Bend in the Weather (Entries tagged as voip)

Mobile Internet for the entire household and universal mobile phone chargers

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:27:00 +1100

Huawei, the Chinese company that ruffled a number of Cisco feathers have been pushing out a number of wireless 3G devices for wireless broadband for some years. You can find the Huawei devices like the E220 and E169 available from several Australian telcos for 'mobile Internet'.

I personally own a E169 on a Optus Pre-Paid Mobile broadband connection as a 'backup' for when my ADSL connection goes down.

This week at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona Spain, Huawei has announced the release of i-Mo; a combined 3G wireless modem and Wifi router unit. This means one connection can now support multiple people.

Many people are already dropping a dedicated telephone line and the cost of ongoing line rental, such a device is certainly only going to grow this market more, as it can now move from a single user device to a household device.

However, the biggest news from the Mobile gathering is that we're likely to finally see a universal power adapter for mobile devices (so no need for a new charger whenever you upgrade that mobile phone). They are also suggesting up to 50% power savings when charging your phone. Don't hold your breathe, it won't become active until 2012. If only they could do the same with damn data connectivity cables!

Back online after moving into the new house

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:44:00 +1100

In my last post, I mentioned I was moving out of the city (Melbourne, Australia) and heading to the country.

Well the transition has occurred and I'm more than happy with the move. Our neighbours two deep on each side have all come out and introduced themselves, and the general atmosphere around the place is warm and uplifting.

The sense of community runs strong outside of the capital cities by the look of it.

Bannockburn is by no means a small town, though it's no thriving metropolis. It's about 15 mins drive from Geelong, but you would think you're thousands of miles away or in a parallel universe. Hand-waves whilst driving, a chat with a stranger (soon to be become an acquaintance/friend) are all common place. At the time of the 2006 Census, the population was a mere 2,486, but has more than doubled in the following two years. By 2015, they are expecting a population of around 15,000. If you're down this way, be sure to drop in. It's a quaint part of town and quite charming.

All the majority of our daily needs are here (local Woolworths, petrol, green grocer, butcher, baker, vet, auto repair, post office, pub, restaurants, fast-food, legal and accounting services,etc can all be found in the town). Those not here (ie: the not-every-day purchases) is only a 15 minute car-drive into Geelong.

I'm loving the lack of police sirens/choppers and cars doing wheelies until 4am most nights. The only noise we hear at present is the 6-7am chatter of the native birds found in abundance. (Not a real problem -- we're up at 6-7am anyway -- working through to late at night getting the house set-up).

Bannockburn for me was a natural choice. It's closer to loved ones, as well as the type of environment, community I would like to raise a family one day. The hustle and bustle and dog-eat-dog attitude that the big cities portray is not the values I would like to instil into my own children.

So how did the move go on Friday? As many know there was a deluge across a lot of Australia. In our neck of the woods we had the pitter-patter of a few rain drops from about 10:30am whilst filling the removalist's truck. By 3:15pm they had finished unloading the truck and literally seconds after the truck doors had been shut down it bucketed!

I'm glad we got our water tank hooked up prior to the move. Those 24 hours resulted in approx 70mm of rain. The tank is now full!
That much rain ensured we had a natural inground swimming pool over most of the backyard. The dogs found this too irresistable (they had never seen so much rain in their young years), and decided it was time for swimming. Shortly after we had dual-coloured dogs.... The original colour on their top half and a nice brown/muddy underbelly.

Saturday/Sunday saw us return to clean up our vacated premises. On Wednesday we return the keys to the landlord. It's a great feeling moving out of the rent cycle and into our own home.

Monday I had our networking guys in to terminate off our wired house. We now have 48 GigaE running throughout the house. The 19" racks I have in the garage look all very impressive now. I'll take some photos in the next few days and post them up for all to see. (Once I find the box with my camera data-cable! )

The new 48-port GigE Managed Switch also has PoE on all ports, and makes powering the Snom VoIP phones a breeze with no need for a power pack anymore (frees up on power point, and also one less cable to tangle unde rmy desk!). Cabling the house was a great idea -- being able to just plug an Ethernet cable into the wall in nearly every room of the house is just a god-send and something I would recommend to anyone who's building (do it during the framing stage, prior to the plastering).

