was in pretty deep from a capital investment standpoint.

It was about the time that I was talking myself into going 100% VoIP that we did a quick weekend trip to Paris to celebrate a birthday. The least intelligent thing you can do before a big trip is a major upgrade to any server, doubly so when it controls your home and work phones; but, hey, I love a challenge. Actually, the least intelligent thing you can do is fly to another hemisphere the day after the biggest day of your life, but that is a different blog. It was while patching the underlying Linux system on my Asterisk server that I broke the Zaptel drives- the crucial part of software that connects those x100p cards to the Asterisk software. All of the sudden I was left with only VoIP and no copper connectivity at all. Thinking quickly, I e-mailed my buddy at the phone company and had him forward my home line to my personal Broadvoice BYOD account and then do the same thing for my work line. Why had I not done that from the get-go you ask? Well mostly because that basically committed me to VoIP and in essence charged me 2x for each line. The other major reason is that, like I mentioned last time, my home Broadvoice account was in a different area code. When I placed calls out over the copper home line people saw the caller ID they were accustomed to; however, now going out over VoIP, it looked like I was calling from 2 hours away. Nevertheless we had a plane to catch, cheeses to mangons and wine quaff. It would have to do. Did I mention that I was going to repeat my Ireland set-up to make free calls between the City of Lights and USA?

When we returned I contacted Broadvoice and officially ported my home copper line to a VoIP account with them. It turns out that they can port numbers from area codes they don’t even serve- imagine that.

That just about brings us to today. We have a phone (and extension) for each room, private voicemail, a great music-on-hold library, a custom tailored phone plan (we’ll get to that) and a 100% echo free system. The experiment that led to an obsession has come full circle. I say full circle because you really shouldn’t ever notice the phone, I mean, I know it rings and all, but you expect it to just work- and only notice when it does not. Today we have a whole-house PBX that is capable of some complex decision making (including ringing the phone in the master bathroom, just in case) and it just works. Of course it does more than any service you can buy through a POTS phone company. For instance, when we dial 411 the Asterisk@Home server actually translates that into 1-800-free-411, a totally free 411 service. When my wife wants to vote for American Idol all she has to do is dial IDOL and then enter the last 2 digits of her favorite Idol’s number and Asterisk takes care of voting 999 times for her (Thanks to Ward over at Nerdvittles for that one…wait, I take that back, my wife is even more obsessed now). Those calls go out over a GoIAX account which gives users free access to toll-free numbers. We can also handle incoming calls differently. I have a friend notorious for late-night drunk-dialing. So I have a setting that looks for his caller ID and if he should call after 11pm and before waking hours he gets a nice little greeting that tells him to call back when he sobers up. Callers without caller ID get their own prompt asking for a number, and if they don’t enter it (most auto-dialers just hang up) our phones never ring. We can treat parents and in-laws differently; giving them the option to try our cell phones before going to voicemail- this is actually something I do for work too. There is also my favorite trick- changing your caller ID, but propriety and a prank gone too far prevent me from sharing that one….maybe.

Today we pay $20 a month for phone service. That is it. We make most of our calls over Broadvoice. When the broadvoice account is in use (while it allows multiple incoming, it only allows one outgoing call) calls go out over a NuFone account. NuFone allows you to set your caller ID so the people we call never know that it came from a NuFone server several states away. My work calls come and go over a work Broadvoice account; set up in the area code of my office several states away. At the end of the day if POTS service is 99% reliable then VoIP is about 98.5% and considering what you can do, why would you not chose VoIP? Just imagine having total control over your phone options and, more importantly, your cost. Remember that example about a family with kids, well VoIP is perfect. Just get your kids a number from FreeDigits and they instantly have their own line- for free. What about a group of friends scattered around the world? If one person hosted the Asterisk server and each friend got a VoIP phone or ATA then they could have a little private phone network. It may sound strange, but when is the last time you called that fraternity brother living in South Africa, or he called you? What if it was 100% free?

We’ve covered a lot here over these three articles and we doubt that most folks could digest all of this at once. Lets face it, the writing here isn’t that great and there are a lot of concepts to digest. But if you’ve hung in this far then you owe it to yourself to try VoIP. If you aren’t the kind to salvage an old PC, load Asterisk@Home and set-up your own server, then check out SunRocket or Vonage. If you are of the adventuresome lot, then stick with us. We are going to cover some pretty neat projects for you home ranging from Asterisk to VPNs- hey, can you think of a tech term that starts with Z? We will give you some links to get Asterisk@Home up and running as well as address any questions you may have along the way. Also, if anyone has topics they’d like us to cover, drop us a line at info@archatechs.com or leave a comment. If we know anything about it, or can find someone who does, we’ll try and work it in!

Coming soon:

• Making fee calls while traveling from anywhere
• Control iTunes with your Phone
• Home network infrastructures – planning for a wired and/or wireless network
• The VoIP Wild West – how can we protect VoIP from lobbyists and big business
• Wireless Network Security
• Much much more

NOTE: for all of the wonderful things that VoIP can do, there are currently limitations and problems with e911. e911 is the service that tells the 911 operator where you are, even if you cannot. When you get a VoIP account like the Broadvoice BYOD account mentioned here you could establish it anywhere in the US. That could also mean when you call 911 from Virginia you get connected to an operator in California. There are many ways to deal with this, and we are even going to talk about some. But if you are going to try Asterisk for your house phone, PLEASE keep a cell phone charged and in reach. Old cell phones, even ones with no active service, have to be able to call 911- by law. We recommend keeping an older phone, one with no contract or SIM card even, on the bed stand always plugged in. Should the power ever go out, it will still hold a charge for at least a day or two. You can find an older cell phone on ebay for next to nothing. You can also call 911 for a test call. Just make sure the first thing you say is something like: “This is a test call, do you have time?” An ounce of prevention…