Okay,
You can go a few ways:
1) Call Jim Rhodes at Rhino Equipment and buy one of his pre-engineered
hardware drop and dial systems (Trixbox I believe).
2) Build your own:
Let's spec this out to get good quality VOIP with good equipment:
First, you can end up paying a good deal for lines from the phone company. You
want to judge your expansion accordingly and order T1/ISDN or fractional frame
cards instead of phone line cards (referred to as FX0 cards) and circuits from
the telco. [Note, ordering the lines can be tricky - be sure to completely
spec and research your project].
FAST Processor and sufficient memory with no less than RAID 1 (hardware
preferred) for read/write speed.
FX0 cards come in 4 line cards which gives us the 2 in and 2 out available from
Digium or Rhino Equipment.
I also would add a nice IAX2 or SIP trunk defined via source and destination to
the outbound provider also.
Installing the cards, since they are PCI cards, can become and IRQ issue, some
motherboards are more efficient with FX0 and Digium cards, see voip-info.org
and Digium sources. Also, be prepared to do some PCI BIOS work to ensure that
one IRQ is not kicking off something or power management causing the warbling
sound as the ethernet card wakes on lan.
The last peice that can be especially problematic is your VOIP handset or
softphones. You can buy low end ATA's like Grandsteam that you plug a handset
into (even cordless ones will work here), or get nice VOIP handsets of all
quality.
The last thing to consider is your bandwidth and QoS network. If you have
10baseT network cards, no switch and extensive bottlenecks your voice quality
will suffer before ever getting to the far side of the connection. So,
obviously good downstream and upsteam is optimal. As you can see you would
best get a nice T1 or ISDN with 1/2 of the circuits applied to data and the
other 1/2 to voice (there are some pros and cons industry wide) with 1000baseT
throughout so that would entail an additional splitter or channel bank.
By this time you might have just bought a Cisco Digital T1 packet voice network
module.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps259/product_data_sheet09186a0080194e20.html
To play with Voip, all you really need is a computer. I built a home based
Trixbox on a 2.0Ghz Fry's barebones system I built in 1998 custom that worked
fine. My SIP trunk was axvoice.com and my VOIP phones were soft and a
Grandsteam ATA plugged into a free analog phone.
It worked. The quality was acceptable enough to run with full recording on. I
could enhance the recordings to separate out portions of the analog signal and
enhance. Everyone could hear me better than my BlackBerry at times. It rang
whatever line I wanted including my cell phone (with unlimited calls to home, I
could then grab and outside line and dial/talk for free) and it did all this
over cox cable, but it took me (with VOIP and Linux experience) about 10 hours
to build and setup as well as about 1 hour to maintain.
If you are seriously interested in having assistance for this solution and want
rates contact me offlist.
I am confident that anyone on this list is capable of building one of these
systems, given time and accessing the various VOIP resources.
www.Obnosis.com | http://wiki.obnosis.com | http://hackfest.obnosis.com
(503)754-4452
PLUG HACKFESTS - http://uat.edu Second Saturday of Each Month Noon - 3PM
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:07:37 -0800
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: GrandCentral via Asterisk
To: [email protected]
Okay, all this sounds really cool. What would it cost a small business to set
one of these up?
Say a simple 2 inbound lines, 2 outbound lines, and a fax. 3 or 4 simple
handsets (What kind of handsets do you use?) cost?
Is this strictly VOIP? VOIP has shown to have lower quality the few times I
have been exposed to it.
My point of reference is 1992 or 1993 when one would buy an ATT or one of the
many other small business phone switches for maybe $3,000 - $5,000.
Also someone mentioned buying a trunk. What is the number of lines?
I get the feeling I'm looking at this through 15 year old technology and things
have changes significantly. For instance I worked at a place that had a trunk
of about 100 lines as I recall.
------------------------
Keith Smith
--- On Tue, 1/20/09, Lisa Kachold <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Lisa Kachold <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: GrandCentral via Asterisk
To: [email protected]
Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 9:15 AM
Yes, I agree with [email protected]:
I have been a Stromberg Carlson Central Office DCO Technician, Senior
Voice/Data Network Analyst for Nike, VOIP Engineer for AffinityVoipTelecom.com
and Support Engineer Manager for RhinoEquipment.com
Asterisk can do a great deal all based on the configuration files in
/etc/asterisk.
Fonality does not have deep technical support, rather providing cost based
services and failing to fix breakage.
Since there are so many different applications of Asterisk, Trixbox, FreePBX
this is a good place for profit for the entrepreneur.
Compiled sources is a better solution, obviously.
FreePBX is the magic behind the solution allowing a GUI to setup most of the
user applications, testing and CMS.