The mountain of boxes strewn around the house are slowly disappearing. It will take us some time but we're hoping by Christmas to have everything fully unpacked/setup. That will leave me with the daunting task of establishing our gardens/plants/lawns outside during this crazy drought/summer. Something I am looking forward to getting up and running.

One of the benefits is since moving that my ADSL1 connection is indeed faster and cleaner here than our previous location (though we are about the same distance from the exchange (1-1.5kms). I'm pulling down pretty much the physical limits of ADSL1 and squeezing 100-150Kb/sec more then I previously have. Once ADSL2+ becomes available through my provider (Internode - due in the next few days), I may consider the move up if the price is 'reasonable'.

The garden shed and vegie garden will probably be first off the ranks, with the rest to follow after that.
I'm seriously considering putting in a large sandpit for the dogs so they can dig til their hearts content (and not in my lawn/vegies/plants! )

Though, all in good time. In the interim, I'm just enjoying country life, and not missing the glare of the city at all. A few more weeks of setting up house and I'll be as happy as my dogs running around in mud!

The time of converging electronic devices is upon us.

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:41:00 +1000

It was time to upgrade my phone. Not that my old phone didn't work, in fact I actually loved my Sony Ericsson K750i, however the battery wasn't holding the charge and in this disposable world we live in it seemed crazy buying a new battery. It was purely a case of the plan I was on allowed for a new phone. So what the heck, it had served me well... but it was time to look at this 3G stuff. Sure, video calls didn't really impress me (and seemed more a gimmick then functional -- it's a call after all!)

I wanted a better camera on my phone. 2MP cut it a few years ago, but it just wasn't cutting it now. I really wanted a decent 5MP camera in my phone. It saves me lugging around another electronic device.

I own an iPod mini but find I am always forgetting it.. so a reasonable music player is also handy.
A decent browser and Email client is always handy.

We looked through all the available phones, and I was keen not to get an iPhone.

I finally settled on a Nokia N95 8GB. I was a little disappointed that the phone had no expandable memory, but hey, at 8GB I'm not filling that any time soon! (I really don't store that many songs in my phone!)

Man, how phones have progressed. To be honest, the complexity of the beast actually had me freak out a little. The K750i was pretty easy to work out, but this thing had buttons sprouting out all over the place. I guess what didn't help was that it was also my first 'slide phone'.

The first month I did the usual things, making calls, SMS and taking the odd photo or two on it.. I hadn't used a Symbian based phone for quite a while, so it took a bit of time getting used to. Over the last month I've experimented a bit more and found out it's not too bad at all. Even better is that Symbian will be released under OpenSource. Nokia also has an OpenSource website, as well as there is a bunch of OSS software you can install on your Symbian based phone.

I didn't have a GPS - and one thing I had also been toying with for a while. It is handy for long trips or somewhere you've never visited before, but I really couldn't justify it... it seemed more 'toy' then functional. Those people I had seen with a GPS seemed more frustrated then helped. Granted, these were early models but I'd seen too many people being send down non-existent roads or dead ends -- or told to do U-turns on freeways!

The Nokia N95 8GB comes with Nokia Maps. To be honest, I'd never used a GPS before so it was all greek to me. After playing around with it for a while I learnt that it wasn't too bad. Nokia kindly gave us 6-months free Navigation (basically the voice saying turn right/turn left, etc). It actually works quite well. The GPS in the Nokia N95 8GB is actually quite fast... I was surprised how quick it was able to re-route me once it realised I had missed it's 'chosen route'. I've seen dedicated GPS devises screw that up big time.

