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 :-)

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….

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.

1. Get the latest version of Audacity, I think it needs to be later than 1.3 (currently in Beta).
2. First set the “Project Rate (hz)” at the bottom on the screen to 8000hz.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Clicking on the “Audio Track” menu again scroll down to “Set Sample Format” and change it to “16-bit PCM”.
6. 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”.
7. An “Edit Meta Data” box should come up. Just click OK.
8. A box called “Advanced Mixing Options” will come up and there should be one “Output Channel” if so click ok.
9. 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.

The system:

• 4 x lines on standard phones through 1 x Linksys ATA and 1 x WAG with 2 ATA ports
• 4 x people using softphones – X-Lite
• 1 x Linksys SPA922 VOIP deskphone
• Auto attendant on main calling in line
• Eftpos and Fax on a POTs line which also carries the ADSL
• Voicemail on all extensions with voicemail sent to email addresses where necessary

Lessons so far:

• Linksys ATA’s seem to be more reliable and give better call quality than a software phone on a PC.
• Starting out with one sort of end point (ATA’s) would have been easier. Having people on three different solutions makes config and customization a bit of a nightmare.
• The free version of X-Lite does not do a blind transfer, I haven’t found a free softphone yet that does but will try Zoiper tomorrow.
• Without a local digital PBX (Wastebusters is using the Kiwilink service) you are restricted to the options that the external service offers on their (usually Asterisk) setup. In this case a limit of 9 speed dial numbers restricting the pool of possible blind transfer speed dials.

Savings

• Reduced monthly rentals by around $200
• Cheaper calling costs
• Flexible extensible PBX features, mostly changeable through web interface

• Tested the Kiwilink service with a variety of hardware and software phones. PAP2T, X-Lite etc. Call quality is very good 90% of the time and choppy around 4pm…hmmm…hopefully a new ADSL link fullspeed in both directions will solve that
• Have setup auto attendant features and voicemail, nice and easy
• Blind transferring a call has been a bit more of an issue. In X-Lite it is disabled in the free version and PAP2T’s don’t seem to have a good speed dial method. Kiwilink has been exceptional in trying to find a solution – so far the easiest seems to be to use dedicated VOIP phones over ATA’s with analogue phones – will up the investment price a bit

One of the outcomes for me has been to see how VOIP technology, maybe technology in general, has evolved over time. The standards and even the hardware has been around for a few years but it has still not bedded in as a simple flexible solution: system components require extensive configuration, quality is variable and trouble shooting still an art not a science.

Depolying a VOIP PBX is not yet a turn key industry,  but the advantages still greatly outweigh the disadvantages.

I have been slightly obsessed with VOIP for a while, mucked around with Asterisk on and off and have used World Exchanges VFX service at home for a year or two. I’m not sure why I have this obsession – I suspect because it is such an attractive disruption – voice, and all its features, becoming as cheap and easy as email.

I managed Cactus to start using VFX for it’s main calling line a while back, and now hardware QOS has improved and DSL speed settled down (you can finally get full speed both ways relatively cheaply) it is time to try on a larger scale. The benefits are too big to ignore.

• Hosted PBX – no hardware investment…and features+ like the below…
• Web interface to control the PBX as opposed to semi-blind phone keypad inline programming
• Voicemail to email – email seems to be THE collation point for business communication
• Softphones like X-Lite, point and click phone action! Address books!
• Cheaper calling
• Movable phones – take your latop to the other side of the world and you are still on the same system

I have been working on the implementation plan and have agreement from Wastebusters, I’ll write it up here as it happens.