VOIP Testing

All in all, looking back on this. The setting do make sense but it was very frustrating trying to figure out which ones would make the difference. Now all the phones are working great and Broadvoice is( without fail) serving all of our needs. Three-way calling is a wonderful feature that I have now had a chance to use quite a bit because of how easy the Cisco 7960 and 7940 phones are to use. Now if I could just get a Vonage account to work...

VOIP in every home?

According to the analysis VoIP usage has toped 2.7 million in the second half of 2005 compared to just 440,000 just a year ago.

The revenue for VoIP is also on the increase and it is expected to top 3 billion USD by the end of 2007.

This raises a very good question. What is the ratio of minutes of VOIP versus the minutes of plain old telephone service. My take on this is simple. The people that have VOIP use it mainly as a toy/only for certain types of calls i.e long distance and the rest of the time they are still using there plain old phone or cellular phone. On this point I could be wrong. What are your thoughts?

VOIP Testing

ISPs and some VoIP providers will be forced to build backdoors into their networks that make it easier for law enforcement to run wiretaps. What does this mean for asterisk? I suppose not much unless you are a VOIP provider using it. What kind of a backdoor do you think asterisk could have. Open source seems a bit frightening when it comes to topics like this.

This follows a new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule that expands the reach of the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), says the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Under CALEA, passed in the early 1990s, all telephone providers must build "tappability" into their networks, but it expressly ruled out information services such as broadband, says the EFF, stressing that it’s argued against the expansion to the FCC.

Now, this tappability extends to broadband providers, says the foundation.

“Practically, what this means is that the government will be asking broadband providers - as well as companies that manufacture devices used for broadband communications – to build insecure backdoors into their networks, imperiling the privacy and security of citizens on the Internet. It also hobbles technical innovation by forcing companies involved in broadband to redesign their products to meet government requirements.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is also asking airlines to build similar backdoors into phone and data networks on airplanes, says the EFF, adding:

“EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) submitted joint comments to the FCC arguing against the DOJ's unprecedented and sweeping new technology design mandates and anticipatory wiretapping system.

“The FCC's new proposal to expand CALEA to airline broadband illustrates the fallacy of law enforcement's rationale for its CALEA request. The DOJ takes the position that broadband has ‘substantially replaced’ the local telephone exchange, but this claim is reduced to the point of absurdity aboard an airplane and opens the door for CALEA to cover just about anything.”

As Asterisk goes. I do not believe it will be an open source backdoor. Think of the privacy implications. So for the mainstream provider that is using asterisk as a backend, the module would have to be custom made and compiled. Think of the implications of having a few hundred different implementations of the backdoor out there. It would be a free for all... Just my two cents.
The original article can be found here.

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 2, 2005--
Specialized Convergence Distributor Increases 3Com's Footprint by Offering Broad Portfolio of Secure, Converged Networking Solutions

3Com Corporation (www.3Com.com) today announced that the company is expanding its reach into the strategic Voice over IP (VoIP) market through the addition of Target Distributing, a true convergence technologies distributor, to its list of authorized U.S. distributors. Target Distributing extends 3Com's reach into the VoIP market through its extensive and deep relationships with value-added resellers.

"The convergence market is strategic for 3Com, and one of our fastest growing segments as we continue to drive traction with our NBX(R) platform for small- and medium-sized organizations and VCX(TM) platform in large enterprises," said Nick Tidd, vice president North American Channel Sales at 3Com. "Adding Target Distributing to our list of authorized distributors is designed to accelerate that growth by leveraging Target's expertise as a true convergence distributor, as well as access to new reseller partners."

"Target Distributing shares 3Com's commitment to helping organizations fully realize the potential of a converged network," said Michael Momsen, general manager, Target Distributing. "Adding 3Com's extensive and award-winning portfolio of secure, converged products will give our reseller partners an unprecedented opportunity to provide end-to-end solutions for their customers that few other vendors can deliver."

"Given our long history with both Target Distributing and 3Com, we're extremely excited to now have combined access to Target's outstanding service and support and the product portfolio from one of the true leaders and innovators in IP telephony," says Bob Rankin, general manager, Telephony and Data Solutions of Dublin, OH. "We've successfully been selling 3Com since 1998, and we now plan on making all of our 3Com purchases thru Target Distributing going forward."

