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 :-)

When I bought my T61p from the USA i could bring it in at around half the price of the same machine online through Lenovo NZ. So it was with surprise that I saw really competitive pricing on the NZ site.  Yeehaaa. Dell has astonished me in the past with their (lack of) customer service, especially with a XPS Merle had which had well documented  design flaws they refused to take responsibility for.  If you know you’ve made a bad mistake in a product surely the length of warranty should be extended?

I was even more impressed that during ordering online I rang the 0800 number with a technical question and got a very helpful woman, I think in NZ or maybe Aussie, who obviously knew the product inside out.

Ontop off all this when the laptop arrived  it had excellent low key, recyclable packaging (see below). Which considering the machine is to be used in a packaging campaign is very apt.

Lenovo laptop packaging, simple, elegant, recyclable.

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….

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 …

The goal was to increase the productivity of the office space by providing storage for each work space and some division between them. I adopted a rule of 1m3 storage per 1m of desk space, which is a lot but reflects the fact that the office space is connected to the best second hand shop in ~ Wanaka? The world?

Storage is provided by the vertical cases which also split up the desk space. The traffic way around the central island is also now blocked to provide a private (Simon!) workspace. Walkways only work if there is enough room to transit without interrupting which there wasn’t in this case.

All construction is from seconds 15mm plwood from Trademe, some of which was… er… very second rate. To be expected I guess. It all screwed with superscrews so it can be re-configured or dismantled easily at a later date.

Below is the quick Sketchup representation I did to convince everybody it would work, and below that some pictures of it in progress.

Last week we completed our first, underfloor and ceiling insulation, projects in Arrowtown. I can report underfloor for 6 hours in a 450mm crawlspace with spiders and sharp bits of wood and tin for company is pretty grim; it was only made bearable by the wit of Gromme and the brilliant Novatherm product, no nasty Pink Batt dust, no nails glue or staples! More about it later.

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

This project includes researching the potential, branding and communications and then forming a team, and putting together the paper trail and doing the quality control as we roll out the service. Initially we will be contracting to the Otago Regional Council to their Clean Heat Clean Air program.

I put some thought into the brand and decided something a wee bit cleaner and smarter than the ‘Comfy Homes’ message out there may be a little more appealing to the Central Otago Audi driver. I really like German trades logo styles as well which tend to be small and authoritative. I settled on ‘Energy House’ which I think sums up our mission, to reinforce (through insulation) that a house needs energy, good energy, and to retain it.

And what will this entail? Well it is a mix of moving the office processes forward into the 2000′s based on what worked at Cactus and making some of the more esoteric projects reality using what I have learned with Cooreea. Very exciting.

I feel extremely lucky to be in this position and I am pretty sure it is going to work out..very well.