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Using BroadVoice with Asterisk How-To 123

Posted by timothy 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."
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Using BroadVoice with Asterisk How-To More

Using BroadVoice with Asterisk How-To

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  • Yes, fine... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ramblin billy ( 856838 ) <defaultaddy@yahoo.com> on Sunday March 20, 2005 @05:43AM (#11989904)
    but how long until the phone company - who owns the backbone somewhere up the line, puts its foot down?

    billy - remembering DSL

    • Re:Yes, fine... (Score:2, Informative)

      by md8mart ( 869095 )
      TeliaSonera [teliasonera.com], old state monopoly operator in Sweden and Finland, plans for a large IP-based network (article in swedish) [www.idg.se] with an "IP jack" installed in every home within 2 years, replacing the phone jack.
      • That's the point: if TeliaSonera is now in the VoIP biz, won't they compete with the Asterisk network, blocking ports, lowering QoS, and making the telco attack on DSL look like "playing fair"?

  • What is asterix? (Score:5, Informative)

    by sandstorming ( 850026 ) <johnsee@sLAPLACE ... m minus math_god> on Sunday March 20, 2005 @05:45AM (#11989906)
    What Is Asterisk?

    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.
    • It may seem a little paranoid, but I really believe we should take care not to use the incorrect name "Asterix" when referring to Asterisk.

      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
      • Well, someone seems to think this is funny, I don't. Whoever believes this is a joke, please check out the site below ...

        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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 20, 2005 @05:52AM (#11989921)
    I had BroadVoice for two months.

    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.
    • Call quality varied from good to extremely poor. Your mileage may vary

      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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 20, 2005 @07:37AM (#11990109)
      I agree, very poor support, and generally poor service. Great price is the only plus.

      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.
      • smae issues... same response from broadvoice... no suport and imposable to cancel
      • Got to agree with some of this.

        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

    • 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!

      • I don't think the pricing is good at all for voice pulse. It's basically $30 for 1000 minutes PLUS $7.99/month for a number PLUS the cost of your data connection(mostly likely @ $30/month. My Verizon cell phone is 1000 minutes for $60 plus unlimited long distance at nite and during weekends . ( did i mention it was wireless?) Doesn't sound like a cost saving to me.
        • You are confusing Voicepulse (residential) with Voicepulse Connect.

          The former has monthly plans, the latter is specifically for people/companies who run their own Asterisk servers and it does not have monthly plans.

    • 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.

      Although I agree that their service is spotty depending on the type of broadband service you have, my experience with customer service was actually good with BV. I guess YMMV. All I did was fire off an email and they replied within the next day to cancel my service AND credited me back the f

  • ...and for those in business... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alistair Cunningham ( 20266 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @05:58AM (#11989935)

    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]

  • This may seem a bit naive but if someone has this setup at home, what features do they actually use? I mean stuff like three way calling / voice mail etc are already provided with most if not telephone lines. I'd love to tinker with it but would love to hear opinions on why an average home would want this?

    • Re:Benefit for the average home? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by timthorn ( 690924 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @06:50AM (#11990036)
      I'm in the UK. I call the US a lot, from home or from my mobile. Asterisk allows me to telephone a UK number from my mobile, thus using my free talk time, but have the call routed to the US over IP. I can also use the server to deliver my home voicemail to my work email.

      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...

      • Hmm.. interesting. You could apply the same to the room lights :)

        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:5, Informative)

      by edudspg ( 784007 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @09:02AM (#11990351)

      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.

    • Re:Benefit for the average home? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The biggest one I see is that it's cheap to have an unlimited VoIP account which allows multiple calls. And you can add a second DID (unlimited incoming) for dirt cheap ($5 or so).

      Now why would a home want this? Daughter can talk on the phone all night long to her BF and you can still make calls. BF can call at all hours of the night and either by using a second DID or by using Caller ID matching - it only rings her phone.

      Those are the biggest advantages I see, beyond the obvious one -- cost. If you make

    • You might enjoy an article written by Heison Chak for the February edition of ;login: [usenix.org]

      The article is only available in .pdf form; the link is halfway down the page. Heison describes how he uses his home implemenation of Asterisk.