Having delivered the first IP-based NBX system in 1998, and expanding into a broad portfolio of systems and applications, 3Com is uniquely positioned to satisfy customers' needs for IP-focused convergence solutions. Target Distributing has a 30-year legacy of offering communications solutions to enterprise organizations in a wide range of industries, including education, healthcare and government. Target Distributing focuses on Convergence solutions and will carry the full portfolio of 3Com products in order to have the capabilities of providing complete secure, converged networks. Additionally, Target will provide training and education, and service and support capabilities for 3Com's products.

About 3Com Corporation

3Com Corporation (NASDAQ: COMS) is a leading provider of secure, converged voice and data networking solutions for enterprises of all sizes. 3Com offers a broad line of innovative products backed by world class sales, service and support, which excel at delivering business value for its customers. Through its TippingPoint division, 3Com is the leading provider of network-based intrusion prevention systems that deliver in-depth application protection, infrastructure protection, and performance protection for corporate enterprises, government agencies, service providers and academic institutions. For further information, please visit www.3com.com, or the press site www.3com.com/pressbox.

Copyright (C) 2005 3Com Corporation. 3Com, the 3Com logo and NBX are registered trademarks and TippingPoint and VCX are trademarks of 3Com Corporation. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective holders.

If you could tell somebody that you could fix the energy dependence we have in the US, High gas prices, Feed more people, Produce more clothing, make better paint, Make plastics, Make paper without cutting down whole forests, and about a thousand other substantial, beneficial, earth friendly things would you tell them? Why is it that we are so misinformed about things as simple as a plant that can be grown just about anywhere in the US. Many other countries are growing it including Canada, China, Australia, and 30+ others. However, here in the US we have a different stance.
Let take this a different direction for a moment.
If a pit bull is determined to be a more aggressive dog and deemed hazardous to our health and the health of people around them do we make dogs illegal of just make a pit bull illegal( i have nothing against pit bulls).
So with this logic...

The pit bull (marijuana) is deemed bad and the great Dane(hemp) is deemed good for society. Our government makes Canines (Cannabis) illegal to get rid of the pit bull(marijuana) problem rather than addressing the issue in a rational manner.

Misinformation and a genuine unwillingness to accept that the current mindset is taking away from what this country can become. We are supposed to be a country of people with open minds and a drive to improve society as a whole whether it is with technology, crops, knowledge, or whatever.

“Oh, I am not into Drugs.”

