Industry-Standard VOIP Phone Using All Free Software 138
Ralf Ackermann writes: "Voice over IP on a HardPhone running Linux and
just using Open Source software became real. We have sucessfully installed and tested (interoperability with Cisco
7960 as well as Pingtel xPressa in an environment with a partysip SIP registrar and proxy) the linphone SIP phone on a StrongARM based
TuxScreen.
Here is the link describing the steps for others
to use the setup as well: TuxScreen running SIP. All the infos for setting up a comparable installation can be found on the
URL, please also feel free to ask or drop opinions. Many thanks to the linphone developers as well as to my student Florian
Winterstein (for working on a console linphonec version). The setup (on a StrongARM system) is well suited for PDA (iPAQ) or
wearable environments as well."
SIP (Score:2, Informative)
Re:SIP (Score:3, Informative)
And there's also the hack value.
Re:How do I use one of these? (Score:1, Informative)
Open source IP PBX software (Score:3, Informative)
VOCAL [vovida.org]
Re:What about SNOM? (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing that I know of, but that's an awesome idea. It would probably require a new extension (well, codec).
The way we've solved that problem to date is with VPNs, which incidentally solve other problems, such as QOS.
Open-source speech coding (Score:5, Informative)
VoIP on Linux available for several years (Score:2, Informative)
The OpenH323 Project (http://www.openh323.org) has had a H.323 protocol stack availble since 1999. This stack works with Cisco gear and most other commercial H.323 products, and works on Linux, *BSD, Windows and other systems.
A full GUI Linux client using this stack can be found at http://www.gnomemeeting.org.
There is also a SIP stack available as part of the OPAL Project available from the same site. Others are also available (see http://www.vovida.org) for one example.
Lots of companies (including my own) have been doing "real" VoIP using Open Source for years.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of OpenH323)
Re:FYI (Score:3, Informative)
End users will start wanting VoIP too. For one thing other providers, like cable companies, will be able to offer it where they can't offer PSTN service. As with all competition, this should give lower prices and more features.
Speaking of features, VoIP has plenty of cool ones. I really like the Cisco phones (other probably have it too, they are jsut what we tried) ability to be logged in to. You log into a phone, it acquires your number and all your preferences.
However where it will probably be the biggest winner is for bussinesses. Whenever we setup a remote site they have to have enough T1s to cover all the phone lines they need plus T1s for data. With VoIP, we could elimante a bunch of those since with PSTN you have to have a B channel for every phoneline and with VoIP you need only enough bandwidth to cover your peak line usage. These palces never hit 100% usage and probably rarely hit even 30%, hence all that overhead can be eliminated. It also would simply things on our cable plan. We'd only need fibre to a building, then all vocie and data would run over that.
Personally I think that VoIP is sort of a slow inevitability. IT won't happen overnight, but it makes so much ecenomic sense that we'll migrate totally to it eventually.