      Beforegoing to bed, I dial ext. 100 from any phone in the house to request a wake-up call, and the voice of Allison Smith (Allison is the voice of Asterisk) prompts me for the desired time. At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Asterisk called the auto-answer extension of my IP phone i

    • This may seem a bit naive but if someone has this setup at home, what features do they actually use? I mean stuff like three way calling / voice mail etc are already provided with most if not telephone lines. I'd love to tinker with it but would love to hear opinions on why an average home would want this?

      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)

    by Wil ( 7019 ) <slashdot@t[ ]tissues.net ['rus' in gap]> on Sunday March 20, 2005 @06:28AM (#11989997) Homepage
    "My sister's in Italy. My parents are in Florida. My brother's in New York. I'm in Maryland. We need a cheaper way to talk securely..."

    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)

      by mamladm ( 867366 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @07:20AM (#11990084) Homepage
      "I'm the only one in the family running Linux ..."

      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.

    • Re:Sounds like a vonage commercial (Score:5, Funny)

      by LinuxHam ( 52232 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @07:43AM (#11990120) Homepage Journal
      "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..."

      Hey Wil, did you notice you're the most annoying sound in the world?

      j/k :)
    • A number of VOIP providers offer 1-800 numbers at rates that are only slightly higher then the regular per minute rate. It may be more economical then several local numbers.

      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.
    • So far, the whole asterisk project is in the toy stage, but Skype is going strong already. You want to make sure it's not the other way round
    • Skype seems to be a pretty decent system, and it uses good codecs, but unfortunately it's a closed proprietary system, so you won't be able to hook up your own PBX to it unless they come out with a PBX feature, or unless you want to relay it through a conventional phone line. They are adding "Skype In", which will let people make incoming calls from POTS lines, so at least the service is becoming more useful.
      • ... and that is ILBC, which you can have with any open source telephony solution, too.

        as codecs go, there is no such thing as a good codec per se, it depends on the circumstances. Some codecs are good in some circumstances, some other codecs are good in some other circumstances. That's why most telephony solutions negotiate codecs depending on the quality of the connection when they connect with each other.

        Skype is inferior in this respect because it can't adjust to a more suitable codec in the event that

  • BroadVoice has been excellent. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @06:53AM (#11990043) Homepage

    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
    PING -n 100 google.com
    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.
    • I've had problems where asterisk wouldn't register, and of course when that happens, I can't call them, unless I use a different provider, and hold times have been over an hour. And even after getting someone on the phone, they've not been helpful, and it's taken a long time to fix the problem. And we can't afford this since it's our office's main phone line.

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 20, 2005 @06:59AM (#11990050)
    Not sure how applicable Asterix is to the home user but it has just saved me a great deal of money. I own a medium sized enterprise in Melbourne, Australia and up until 2 months I was running a "key system" - small PBX - until it went on the blink. The vendor quoted me $4000 to replace the failed parts. Unfortunatly for the vendor I know a damm good IT consultant (actually he's worth a plug, his name is David Ankers) who after much persuasion convinced me to go with Asterix and broadvoice.

    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.
    • (apparently it isn't that friendly)

      Hey - have you ever tried to configure the Meridian (Nortel) PBX? I cannot believe that any other system is more unfriendly that it's command line interface. The GUI isn't much better either.

      My theory is that any software PBX must be easier than proprietary systems as it's coming from the computer world (which I understand) compared to the telecoms worlds (which has its own language).

      Rob.

  • Broadvoice rocks, Skype is hype (Score:3, Insightful)

    by glomph ( 2644 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @07:04AM (#11990058) Homepage Journal
    Having a half-decent (as long as you don't need customer service) outfit be completely compatible with Asterisk (or ANY OTHER SIP-capable client) is fantastic. Broadvoice has been great. You may also want to check out sipphone.com, which is also an open provider. Once you have one or more good providers hooked into your Asterisk box, you virtually ARE a telco.

    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.

  • Asterix as a teaching tool (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I teach in a small community college and would love to create meaningful labs/problems/projects to teach telco protocols. I realize Asterix does VoIP but it looks to me like it may also be able to communicate directly with a telco switch rather than just through a line card. Very exciting.