The one sticking point for me... is the cost of navigation after 6 months. Nokia want you to pay $124AUD/yr for the feature. They can shove that. I spend enough on the damn phone. Seriously, if you can give me the maps free.. .I can't see why I have to pay for the damn voice.

As a result I'm now looking around at other options (I'll continue using their Maps until I'm required to pay).
I've come across two reasonable candidates: Nav4All and amAze. I'll be testing them both out shortly to see how they stack up in Australia... and in rural parts of Victoria at that!

Ideally I would love to be able to use some thing like OpenStreetMap...which just makes sense and gives me the feeling of sharing and caring.

I'm interested in hearing from anyone that has used some of the free GPS phone software and how is rates.

Overall, I'm happy with my purchase. The built in SIP client and 802.11 b/g support is fantastic. The included web-browser is reasonable, though there are better ones around. (which have found their way to my phone). I see there is even an SSH client -- so that may also make it's way, handy when you need to do a quick 'fix' on a server and not near a computer.

Ideally I was hanging around for an OpenMoko phone, but the lack of 3G really soured that expectation. I needed a phone now and not somewhere in the distant future. Having said that.... I'll see what the future holds, I may just pickup one once the features I'm seeing in this phone make their way into the OpenMoko phone.

Asterisk should come with a warning!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:53:00 +1000

Asterisk needs to come with a warning.

Releasing software like this to the wild is bound to just create havoc!

It's quite irresponsible of Digium to just give this software away, and not at least have some form of warning before people download it.

Let me explain...

Proprietary PABX/PBX makers and Telcos will loose millions of dollars with it
People can finally do what they like with their phones
For a newbie the configuration files can be daunting
Once bitten with the Asterisk bug, you are always tweaking and adding features.
Asterisk Administrators are likely to find themselves shunned in public when they mumble about trunks, extensions and dialplans.

Having said that, I totally love it!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, that we purchased some Snom phones, a Linksys SPA-3102 connected to some Panasonic cordless phones as well as a fax/modem (that runs Hylafax).

We've now have all extensions working, Voicemail, Conference Rooms, group pickup, call parking and Music on Hold taken care of.
I've even set it up that when our DID numbers are called that all the phones ring until someone picks it up.
(A very big thanks to Paul Dwerryhouse for being patient over many hours and answering my silly questions!)

I'm looking at adding iaxmodem to my Hylafax setup so we can utilise T.38 faxing, and fallback to PSTN when only required.
We receive more faxes then ever send, so it's not a real big issue.

Next, I wonder if I can integrate Nagios into Asterisk so when I am remote I can issue commands by dialling into the Asterisk PBX. I've already got 2-way SMS message alerting working on Nagios (Which I promise I'll post up one day shortly) using a range of OSS tools. I would however like a little more control on just what I can do remotely from time to time. (Ever notice Nagios only alerts when you are away from a computer!? )

Now I'm a self-confessed Asterisk-Addict™ (aka AA),

I'd love to hear some of the other neat things people are doing. I think something using ZoneMinder (front door camera, rings IP video phone to indicate someone is there) would be pretty cool.

So post your funky ways you're using Asterisk, I'm all ears!

Asterisk, Snom-300 VOIP phone and Power Over Ethernet.

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:16:00 +1000

Well it's coming up to the end of financial year, and like many businesses we needed to make a few purchases. (That or pay more corporate tax -- hmmm let me think.. more toys or more tax? )
Generally we don't make many purchases throughout the year and then buy up large near the end of the financial year. (well unless something fails!)

As such we decided to get a decent VOIP phone. We currently use a LinkSys SPA3102 with our cordless phone, but wanted to get a phone with a decent headset so we could talk hands free easily.

Snom-300. An excellent VOIP phone, with fantastic voice quality and a solidly built professional phone.

We spoke to a few people, did the research and settled on a Snom VOIP phone. In particular, we elected the Snom-300 as the phone of choice for us. Whilst it claims it's the 'base phone', unless you're mega-boss or a telemarketing guru I doubt the snom-320 or snom-360 phones are really required. (They basically have a lot of additional buttons and few features added to the base functionality).

