We aren't much for just reporting news. However in the wold of VoIP this is a big one… Asterisk@Home, our VoIP server software of choice, has changed its name to Trixbox. Why? Well one compelling reason is that A@H was a lot more powerful than the @Home part suggested.

We are about to take a turn and delve into home networking 101, but we'll make sure to keep you posted on Trixbox and all the latest out the Asterisk@ho…I mean Trixbox team.

Update:

Trixbox became available for download late on 5/31.

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…

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…

Part 1 – What is VoIP?

About a year ago I was in
Colorado skiing and staying in one of my favorite houses. While this particular home is an architectural and design masterpiece you can probably guess what really gets me going- the tech. The owners have an elaborate whole-house audio system, satellite TV in virtually every room and a fantastic PBX phone system. It was while sitting in the kitchen surfing the web on my laptop that I first ran across http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ on SlashDot. A DYI linux-based PBX, how could I pass that up? After several versions of software, a lot of hardware and some very frustrating phone calls we finally have a pretty nice setup. Over this three part series we’ll attempt to give a overview of VoIP and Asterisk as well as recount my experience in using Asterisk for a year as our primary phone system. In the interest of full disclosure the reader may be particularly interested in wife’s thoughts as well. As a decidedly non-nerd and self-proclaimed enemy of all things telecom I’m not sure she was as optimistic about this endeavor as I. We’ll do a special podcast interview in the coming weeks and hear from her first hand about what she likes and what she hates. We’ll also highlight some venders, providers and brands that I’ve either had success or problems with.

And finally, before we begin, Archatechs is available for home technology consulting services in the central
Virginia area. Click our About link for more information.

Background

Asterisk is a free open-source implementation of a Voice Over IP PBX. All Greek (or geek)? Let’s start from the top. A PBX- or private branch exchange- is like a mini phone company. Most offices or commercial establishments, like hotels, have some sort of PBX where each phone is an extension and maybe has services like voicemail. Most people probably think of PBX systems as that annoyance that makes you press 9 to get an outside line. However, behind the scenes a lot more is happening. The PBX may be making decisions about how to route calls (send it to the office next door or out over the public lines to someone a few states away) or providing users with features like call waiting. Traditionally PBX systems used standard copper phone wire and special (often vendor specific) phones.

Enter the modern age of the internet and the network; VoIP is a term for sending Voice over the IP protocol (you know, what the internet runs on). VoIP is a way to utilize existing computer networks to carry voice just like it was email or a web page. Many companies have modernized their PBX systems to use VoIP, but the servers and equipment can still run in excess of several thousand dollars for the most basic packages. That’s where Asterisk comes in. Asterisk, maintained by Digium, a company founded by Mark Spencer, is a very powerful VoIP PBX. Here’s where it gets really fun- it’s free, as in zip, zero, nada. Asterisk falls under the category of open source software which means it’s free to download and manipulate any way you like (just give credit where it’s due). All you need is a computer running Linux and you are good to go. Wait, you don’t have a computer running Linux? Don’t worry- we’ll get there!

Did we mention that you configure it via the web?

Ok but what does it do?

Why would you want a PBX? What’s the point? All good questions. Like we’ve said, a PBX is like a mini telephone company. It can provide voicemail, call waiting, call transfers, forwarding, hold music, and much much more. Wait- it gets better. You may have heard of Vonage, the popular VoIP provider that lets people make calls over the internet. Well, there are hundreds of Vonage-like companies popping up all over the internet, each trying to trump the next with their low rates. Broadvoice.com offers service for as low as $5/month, when was the last time your phone bill was under $50? Many services are even offering free lines (ok, so you have to have a
Fargo, North Dakota area code). When you build your own phone company and couple it with your choice of providers suddenly the power is back in your hands. There is no reason to pay $50 or more per month for things like call waiting and voicemail when you can do it yourself.

Seeing the big picture? Ok, let’s make it practical. Let’s say The Average family has two teenagers. The mom, Jane Average, works from home for a big company and Joe Average has family in
Australia. It’s always around dinner time when the phone starts ringing and it’s a constant barrage of shrill tones until after primetime TV. Trying to get the teens off the phone long enough to reach Grandma Average during the few overlapping hours of daytime Down Under is a fete of parenting magic. Enter Asterisk. With Asterisk each phone in the house is an extension- or a unique line of service. Joe Average signs up for a VoIP provider, like BroadVoice.com and gets two $5/month accounts- one for each teen. In asterisk he then programs each number to each child’s phone. He then gets a Voxbone account with a number in Sydney Australia for about $10/month, that way Grandma can make a local call and connect all the way to Joe’s house over the internet. Finally Jane get’s a Telasip business account for her office phone. When it rings her office, it also rings her cell phone. Since Joe is a dedicated reader or Archatechs and Nerd Vittles he doesn’t stop there. Joe programs both of the kids’ lines to go straight to their own voicemail boxes during dinner and homework hours and he has Asterisk turn their lines off at 10:00pm sharp. He then sets up his voicemail box to send him a copy of the message to his work e-mail so he won’t miss an important call. At the end of it all Joe has cut his phone bill from $50 – $100 a month to less than $30. More than that, he has the flexibility to make the phone work for him and his family, not the other way around.

Put simply, VoIP makes the phone work for you. You build your own calling plan, get numbers in countries or area codes where you need them, make calls around the world for free or next to nothing and, of course, make people listen to The Flaming Lips’ latest album while on hold!

Coming in the next editions

• Setting up Asterisk
• My personal hardware experiences
• Providers
• Real life uses of Asterisk
• Imagination is the limit