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which allows enterprises to transmit voice calls over data networks, was supposed to make copper telephone networks obsolete and save companies millions of dollars in communication costs. But those ambitious goals have yet to be realized, and vendors are trying to unravel the mystery behind the technology's slow acceptance.
Call quality, unstable technology, and the perceived oddity of migrating an enterprise's voice communications to its data network used to be the main reasons cited for VoIP's lackluster adoption rate. No more.
"You don't hear a lot of talk anymore about voice quality or QoS (quality of service)," Frost & Sullivan VoIP analyst Jon Arnold told NewsFactor. "There's enough confidence and faith in the technology. A lot of the gap has been bridged, although it's not perfect."
So, why are enterprises still hesitant to deploy VoIP on a wide scale -- and why are service providers still twiddling their thumbs?
Education Needed
The slow pace of VoIP deployment is connected not only to the economic downturn, but also to a lack of customer education or acceptance, according to Ralph Santitoro, director of network architecture at Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT - news).
To remedy that shortfall and educate enterprise customers, he said, Nortel now offers a network assessment program in which Nortel business partners "crawl through" a company's Ethernet network to determine its fitness for IP telephony.
Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO - news) also is trying to teach customers about the business benefits of voice over IP. "Customers aren't aware they can get QoS in a corporate network," said Hank Lambert, director of product marketing in Cisco's enterprise voice and video group. "When they talk about voice over IP, they confuse [it] with voice over Internet. That's a very different application of voice over IP."
Currently, most corporate applications send voice calls through a company's data network and tie in to the standard copper-wire phone system at some point, avoiding the open Internet altogether.
VPNs Lead the Field
Currently, most enterprises adopting VoIP are focusing on voice virtual private network (VPN) applications, said Bob VanSickle, vice president of the Americas at Vocaltec, the company that introduced the first PC-to-PC voice client back in 1995.
With this technology, companies with numerous remote locations can use small gateway appliances that interface with their PBX (private branch exchange -- a private telephone switching system) to place calls that bypass the phone companies' legacy networks, creating a secure voice connection. And one large retail chain is using its frame relay links, which are idle during the day, to do unlimited calling between stores, VanSickle said.
He noted that return on investment for such VoIP projects usually can be achieved in less than six months. "You're not spending money to hear a lot of garbles, clicks and buzzes," he said. "Interoffice communications are also lower risk."
Of course, VoIP is better suited to some applications than others. For example, some service providers that offer IP voice clearly state in their ads that they do not support 911 emergency services. "That might slow the adoption for certain applications," Santitoro noted. Cisco, for one, has addressed this problem by introducing an emergency responder server that gathers information about the location of an IP phone.
Static About Security
Unlike VPN-based voice over IP, the adoption curve will be steeper for IP PBX devices that allow users to place calls over the open Internet, VanSickle said. Slower acceptance of this technology will be due partly to technical problems -- packet jitter, missing and dropped packets, and compression hurdles -- and partly to security concerns.
Sending voice packets across firewalls, for example, is a potential nightmare for some IT managers. "When you packetize everything, the networks don't know how to distinguish very well," Arnold said. In other words, identifying which packets are or are not acceptable in terms of network security is a difficult task.
VoIP handsets also have their share of security vulnerabilities. Theoretically, hackers wanting to eavesdrop would not need to establish a physical connection to tap a VoIP phone line because the phone is connected to computers over the open Internet. VoIP phones also have IP addresses, which means anyone with a browser could access the phone's Web page and modify its features and options.
But tapping an IP phone call is a lot harder than it sounds, VanSickle said, because packets follow multiple geographic paths and pass through different gateways to reach their destination. "Where do you place the tap, and how do you reassemble the packets?" he said.
Integration Obstacles
Security issues aside, interoperability, or internetworking, is also key to promoting widespread adoption of VoIP over the open Internet. For example, in today's technology market, one vendor's flavor of session initiation protocol (SIP) -- a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony and instant messaging (news - web sites) -- may not be identical to another vendor's.
"Although the equipment meshes 90 percent of the time, there will always be glitches," Arnold said. "Until you can throw everything into the pot and have it all work, no carrier in their right mind is going to have a large-scale deployment."
Although these obstacles to adoption are not insurmountable, overcoming them may take time.
Inert on IP
Service providers are the final piece of the VoIP puzzle, and they have been slow to deploy the technology and QoS-level agreements, Lambert said. But there are positive signs for VoIP on the horizon: Domestic RBOCs (regional Bell operating companies, such as BellSouth (NYSE: BLS - news), Ameritech and Nynex, among others) will need VoIP technologies in order to offer local phone service to customers outside their home regions, according to Arnold.
"If RBOCs push further down the road, they're going to need IP packet technologies to do it," he noted. "They're not going to build out their copper networks. That could serve as a big stimulus" to sales of VoIP services and equipment.
Even so, the RBOCs currently are dragging their heels on VoIP trials, putting the small, innovative equipment vendors running on limited capital resources in jeopardy. "There's nothing pushing [the RBOCs]," Arnold said. "Everyone is hoping they are going to do it all."
But there is an "X" factor that could change the RBOCs' tune: Cable companies, such as Cox Communications, are rolling out IP telephony services over HFC cable networks. If cable operators begin to make inroads into homes and businesses, the RBOCs may be forced to pick up the pace.

This is a continuation of Asterisk - In Windows Posted Yesterday.

Sip.conf (Broadvoice and Cisco configs.)
The big change is right here!!!
The first does NOT work and what I read on their site.
;register => 303XXXXXXX@sip.broadvoice.com:itsasecret:303XXXXXXX@sip.broadvoice.com

And This one DOES work!!!
register => 303XXXXXXX:itsasecret@sip.broadvoice.com
An issue I can not seem to explain and will do more research on as it is completely different than any of my UNIX servers. And the rest below is pretty plain jane...

[sip.broadvoice.com]
type=peer
user=phone
host=sip.broadvoice.com
fromdomain=sip.broadvoice.com
fromuser=303XXXXXXX
secret=itsasecret
username=303xxxxxxx
insecure=very
context=from-broadvoice
authname=303xxxxxxx
dtmfmode=inband
dtmf=inband
canreinvite=no
nat=yes
disallow=all
allow=gsm
allow=ulaw
allow=alaw

(The cisco 7960 and 7940 phones)
[3000]
type=friend
username=3000
secret=itsasecret
host=dynamic
callerid= <3000>
nat=no

and six more of these all identical

The extensions.conf
[from-broadvoice]
Audio problem fix as reported in my last post(not exactly a great way to fix it) causes the audio to be passed immediatly as soon as the asterisk server gets a sip notification of the call.
exten => s,1,Dial(SIP/3001&SIP/3002,60,tm)
Here is the way it should have worked.(Any insight on this would be appreciated.)
;exten => s,1,Dial(SIP/3001&SIP/3002,90,t)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(3001)
exten => s,3,hangup

As I said all is going well and the AMD machine is not working very hard at all to keep up. Now I just need to figure out what the big difference is for the audio problem... As I said. Insight from you would be greatly appreciated as this is about as odd as I have ever seen Asterisk get.