You can configure the phone via the LCD menu system, or use the built in web based configuration. The web-based configuration is very well laid out and easy to navigate and locate what you need.

Upgrading the phones firmware is extremely easy and quite painless. You can watch the progress of the phone being flashed, and it's quite novel to see items like chroot, mount appear on your phones LCD.

Chroot, mount you say?! Yup, at the heart of every Snom is a Linux kernel. Whilst this wasn't the sole reason for buying the device, it's handy to know that with a bit of time I could in theory hack the phone.

The Snom-300 HS-MM3 headset is both comfortable and functional. Sound is clear and crisp through it.

I unfortunately get stuck is long boring teleconferences far too often, so I wanted to ensure I also had a phone that was able to plugin in a headset. Not all IP VOIP phones we looked at seemed to have that feature.

The Snom phones do, however they use an RJ-11 headset connection instead of a 2.5mm or 3.5mm jack that people are most familar with. (Many cordless phones also use the 2.5/3.5mm jacks).

As such, we decided to purchase them. They don't come cheap but are worth it. It's a much better solution than getting 'neck cramp' attempting to hold the phone under your chin, or even speaker phone (which seems to pickup more background noise), which can annoy anyone else within earshot.

With the headset, I'm able to easily keep working on my computer; punching away on the keyboard, and those on the other end are none the wiser! (Well besides being too distracted to really keep up with the conversation; dang! I think I just let my secret out....and to think -- people just thought I was vague on the phone!)

Our current setup has me registering both the ATA and the Snoms devices registering directly to our VOIP provider. This works fine, and allows multiple out going calls at the same time, but means only our ATA rings for incoming calls (we have two DIDs).

It makes sense, as the ATA picks up the incoming request and responds... well before the Snoms do. How to resolve?

Easily -- Asterisk to the rescue!

I can setup Asterisk as our local PBX (or PABX for those in Australia!), and have all devices register to it. Then the Asterisk server registers with our Voice Provider.

A bit of Asterisk config and I should be able to get all the phones to ring. In addition, it will allow me to use T.38, add MOH, and voice mail. I also like the ability to have local extensions so we can forward calls between various devices. Currently both Pauline and I share an office, but in our new house we'll be up other ends of the house. So call transfers make sense. I think it would be great to also create an IVR application that puts telemarketers into a loop of endless questions. (randomly generated of course -- so they aren't aware!) Though I think Paul Dwerryhouse's idea is probably the solution.

I'm a newbie to Asterisk (though I've been aware of it for a while -- I just haven't had a need for it)... so I imagine it might take me some time to configure it all up as we desire.

Once done, the only thing Telstra will be getting out of us will be the cheapest line rental we can pay. (They overcharge for that as well!) Though, there is not much getting around it whilst stuck on an ADSL1 connection.

Another purchase we made for the upcoming house was a nice 48-port managed Gigabit switch that contains 12 POE (Power over Ethernet) ports. These will be used to power our phones in the future, saving the need for the current power-pack.

The switch we went for is a D-Link DGS-3100-48P. Like most large switches it's full of fans and sounds like a DC-7 taking off. As a result, it's safely packed back in it's box and will be used after the house move!

We also purchased to UPSes (the old ones had dead batteries) -- strangely it's cheaper buying new UPSes than batteries.
So we ended up with 1 x 1500VA UPS and a 1 x 2200VA UPS.
It appears we'll probably need one more 1500VA.
I went with Powerware UPSes as their is reasonably good local support (and hopefully battery replacements!), and nut seems to work well.

All in all it's been a good month for hardware toys to play with.
Shame a fair bit of this new gear is a few months off until we get into the new house!

Now if only those Intel 8-core Xeons were out.... (my desired replacement server that will consolidate everything down!) If you wish to view a demo of what's coming.. take a look at the Intel demonstration.