Slashdot Log In
Using BroadVoice with Asterisk How-To
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Mar 20, 2005 05:40 AM
from the next-comes-the-phone-division dept.
from the next-comes-the-phone-division dept.
Kerbo writes "With all the hype surrounding open source PBXs (telephone switches) such as Asterisk, the user community is clamoring for more help in getting these systems up and running. The Geek Gazette has published an article on how to configure Asterisk to work with BroadVoice VoIP service and eliminate the need for the phone company."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Yes, fine... (Score:5, Interesting)
billy - remembering DSL
Re:Yes, fine... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yes, fine... (Score:2)
Re:Yes, fine... (Score:2)
Re:Yes, fine... (Score:2)
What is asterix? (Score:5, Informative)
Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.
Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the Features section for a more complete list.
Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. For interconnection with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk's sponsors, Digium(TM). Digium has single and quad span T1 and E1 interfaces for interconnection to PRI lines and channel banks as well as a single port FXO card and a one to four-port modular FXS and FXO card.
Be careful not to use the name 'Asterix' (Score:3, Funny)
Evidently, the publishing company of the popular French comic books with the famous character Asterix are extremely litigious. They have sued a German Linux company over the use of the name Mobilix for a Linux distro that was aimed specifically at mobile computing, hence Mobilix.
They don't have any character by the name Mobilix in their comic books, but they claimed th
Re:Be careful not to use the name 'Asterix' (Score:2)
http://tuxmobil.org/mobilix_asterix.html
It has details on the case I described with several links to other sources and it also lists other cases where this French publishing company has sued users of far fetched similar names as the characters in their comic books.
Those guys don't shy away from any frivolous lawsuit they can bring and they have the dollars to follow it through.
It woul
BV = Poor Support (Score:4, Informative)
Call quality varied from good to extremely poor. Your mileage may vary.
BV also seems to have a problem handling DTMF (Touch-Tones). I had consistent trouble using many call routing systems, including my bank's customer sevice line.
The worst came when I tried to Cancel my BroadVoice account. I followed BV's support page instructions and emailed billing with the exact information necessary. NO response. I called support several times to no avail.
Ultimately the only way to terminate my BV account was to call my credit card company and have them block BV's continued attempts to charge me for service that I no longer wanted.
Re:BV = Poor Support (Score:2, Interesting)
Was this for internal or external telephone calls? I don't think we're quite ready yet for the later in a business environment. But on an internal PBX - isn't that okay assuming your LAN is up to spec?
Rob.
Re:BV = Poor Support (Score:5, Interesting)
The only codecs they allow are alaw and ulaw, which are bandwidth hogs, leading to poor call quality.
3/10'th the time they can't complete my outgoing call for one reason or another, sometimes I even get error messages in russian(?).
The worst part is their SIP implimentation changes regularly. One day everything works fine, the next day they've changed something and I have to fiddle with your configuration for a few hours to get it working again.
Good luck getting in touch with support, they don't answer e-mail and rarely answer the phone. I've called them a total of 27 times in the past, and got a rep on the phone only once. The rep was nice and tried to help at least. I am now trying to cancel my account to no avail. I'm putting a stop-payment on it tomorrow.
In short, don't use BroadVoice unless you are a bit of a masochist. There are other services such as VoicePulse Connect and SimpleTelecom that work MUCH better, and are fully supported.
Look for a provider that uses IAX instead of SIP. IAX is great for people behind nat, and the fact that they allow IAX connections means they run Asterisk too so compatibility is almost guarenteed.
Parent
MOD PARENT UP!!!!!! (Score:2)
Re:BV = Poor Support (Score:2)
I am part of several companies of which one is doing * set-ups in the Denver region. We have been using BV do to their low prices and their attitude towards * (Vonage and the RBOCs do not want to work with you).
We have had 4 outages. In each time, trying to get a hold of them is next to impossible. In addition, in one case, we noticed that accounts came up seperately over a period of a couple of hours (hinting at a DB change-over/lose with account info).
When we call them
Re:BV = Poor Support (Score:2)
At my business all of our outgoing calls travel over virtual lines provided by the VoicePulse Connect [voicepulse.com] service. We get to set up the line(s) as an IAX connection and all you do is buy minutes. Better yet, for outgoing calls you have as many lines as you attempt to use, it just uses 1 minute each minute per active line.
I didn't look through the article to see if you can do this with DV, but with Voice Pulse the quality of service has been superb! Kudos to them!
