Industry-Standard VOIP Phone Using All Free Software

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

[Fantanicity]

SIP is an open protocol [isi.edu], so what is special about this?

Re:SIP

[Wesley Felter]

Most of the SIP phones I've seen (like the Cisco and Pingtel ones mentioned in the article) cost as much as a low-end PC, so maybe open source SIP software can help to bring down the cost of SIP phones in the future.

And there's also the hack value. :-)

Re:How do I use one of these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that supports IP which mean ethernet fiber including the internet. It is really not much different than streaming video but you can't take advantage of buffering and must be real time so it is UDP and it does an unrealable packet sequencing on top of UDP which is able to tolerate the loss aof a few packets here and there.

Open source IP PBX software

[Wesley Felter]

Asterisk [asteriskpbx.com]

VOCAL [vovida.org]

Re:What about SNOM?

[DragonWyatt]

...is there plugin or module of some sort included for encryption? If not, is it easy to tunnel through ssh? It seems to me that a VoIP telephone directory could also serve the public key (or fingerprint at least).
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

[jmv]

(shameless plug) Take a look at Speex, an open-source, patent-free speech codec (Speex is to speech what Vorbis is to music). Speex should soon be available in Linphone too!

VoIP on Linux available for several years

[Ming The Mad]

VoIP using only Open Source isn't new, nor is interoperability with Cisco equipment, nor is SIP, or even embedded VoIP using Linux.

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

[Sycraft-fu]

Cox (tha cable company) seems to disagree with you. They receantly told us (as in the people I work with) that they'd installed their las PBX, they were going all VoIP now.

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.