Still here...

 

Hello everyone,

Just a very quick note to let you all know that I haven't fallen off the face of the earth...

I promise more stuff in the days to come, and will also promise information concerning a new version of my click-to-call script fairly soon. Sorry, that's the best I can do at this point...

I'm considering setting up a public Google Calendar to visually justify my lack of attention to VoipJots lately!

Regards,

Olin

SipX@Home

 

Looking through the sipx wiki, I stumbled across this article about SipX@Home. I don't recall noticing it earlier, so I'm not sure just how new of an article it is, but looks interesting. SipX has just about all the features you can want with a home/SMB phone system. I have never set one up in a production environment, but I have played with it. I can say it comes with a very nice interface to use for configuring the system. There is also a link at the end of this article that talks about interconnecting a SipX box with an asterisk box. I only glanced through it, but it also looks interesting.
This site hosts a virtual machine of SipX 3.0 you can read about and download here in order to get your feet wet.

Asterisk@Home Click-To-Call Application Ideas

 

Hi Everyone,

First off, let me apologize for not posting in awhile. There's another project I've been working on that has unfortunately been taking up all of my available free time...

There's been a lot of good suggestions on ways to improve my initial Click-to-Call script. There also seems to be a lot of interest in the Click-to-Call functionality, and I'm sure we can all see the many uses and advantages of developing something that seamlessly integrates with AAH/Asterisk, is feature-rich, secure, and easy to setup. This being said, I'd like to propose something to all who are interested.

Let's put our heads together (similar to the way we have been with comments) and come up with the requirements of an ultimate click-to-call application. Something that is full-featured, easy to setup on an asterisk or aah box, and configurable; easy for the user to modify the way the application works in order to accommodate their needs.

Some of the requirements already mentioned:
1. Client-server architecture
2. Logging
3. If the call is not received by the asterisk extension, call the number anyway and play a message.
4. Limiting access to only certain IPs
5. Email notifications.

Requirements I'd like to see:

1. Management web interface to specify behavior rules based on weekday/weekend, day time and night time hours.
2. Calling a ring group instead of just a single internal extension - the first extension that answers completes the call to the remote number.

If there is enough interest, and we have a strong set of requirements put together, I'll begin developing this. If others wish to help with the development, please let me know (PHP is not my forte, so it will take me longer to develop than someone who is more familiar with php). Maybe there’s enough interest in this to start a sourceforge project? Just throwing ideas around here…

So please, leave your comments on what you would like to see in a click-to-call application, your feedback on how such an application could/should be developed, etc.

For those of you who have already made some changes to the initial script, I'm glad you found it useful, as that was the intention. And to answer one question that was asked, I don't have any problems with you changing the script, and it will not violate any licensing terms. If you do something that you feel could help others though, it would be good (though not required) of you to give us an update on what you did and why it was beneficial to you.

If someone wants to email me directly about this, send to ohamilton{at}voipjots{dot}com

Thanks, Everyone.
Olin

Click-to-Call with your Asterisk@Home Box

 

It seems everyone is talking about Click-to-Call functionality these days. Google has announced they are going to do it, EBay will be doing it before too long, and there are other websites out there that I've recently noticed are offering this service.

Click-to-Call seems like it would be a complicated task to setup; enabling a website visitor to click a button to allow them to submit their phone number, and receive a call from someone a few seconds later, with no long distance charges for the visitor.
If you have an AAH or Asterisk box, it really is not that difficult to add such a feature to your website. A very simple PHP page hosted either on your AAH box, or another PHP-capable web server (that has TCP connectivity to your AAH/Asterisk box) is all you need. Last night I developed such a script, and though it is rather simple, it's effective. I plan on doing more with it later, but thought I'd share it will all of you so that you can begin playing with it, or customizing it yourself. This script was written for AAH, so it probably will not work with a regular Asterisk box without some modifications, or even a heavily customized AAH box. However, it's very straight-forward, and should not be hard to debug if you have problems with it.

To the expert PHP'ers out there, this was my first attempt at doing anything with PHP (I'm an ASP guy), so have pity on me!:)

Ok, here it goes.

I'm going to be explaining how to set this script up on an AAH box, but as I said before, it should work on any PHP server that can communicate with your AAH/Asterisk box. Also, I have only tested this on AAH 2.4, so I don't make any guarantees that it works on anything else. In fact, I don't make any guarantees that it works on any AAH 2.4 box besides my own, though it should. :) While I'm at it, I may as well also mention that if you decide to use this script, you do so at your own risk.