...and for those in business... (Score:5, Informative)
For those who are interested in VoIP for business, I've written some online guides:
VoIP for business [integrics.com]
How ISPs can sell VoIP services to their customers [integrics.com]
Benefit for the average home? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Benefit for the average home? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm working on a system where each of my computers (at home, work, and my parent's house) is fitted with a Bluetooth dongle which will discover if my mobile phone is nearby. If it is, calls to my Asterisk server will be routed to the landline phone I'm sitting at.
Geeky, I know, but I started my engineering life in telecoms and can't seem to shake it off...
Parent
Re:Benefit for the average home? (Score:2)
I do the same, to Australia, Germany, US and the UK - all free. Of course being a geek I've spent more on hardware to do this than I've saved
How are you routing the UK calls from the mobile? I find that if I put a menu/pin on the incoming line people just get confused, so I'd like it to start ringing and also listen for a pin code... haven't found out how to do that though.
Re:Benefit for the average home? (Score:2, Interesting)
I perform CLI grooming, so Asterisk knows that it's my mobile calling. Only I get the menu.
Re:Benefit for the average home? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Benefit for the average home? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm running Asterisk in a home environment. Although it's being fed by two POTS lines, how Astersk connects with the rest of the world doesn't actually matter.
First advantage: ghetto hunt group. With bu
Sounds like a vonage commercial (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now we're using Skype with good results. I'm the only one in the family running Linux, but we've all got broadband and the audio is often better than a regular phone call.
My real evil plan, however, is to run a PBX (my own little Personal Branch Exchange) with VoIP subscribed PSTN numbers in Maryland, New York, Florida, and maybe Italy. Dialing in and out supported for authorized users (just the fam plus maybe a few friends if they want to add some lines to elsewhere.) My parents want to call my sister? Dial a local phone number and:
"For [Wil's Sister], press one. For [Wil's Brother], press two. For the most annoying sound in the world, press three. For Wil, press three..."
So far, the whole asterisk project is in the toy stage, but Skype is going strong already.
Asterisk is NOT a Linux only thing (Score:5, Informative)
Asterisk also runs on *BSD, MacOS X and Solaris. With the help of Cygwin it even runs on Windows now.
In fact, talking about an easy to set up home PBX, you might actually find MacOS X to be far more likely to suit your needs.
There is an Asterisk installer for the Mac, so you don't have to built it yourself and there are GUI based setup wizards, or assistants as they're called in the Mac world, which allow non-geeks without tech skills to set up a basic home PBX in just a few minutes.
A driver for using the Mac's built-in modem as a voice port to connect to a POTS line is on its way.
But even if you don't have a Mac nor want to buy one, I assume that similar tools will eventually show up for Windows now that Asterisk runs under Cygwin.
Asterisk on Linux will probably remain a "mostly for geeks" affair. Then again, there are some promising efforts under way to package Asterisk and Linux in a "works out of the box" fashion, for example Asterisk@Home.
Anyway, you shouldn't compare Asterisk with Skype because Asterisk is a _server_ application that can be linked to just about _any_ service and Skype is a _client_ application that is _locked_ to one single service.
Parent
Re:Sounds like a vonage commercial (Score:5, Funny)
Hey Wil, did you notice you're the most annoying sound in the world?
j/k
Parent
1-800 voip (Score:2)
I am considering getting a 1-800 so that friends and family can easily call me. I would also configure it so that I could easily and cheaply place long distance calls while on the road.
BroadVoice has been excellent. (Score:5, Informative)
The Slashdot story How Do You Make International Calls? [slashdot.org] drew 420 comments. The best suggestion by far, I found, was BroadVoice. It's amazing: $25/month for unlimited calls to land lines in 35 countries.
The BroadVoice service has been excellent. Note this comment earlier in this story: BV = Poor Support, #11989921 [slashdot.org]. It's very important when using any VOIP service to test your internet connection quality. It's easy. Linux users need no help, probably. Windows users left-click on Start/ Run/. Enter CMD and press the Enter key. In the Command Line Interface (DOS) box that appears, enter
and press the Enter key. The times may be about 60 milliseconds, and should all be below about 300 milliseconds, and there should be no times far (5x) larger than the average time. Hold down the control key and press the C key to exit from Ping before the 100 tests are completed.
If you get highly variable Ping times, you will have trouble with VOIP, both in dialing and in talking. Call your ISP and tell them to repair their equipment. I did that with Telefonica here in Brazil, and, after hours of talking to many people, they did do the repair.
If you call your ISP, I suggest you don't complain about VOIP, because that is a painful issue for some ISPs. Instead, complain about these things:
1) Ping times definitely show there is a problem. Tell tech support to try it themselves.
2) Web pages give error messages or don't load unless they are clicked on more than once.
3) Email cannot be received or sent except by trying several times.
4) Music on internet radio is periodically interrupted.