    Could Asterix + minimal equipment be used to simulate two switches talking to each other?

    How would you use this as a teaching tool?
  • Yes... shame on me I read the article...:

    Before we get started I want to point out that the agreement with BroadVoice gives you one concurrent connection per account. Although you may be actually able to make concurrent connections (multiple simultanious phone calls) you might incur an extra service charge for the extra connections.

    I browsed the broadvoice site and found no mention about this, which are these costs?

    any idea?

  • Coolest stuff I've seen in a while (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DanielMarkham ( 765899 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @07:43AM (#11990119) Homepage
    Perhaps since WiFi.

    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?
    • With the help of Cygwin, a Unix compatibility API layer for Windows, you can now run Asterisk on Windows. Keep in mind though that this has only been a very recent development, so it is probably less mature than Asterisk on other platforms such as Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Solaris.

      There is also OpenPBX from Voicetronix, a Perl based PBX which runs on Windows, but it doesn't have the IP capabilities Asterisk has.

      The sharing of landlines between Asterisk users is already happening on a community basis. It's

  • scary boss (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by octalgirl ( 580949 )
    I don't know how this guy does it, who he knows, or how he keeps managing to BS his way into all of these things. Every bill he has attempted to pass has been so infantile in tech knowledge, so utterly chilling, and yet he just manages to do it again and again. And he doesn't even bother to learn, he just twists the words until they meet his agenda. He is like some scary Dilbert boss of the entertainment world, carelessly waving his laser pointer in everyone's eye. But for as much as he screws up (in th

  • For the people that just want to try things out on the cheap, there is no reason to sign up with a company that charges a setup fee and/or a high monthly fee. Several voip players have no setup or monthly fees and a relatively cheap 2cents/minute. In most cases thats comes out much cheaper that the places that sell you "unlimited" service for $20/mo - $40/mo and then get mad at you if you use over 1000minutes per month. One example of a provider that makes it painless to try out voip is gafachi [gafachi.com].

    Here is

  • This is news? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Sunday March 20, 2005 @08:38AM (#11990263) Homepage
    This has been on Broadvoice' own website for months. There's also a good guide on voip-info.org.

    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)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Sunday March 20, 2005 @08:57AM (#11990329) Homepage
      Hmm just RTFA. It's just a blog, and he's copy/pasted from voip-info.org *including* all the errors!!!

      The minimum required in sip.conf is actually a lot less than posted:
      register => <phone number>:<sip password>@sip.broadvoice.com

      [broadvoice]
      type =peer
      host=sip.broadvoice.com
      fromdomain=sip.bro advoice.com
      fromuser=<phone number>
      username=<phone number>
      authuser=<phone number>
      secret=<sip password>
      canreinvite=no
      dtmfmode=inband
      insecu re=very
      You might also have to limit the protocols to ulaw/alaw (disallow=all,allow=ulaw,allow=alaw).
      • The base information on voip-info as well as BroadVoice's own website do not work anymore. There are a few tweaks to make it work properly now.

    • Never mind ... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mamladm ( 867366 )
      let's just say that any publicity for Asterisk is good news, belated or not ;)
  • I'm not especially interested in using VOIP - I make very few outgoing calls... I seriously doubt that I'd find any cost saving myself. I would, however really like a full-featured voice mail system... I do want to be able to tailor responses depending upon which number is calling. For example I'd like all "number withheld" callers to only be able to leave voice messages... after a brief automated warning that I do not accept unsolicited commercial calls. I'd like callers with valid caller id to ring the

    • 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)

      by mamladm ( 867366 ) on Sunday March 20, 2005 @09:25AM (#11990439) Homepage
      Yes, Asterisk is an excellent tool for what you want to do.

      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.
  • Its biggest strength is its weakness: there are literally a bazillion different options for damn near everything. The good news is that with a minimum of effort you can have a fully-functioning phone system for almost nothing. We had to buy a $40 "modem" card (I don't know what the difference is between that thing and a "hardware" modem but it works so I don't care) and that was it.