All asterisk VOIP products can be a huge security issue, but the spyware was
especially shameful.
This solution with PBXInAFlash is an EASY solution that will be able to provide
a
fine dialaround, voicemail, record all calls, Unlimited calls to home (from
Cell provider) for dial around to get unlimited cell minutes from SIP trunk
line, CMS, click to fax from Windows, etc.
You can configure your autoattendant, provide even an outside line with a
password, get a nice SIP signature for your email. Call sip people, put a few
VOIP Clients on your linux boxes and a nice hunt group (try grandstream ATA in
bathroom, then call my Linux desktop, then my laptop. then my office phone,
finally my cell phone) for any incoming call. You can setup a DialAVOIP
Technician line? DialAClownJoke would be nice on the main menu? Setup record
all calls, then GabCast call to Cox Cable, or your Senator, or Bank in comedic
ways?
www.Obnosis.com | http://wiki.obnosis.com | http://hackfest.obnosis.com
(503)754-4452
PLUG HACKFESTS - http://uat.edu Second Saturday of Each Month Noon -
3PM
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:35:07 -0700
Subject: Re: GrandCentral via Asterisk
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
The main reason I recommend PBXInAFlash over Trixbox is that
1. After the famous root exploit pre-installed spyware incident I don't trust
Fonality.
2. They have a long history of delivering broken installs but have been getting
better in the last year or so.
3. They say they're an open source project but don't really act like one.
4. Trixbox is RPM based , and PBXInAFlash uses Centos 5 but compiles all of the
asterisk components from source (which is what you have to do most of the time
to fix Trixbox).
5. Unlike a lot of other distributions PBXInAFlash doesn't try to hide that
FreePBX is doing all of he real magic that those distributions taking credit
for.
6. PBXInAFlash works reliably and doesn't have everything under the sun thrown
in that you don't need.
That said, Kerry Garrison's tutorials are pretty good.
In either case if you want to learn start here:
http://dumbme.mbit.com.au/
http://dumbme.mbit.com.au/piaf/piaf_without_tears.pdf
http://dumbme.mbit.com.au/trixbox2/trixbox2_without_tears.pdf
JD--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC
[email protected]
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com
Emo Philips - "I was sleeping the other night, alone, thanks to the
exterminator."
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 10:01 PM, Lisa Kachold <[email protected]> wrote:
Yea Howdy!
Trixbox ala Kerry Garrison is a really easy PBX setup (complete with everything
you need for an AutoAttendant, Voicemail, Fax, CMS, dial around and through
apps) that installs from an ISO: http://www.trixbox.org/downloads
Kerry Garrison offers easy to follow videos here: asterisktutorials.com -
search for trixbox.
Simple setup How-Tos exist at voip-info.org
Course you can get a fine PSTN SIP trunk from axvoice.com for $9.99 a month or
buy FX0 cards for a phone line (or lines).
You can buy a drop and dial asterisk based configuration from Jim Rhodes over
at Rhinoequipment.com.
I think my name is still on some of the bash scripts for the Trixbox 2.0
release from contributions?
www.Obnosis.com | http://wiki.obnosis.com | http://hackfest.obnosis.com
(503)754-4452
PLUG HACKFESTS - http://uat.edu Second Saturday of Each Month Noon - 3PM
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:19:24 -0700
Subject: Re: GrandCentral via Asterisk
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Asterisk is the engine that enables pstn/voip connectivity (think linux kernel).
Asterisk when bundled with other open source software can do all the things
GrandCentral does and more provided you give it the connectivity it needs to do
so (PSTN or voip). A good place to start is with PBXInAFlash (pbxinaflash.org).
JD--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC
[email protected]
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com
Katharine Hepburn - "Death will be a great relief. No more interviews."
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Kurt Granroth
<[email protected]> wrote:
I know that there are some people on this list that use Asterisk a
decent bit. Those that do... are you familiar with GrandCentral? If
so, how do they compare?
http://www.grandcentral.com/home/features
I really like the control that something like GrandCentral gives you.
The ability to choose where you receive a call (home, cell, work, etc)
based on who is calling or when they are calling is a killer feature for me.
Alas, there are just too many potential gotchas with that service to
really commit to it other than as a play-thing (or as a number passed
out freely to businesses and warranty cards and the like). What I would
like is that kind of control... but in a way that *I* control it all!
So no calls being routed through a 3rd party server; no voicemails
stored on their server; no need to upload all of my contacts to a search
company; etc.
Asterisk seems like it might be able to do all that... but who can tell?
Their site is horribly disorganized and when you do find a "feature"
page, they spend all their time in an acronym frenzy.
So... does anybody know?
Kurt
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