BroadVoice customer service has been excellent for me.
Re:BroadVoice has been excellent. (Score:2, Informative)
And I know it's not our ISP, we've got a 20Meg connection, with no problems with ping times, email, webpage loading, nor internet radio.
So I don't ha
Asterix just saved me $4000 (Score:4, Interesting)
An old PC, some Linksys boxes and two days of Dave's time later and I have saved a lot of money. Not only that but I have way more features than I used to have. This is my first venture in to using open source, I think my Windows machines will be going soon.
Asterix is a great product, if it is configured correctly (apperently it isn't that friendly), it works perfectly, has saved me money already and I based on last years bills from Telstra broadvoice will save me even more.
Asterix & broadvoice are a killer setup.
Broadvoice rocks, Skype is hype (Score:3, Insightful)
Skype on the other hand, it a nasty hack which somehow got onto lots of Windoze boxes. Explicitly closed system, will not play with anybody else. Lowest-common-denominatorware. Fuk'em.
Coolest stuff I've seen in a while (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anybody know if there is a open-source Windows PBX program?
The one bad part is the 30-40 bucks BV and others charge you with for what seems basically a large internet directory service, right? I mean, if I have the PBX and am willing to share my land line, all I want to know is a list of other people who will do the same. So it seems to me the only real expense should be the cost of the land line (if you want to share). In a world with long-range WiFi and mesh networking, perhaps even this cost goes away. Perhaps I missed something.
Really neat stuff! I wonder if the standards support both video and audio conferencing?
Re:Coolest stuff I've seen in a while (Score:2, Funny)
Many people ports free software, to free plataforms.
It's ethically wrong to port free software to propietary plataforms. You are heling exactly what you are fighting if you do.
This is news? (Score:3, Informative)
Why is it suddenly 'news' because some hack reporter republishes them?
(Of course with asterisk you don't use a single provider... you work out the cheapest routes to different places and write them into the dialplan).
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Informative)
The minimum required in sip.conf is actually a lot less than posted:You might also have to limit the protocols to ulaw/alaw (disallow=all,allow=ulaw,allow=alaw).
Parent
Never mind ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Dumbish question about Asterisk... (Score:2)
Re:Dumbish question about Asterisk... (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, all of that is very doable (not that I've done it on mine since I don't have callerid). You'd just need some logic to check the value of the ${CALLERIDNUM} variable.
Take a look at the Asterisk wiki, particularly the variables [voip-info.org] and commands [voip-info.org] pages.
Re:Dumbish question about Asterisk... (Score:4, Informative)
It has quite a few neat tricks for telemarketer avoidance. First, there is a thing called Zapateller, which if enabled, sends a so called SIT sequence on the line when a call comes in and telemarketer's equipment hangs up on that.
Those telemarketers who don't have equipment that hangs up on the SIT sequence, eg. telemarketers located overseas, can usually be blocked just as easily by sending all calls without caller IDs or with unknown caller IDs to a voice menu that asks the caller to press a touch tone key. This is because telemarketers use so called predicitve diallers, systems that dial and only connect the call to their staff when there is somebody human on the other end of the line. If a predictive dialler hits your voice menu, it will just hang up and call some other number.
Likewise you can do all kinds of smart things with calls from callers you do know. For example, some you may want to forward to your mobile, to some others you may want to announce an alternative number to call, yet others you may want to forward to someone else or to voicemail. Asterisk can send voicemail to you by email as an attachement and it can send you an SMS to your mobile phone with the number of the caller and the time of the call.
You say you aren't keen on using the VOIP features, but VOIP isn't only about making long distance calls over the net. It is also about extending the reach of your home phone line. For example, you may be out of the house but as long as you have internet access, you could still be picking up your phone at home when a call comes in. Or you could make a call using your home phone while you are some place else.
It's pretty addictive. Once you've started using something like Asterisk, you keep using it in more and more interesting and innovative ways.
Parent
Asterisk Rocks (Score:2)
We only have 1 phone line for our business - (small IT company, mostly cell calls) but we wanted to have voice mail boxes f
Re:Asterisk Rocks (Score:2)
IF you don't run too many calls at once, a mini-itx [mini-itx.com] system might fit your bill. They can be very low power, and the single PCI slot is likely enough for most purposes. Look close at that site, they sell (or at least have sold) 12 power adapters, so you can use a car battery as your power supply, and have a very long lasting UPS (perhaps changed from solar panels) just like the real telcos. Well not quite, real telcos use 48volts, but I have seem some of the smaller ones use 4 car batteries to get that
Similar Broadvoice rates in Canada? (Score:2)
This is something I would like in Canada say province wide. Vonage is already available here but is 34.95 (last I checked) but that's includes all of north america.