    We only have 1 phone line for our business - (small IT company, mostly cell calls) but we wanted to have voice mail boxes f
  • * Service was unavailable a lot * Dropped calls * Terrible customer service--can't get a hold of them * They changed their config, then suspended my service because I didn't change mine. THEN they continued to bill me for it! I had to dispute one of the charges, they would not refund it even though they denied me service! I use a phone line with an unlimited dial plan for $25/mo. Sure, it's not as slick technology wise, but it always works, and Cox even knows how to spell customer service!
  • I notice broadvoice has a 9.95 rate for just in state.

    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?
  • So basically this is this exact post : http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/06/194 5210&tid=126&tid=218 [slashdot.org]

    Just that the guides on a new server...right?

    • Judging by the amount of comments this article has received so far, it would seem that there was enough interest to justify it showing up even if it wasn't all that "new" as you say.

      Also, most of the publicity Skype is getting is more or less repetition, not always, but many times it is. So, shouldn't we be happy that an open source telephony & VOIP project like Asterisk gets it's share of free publicity every now and then?

      Remember the saying "Any news is good news" ;)
  • I'm using http://connect.voicepulse.com/ VoicePlus Connect! For devs/etc. 4 incoming/4 outgoing simultaneous, 7.95/local DID, free incoming minutes, per minute charges, 2.59/min, money in your acct never expires. Great for testing, works for simultaneous ring, works great with asterisk, and sound quality is great(even better if you QoS it).

    • You might want to mention that it is 2.59 CENTS/min not dollars like it looks in the post. I also use Voicepulse connect and think it's a great service.
    • Teliax offers local DIDs for 5.00, and
      charges .029 for toll-free incoming.

      Voipjet.com offers outgoing US for .013.

      I use nufone.net because of low latency (for me,
      since I'm close to Chicago) and the ability to
      pre-pay via paypal. I do not like convincing my
      CC company to stop recurring charges when I cancel
      a service.
      • Sweet. =) Thanks for the reference.

        I like the quality of Voicepulse, I looked at TelIax but completely missed this part:
        Unlimited Channels/Calls

        Heck yeah. =) I like the free incoming from Voicepulse.

        Voipjet just didn't interest me, the free test is good but I can't figure out the rest of the site at all.

        Nufone isn't accepting new customers at this time. =/

        Thx for the links though, I'm always on the lookout for new stuff. =)
        • I haven't tried Teliax.

          Voipjet is mainly of interest due to their very low termination charges, and IAX2 support. I've not yet seen anyone who could touch them for low-cost outgoing calls.

          Stanaphone offers free unlimited incoming, with
          free New York state DIDs. Teliax had the lowest cost and widest coverage for local DIDs that I've seen so far. If they took paypal, I would have signed up with them.

          I do not use credit cards for online purchases or recurring charges.

      • Have you used Teliax?

        Do they offer free incoming calls on their local DIDs or just unlimited channels?

        What is the deal with the $0.02 connection charge they talk about on their website?

        Are you happy with the quality?

        I'd really appreciate it if you have that information. I'm looking to replace my landline and I'm trying to choose between a few different options. :)

  • I had signed up with broadvoice since they are the only ones i could find who had a BYOD(Bring Your Own Device) plan. Fisr of all the configuration on their webiste did not get anything to work. After tinkering around a little bit I could make outgoing calls. Serveral emails to their tech support and half-an-hour to an hour holds on the phone did not provide any clue. Then two or three days later the good people on the asterisk IRC gave me some help with which I was able to recieve incoming calls. All worke
  • Ok, can somebody give a high level overview of why someone would want to run their on PBX? Is there some savings over just getting a VOIP phone/service? Is it simply so you can gain greater control over voicemail, and other options, etc.? This seems like a cool project, but I'm not sure what the point is.
    • It is both savings _and_ greater control. Which one of those two is more predominant for you depends on the way you are using the telephone.

      Often people get interested mostly for the savings potential at first and only learn to appreciate the additional benefits once they got to use them for a while.

      As far as savings go, you may ask how can Asterisk save more money than just another VOIP adapter or IP telephone that in the end may connect to the very same service?

      The difference is that Asterisk can conne

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