Step 1:

Login to your AAH box and enter these commands:

cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.voipjots.com/scripts/click-to-call.zip
unzip click-to-call.zip
mv click-to-call.php /var/www/html/click-to-call.php
rm click-to-call.zip

Step 2:
Now we have to slightly edit the script to get it to work for you.

cd /var/www/html
nano -w click-to-call.php

For a typical AAH box, you should only need to edit one line in the script. Change the line:

$strChannel = "IAX2/250";

to reflect one of your extensions. In my case, I am using my Idefisk IAX2 softphone that has an extension number of 250. For instance, if you have a SIP soft/hard phone that has an extension number of 1234, you would change this line to:

$strChannel = "SIP/1234";

Ok, at this point, we should have everything properly configure on our AAH box. Now we can try it!

Step 3:

In a web browser, go to http://my-aah-ip-address/click-to-call.php

You should see this:




While near the soft/hard phone belonging to the extension you specified above, enter a valid 11 digit phone number, and click on the Call Us! button.

The soft/hard phone should begin ringing, showing "Web Call " as the caller id. When you answer the call, you will briefly hear... nothing (something I'm going to be working on in the near future), but after a few seconds, you will hear ringing as it calls the number that was entered on the web page.

The click-to-call web page should now be this:




This script is very simple, and probably not best hosted on your aah box, but on another web server that hosts the site you would want to add click-to-call functionality to. However, I hope that this provides a good demonstration as to exactly how simple it is to implement click-to-call with AAH, and leave it to you and your creativity on exactly how you wish to offer this feature. The sky's the limit, really.

I hope this has been helpful to someone. If you have any ideas on how to improve the script, please let me know by leaving your comments. If you make significant improvements to the script, I would appreciate it if you shared them with all of us.

Enjoy!
Olin

VoIP Comes to the Rescue of 3G, with Skype already on the bandwagon

 

Going hand-in-hand with my previous post, this article talks about how VoIP is likely to help the 3G mobile operators. 3G is a relatively high-bandwidth mobile technology that has not yet taken off as well as many would have liked because of it's cost. However, with the increase of VoIP users desiring to use VoIP on their smart-phones and PDAs, 3G (since it provides the bandwidth needed for VoIP) could become more popular, making the service costs for it drop by increasing its subscriber count. The article also mentions that Skype has seen the potential in this and has already signed an agreement with Hutchison 3 Group to allow their software to function as a softphone on Hutchison 3G devices. Please click the link above to read the entire article.

Mobile phone service not doomed by VoIP

 

There has been a lot of talk lately about all the Wi-Fi/VoIP capable mobile phones that are emerging into the market recently. I hadn't considered any of this news-worthy enough to post here, because most of these articles talked about how these phones are going to eliminate traditional mobile phone services, which I don't see as being the case. I do agree that having a wireless capable phone with softphone software as a huge feature, but not as a feature that's going to totally replace mobile phone service. At least not until many large metropolitan areas are covered with Wi-Fi mesh networks that are always available, or as this article mentions, it is done using 3G technology. People need their mobile phones everywhere, not just when a wireless network is available. This article, although not too terribly informative, is the first I've seen talk about these phones (specifically Microsoft's) and also about the fact that they don't pose a huge threat to mobile carriers. Please click the link above to read.

Idefisk IAX2 Softphone

 

The Asterisk Guru has had this IAX2 softphone available for awhile now, but in case you may not have heard of it yet, allow me to present it to you.
I've used this softphone with my Asterisk PBX for a few months now, and like it. It's very simple to configure, and works reliably. If you have a static IP and can port-forward the specified IAX2 port through your router to you asterisk box, you can use this phone anywhere you have an internet connection. This of course is not a SIP softphone, and only works with the native asterisk protocol, IAX2.

Running Asterisk on a Wireless Router

 

Here's an interesting article on how to configure and run Asterisk on OpenWrt running on a wireless router. Probably not a good solution for a production environment, but would still be something fun to play with, if you have the time. Click the link above to read the article.

Better quality VoIP calls over SSL VPN connections

 

Those of us familiar with networking realize that this makes perfect sense, but this is still a very interesting article concerning an experiment on VoIP call quality over SSL VPN connections at different speeds. This is a timely experiment considering how much importance (and rightly so) is being put on the security of VoIP networks lately. Please click the link above to read.
On a side note, in my opinion this is a huge, certain-to-be-lucrative, market that has barely been touched: producing software and hardware devices that aid in securing VoIP applications and networks. This topic is going to grow steadily in the next year or two, and just as we now have data network security experts/consultants, we are also going to have VoIP network security experts and consultants that businesses are going to begin to rely on in the design, execution, and maintenance of their VoIP systems.

The cost-saving potential of VoIP

 

Here's a good write-up about the cost-saving potential of VoIP by the Chicago Tribune. The general gist of the article is basically that if a person requires high-speed internet service, then VoIP is a no-brainer. This is especially true for small businesses. Click here to read more. However, I have been hearing rumors that VoIP calls are not going to be cheap/free for very much longer... More on that as I come across it.