I don't really make much long distance calls so I'd like something competitive for just local with voip.
Is there any provider for something like this providing service in Canada?
Repost just a teeny bit. (Score:2)
Just that the guides on a new server...right?
I'm using VoicePulse (Score:2)
Re:eliminate the need for the phone company. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see governments encouraging the destruction of major industries, nor those industries happily watching, no matter how logical it may seem to the geeks involved.
Revolutions are possible but heading for full-frontal confrontations with powerful and rich interest groups is generally a good way to get yourself into serious pain.
If the telcos were bankrupt, inefficient, unable to provide a decent service, and already collapsing... yes, aim for the throat.
But given that's not the case, the smartest strategy is to move the fight to a different terrain (which VoIP attempts to do but which wifi is more suitable for). Guerilla warfare can bring down powerful interest groups.
Sorry for the metaphor of war, but if someone came along and told me that my $BIGbn business could be replaced by a bootable CD, there would be a certain reaction, yes.
Parent
Re:eliminate the need for the phone company. (Score:2, Insightful)
Ohh isn't the internet an evil thing for all these mega-corps. I love to see them cringe when their lovely little monopoly starts getting threatened We've got the music industry cringing that they're going to loose a lot of money because we're all downloading music for free. And now the telecoms are quaking because we're all going to start
Re:eliminate the need for the phone company. (Score:2)
A lot of them *are*. Some of the european ones barely survived the last few years. A lot of the big carriers got bought out (KPN, etc.)
Anyone who could call a telco 'efficient' has never had to deal with them. The incumbents are used to being state monopolies - they have whole departments that are just money sinks (in a previous job we had software that replaced one or two of
Re:Maybe a dumb question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seeing as how featureful, small, internet-connected telephone switches might just attract some phr34ks, you may want to run your Asterisk on an older, dedicated machine.
I have been playing with it on a Debian machine recently, and it was really easy to install. The configuration has been non-trivial, but not too terrible.
I like the idea because you are in complete control of an entire PBX, including switching, extensions, and voice mail. You can even include on-hold music of your choice.
The best advice I can give is to install Asterisk (behind a firewall, to start) and begin playing with it.
Parent
DIY-VOIP-Network (Score:5, Informative)
That's rather easy to do with Asterisk.
The first thing to do is - surprise - to set up an Asterisk server. Next, you configure a user account for yourself and one for each of your friends.
Then you tell your friends your server's address or DNS name, username and password and ask them to download a software phone that supports any of the open standards Asterisk supports, eg. SIP, IAX and H.323 to name the most important ones.
For Windows, your preferred choice would probably be the Firefly softphone, which supports both SIP and IAX, another one is called X-lite which is SIP only. For Linux there are quite a few open source softphones supporting various protocols, SJphone, Kphone, GnomeMeeting and more. For MacOS X there is X-Lite and the cross platform iaxComm (Win/Lin/Mac). All those are free.
Then all that remains to do is to tell those softphones how to find your Asterisk server and what their username and password is. In some cases a little fine tuning may be needed. For example, if someone is behind NAT, you may have to work around NAT traversal problems.
The easiest way to avoid NAT problems is to use the IAX protocol and a softphone that support IAX, eg. Firefly or iaxComm. IAX doesn't have NAT issues, so no work arounds are needed.
Note, that Asterisk supports multiple protocols concurrently. So, some of your friends might come in using SIP while others use IAX and yet others use H.323. The overhead for Asterisk to translate between protocols is negligible.
Everybody can now call everybody else by their username, which could be a nickname or an internal phone number. If a user isn't logged in, calls will go to voicemail. You can also set up chat rooms for multi-party voice conferencing.
In addition, you can set up so called SIP URIs, which is akin to an email address. In fact, your email address may well be identical to your SIP URI. Using that SIP URI, anybody with a SIP device can now call anyone on your DIY VOIP network, if you want to allow that.
Your friends can also register their ordinary phone numbers with a directory service like E164.org and if somebody with an appropriately configured IP-PBX calls that number, the call would not pass over the PSTN but over the internet via your Asterisk server to the owner of that number.
All this is not very difficult to do and you don't need a very powerful box either. So, all I can say is: Go for it!
Parent
Re:Maybe a dumb question... (Score:2)
Re:Bad experience with broadvoice & asterisk (Score:2)
You meant to post to this story: (Score:2)
Wrong Story! You meant to post to this story: Your Rights Online: Orrin Hatch to Lead Senate Panel on Copyright, Patents.
Yes, he is another example of U.S. government corruption.
For more on that subject: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government [futurepower.org].