VOIP in the small business – update… 3
Mar2
Phones are boring, until they don’t work or get GPS or something. If you’re not interested in the crazy way the phone systems are changing in regard to calling over the Internet skip this post and come back from something more exciting (baby pictures?) soon.
After my post in November last year on the successful upgrade of a Asterisk PBX at Wanaka Wastebusters a lot has happened.
The reason I installed a local Trixbox server in the first place was to take advantage of cheaper calling, have more lines and to make administration of the system easier. At the time the local Voip Trunk providers (who all seem to resell the 2talk service) did not have a good multi extension feature. Our trial with Kiwilink never gave us a solid way of transferring calls.
Our Trixbox setup was good, but I was not happy with the possibility of failure with the laptop it was running on. So we invested in a IP01 embedded box from Nicegear. This solution worked ok but we had repetitive problems with incoming calls dropping. I’m sure one of the 200,000+ settings in Asterisk could have been tweeked but damned if I could find which one.
Soooo…in the meantime 2talk had a better implementation of their line manager and I decided if we could manage all our lines and features from one login a hosted service was the way forward – into the cloud we went. I decided to invest in a bunch of Linksys SPA942 deskphones to get some continuity in our endpoints, set them all up and sat back with fingers crossed sweating.
I should mentioned I also doubled up our broadband connection with 1 x wan through hd.co.nz and one through netspeed.co.nz with a fail over at the router level. I figured the extra $60 a month would pay itself back easily through saved calling costs.
The result has been, so far, excellent. We’ve had failures on both internet connection, fortunately not at the same time so nobody but me know. Perfect. Calling has been of high quality and transfers, auto attendant and voicemail to email have all been seamless.
The only comment I have is that the 2talk web interface for the line manager is buggy and badly designed. I couldn’t change the caller id for the lines from it and the email for voicemail setting there didn’t seem to work. I’d love the job of redesigning the interface – actually I’d like to do the 2degrees one as well, but that is another story :-)
More phone craziness – ATCOM IP01 Asterisk PABX
Nov1
A few months ago I installed a digital Pabx here at Wastebusters. It was an old Toshiba laptop running the opensource Asterisk/Trixbox CE mix. Since then it has mostly worked well apart from some hiccups at the beginning, and some occasional loss of internet connection which takes down the phones.
From the beginning it is has been obvious that relying on an old laptop has its disadvantages, mainly as if the power goes out it does not boot up automatically. It also relies on the laptop hardware and hard drive, which when (not if) it fails is fairly catastrophic. A server grade bit of gear with a UPS would be nicer.
The world of computers is ever changing and this year it looks like the age of the embedded system on cheap, but powerful, processors is here. Below is a ATCOM IP01, it is effectively a mini computer (from Nicegear) running a 400mhz Blackfin processor which as it turns out is ample to run a linux/asterisk stack ~ cost $295nzd. What does this mean? You can now replace a cabinet sized PABX with a low power box the size of a calculator. No surprise I guess when you look at an advanced mobile phone.
ATCOM IP01 Asterisk Applicance
The experience setting it up was mostly good, the gui is ok (some contrasting colours separating feature groups would be good) and my experience with Asterisk generally came in handy.
So now the little guy is churning away handling 10 extensions, an auto attendant, voicemail to email and all the goodness. It isnot over though – unfortunately we have a very sporadic call dropping issue which I am hoping is almost fixed.
The next mission, depending on how our internet connection reliability goes, is to add a normal phone line to the IP01 so if the net is down it has a fall over. The other option would be to add a GSM trunk so the fallover was a cellphone ~ I need to start looking for a economic SIP->GSM widget that could plugin as a trunk. Hmmm….
Asterisk / Trixbox digital PABX in real world use
May3
What this looks like is a old Toshiba laptop sitting on a shelf. Which is correct except right now it is handling up to a few hundred phone calls a day as a digital PABX running a Trixbox build of Asterisk+Linux software .
What does this mean? Well…Wanaka Wastebusters, where it is installed (please do not steal it :-), has one phone number people can ring in the normal phone like way. That phone number has been parked at a service provider and there enters the internet. Over the interweb thingy this laptop talks to the provider and can conduct up to five simultaneous calls. At Wanaka Wastebusters there are ten extensions that each have voice mail and are available through the IVR (a recorded message you get when you ring the number) – all of these features are running off the laptop. People can dial within each others extensions and transfer calls etc and generally be productive hopefully.
Nice – but why? Well it saves a few hundred dollars a month on line charges for extra phone lines with Telecom and means we can add users and features as we need them. We can also make use of cheaper calling rates and eventually peer directly hopefully with other businesses using SIP which is the glue like protocol making all the VOIP stuff happening. It is an acronym world.
Pretty cool use for an old computer huh. I’m not sure how long a laptop will last always on but it has been working for 5 weeks no problem and because it has a battery even has its own UPS built in. We might have a sweepstake on what gives up first – the power pack I’d say.
In case of failure or hacking I am building another one on a old IBM Pentium 4 which could be plugged in as a replacement. What I would really like though is a few Sheevaplugs, amazing 5w super computers. That is ‘super’ as in awesome not as in a Cray – although they are probably faster than most Crays ever built… maybe one day …
Trixbox, FreePBX and System Recordings using Audacity
Mar2
I am building an Asterisk box for Wastebusters using the excellent Trixbox CE mixup of Asterisk, FreePBX and LAMP. It is on a Toshiba laptop andas of yesterday I had everything working well except uploading system recordings and the outgoing SMTP for voice mail.
This morning I managed to solve the System Recording using a free opensource audio recorder toolbox Audacity. The steps to record a message for an IVR are below.
- Get the latest version of Audacity, I think it needs to be later than 1.3 (currently in Beta).
- First set the “Project Rate (hz)” at the bottom on the screen to 8000hz.
- Record a message (standard Audacity help files cover this including editing/clipping the message) you should have something like the below. Note at this point it is in Stereo and the wrong bit rate and sample format to use in Asterisk.
- First change the track to mono. Click on the “Audio Track” menu just to the left of the blue waveform and and go down to “Split Stereo to Mono”, this should create two tracks. You can delete one of them.
- Clicking on the “Audio Track” menu again scroll down to “Set Sample Format” and change it to “16-bit PCM”.
- Go to the main “File” menu in the top of the window and pull down to “Export”. Where it says “Save as Type” select “Wav (Microsoft)” it should say “signed 16 bit – PCM” after “Microsoft”. Click “Save”.
- An “Edit Meta Data” box should come up. Just click OK.
- A box called “Advanced Mixing Options” will come up and there should be one “Output Channel” if so click ok.
- Upload to Asterisk using “System Recordings” or directly and test.
I tried all the Wav compressions available in Audacity GSM, Ulaw and Alaw but none of them worked in Asterisk. Strange.
Updated: 16th June 2010 – new bitrate setting.
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