Windows XP Pro
Asterisk Win32 from asteriskwin32.com
AMD 64 3200
1 Gb DDR2 RAM
650 GB SATA storage
MSI NVIDIA 6600 PCI Express
A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
- NVIDIA nForce4 SLI
- PCI Express Architecture
- SATA 3Gb/s
- Dual RAID
- Dual Gigabit LAN & AI NET2
- NV Firewall
- AI NOS™
- AI Audio (8-channel Audio)

My goal is to get all of this up and running with asterisk and see what the performance ramifications of running it under CYGwin are. I will use the majority of the configurations from the other ASterisk servers I have with the main difference being the Windows thing... I will post update this port in a few hours and explain the results...
Update 1:
Server is up and running with only a few minor issues. Issue 1 was broadvoice. The setup is not as they have explained in the help files they have on there site or any of the true unix implementations I have done. Issue 2 was the way it is handling the Cisco 7960 SIP phones. Currently, in incoming calls only, I can hear the other person when they call but they cannot here me. In outbound calls it is fine. The workaround I have found it to use a m switch in the extensions.cfg so that the incoming caller hears music instead of ringing. Audio is then passed throughout the entire call.
Overall the server seems to run very well. The calls are routed efficiently and the broadvoice service again is shining as a very easy way to establish calls to non VOIP equipment or phones.
I will post again the details of the change to the first issue. Currently I have modified the registration information for the broadvoice service to create teh connection/registration to them. Once I am sure it is solid I will post the sip.cfg file that succeeds.
So far Asterisk for windows is a success and the system can still be used for other tasks easily. Memory usage is low and will 10 VOIP to VOIP calls going on with translation to another codec the processor doesn't break a sweat. I am very pleased so far. Tomorrows post will bring the guts out of this config so that you can duplicate it at home without having to have a seperate box for it.

Session Initiation Protocol or SIP refers specifically to a language that various computers can communicate to one another in so that they can complete voice calls. It has become vitally important in recent years as it plays a central role in VoIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol. VoIP Is the rapidly growing technology which has millions of Americans throwing out their local and long-distance telephone bills and replacing them with free calls made over the internet.

While Session Initiation Protocol sounds like technobabble, it helps if you can imagine SIP as the common language that new generation operators use to complete calls over the internet. With SIP, however, the operators are no longer hundreds of people in a room somewhere connecting one call to another but simply your computer device connecting to the telephone or computer device of the person you want to talk to. The fact that there is no need for real operators, or even a central board to complete calls through, explains part of why SIP is so revolutionary.

SIP was intended to give ordinary callers like you and me all the familiar functions and features of what we expect from a phone call, such as a dial tone, a ringing sound, etc. So while all the communication from our end seemed exactly the same as before, SIP makes phone calls by communicating directly with the other person’s telephone device. Unlike traditional telephony, which was based on a cog and wheel approach in which the call you placed goes through a central location and then is routed to the person you are trying to call, SIP is based on internet protocol. This means that there is no need for a central cog to run calls through, but rather calls can be made directly from person to person.

The fact that the technology is based on internet protocol (IP) rather than a traditional cog and wheel also means that placing and receiving calls are no longer inhibited by location. To conceive of this more easily it is best to think of something like your e-mail. You can take your laptop and access your e-mail from your home, just as easily as you can plug that laptop into the internet at access your e-mail from anywhere. In the same way, you can plug your SIP phone into any access point in the internet and call a person who can be located anywhere in the world. Similarly you can receive phone calls from anywhere in the world no matter where you are, simply be plugging your SIP phone into the internet.

As you can probably imagine, this ability has some pretty remarkable applications. For companies or businessmen that work out of the office, moving your office phone number is as simple as picking up the phone and carrying it with you. There is nothing else to it. For those often staying in hotels for travel or business, this means always having the direct office line with you wherever and whenever you want. No need to forward calls or even to ever pay for long distance or hotel phone access again!

The SIP technology is already revolutionizing the way in which humans communicate. In recent years, literally millions of Americans have tossed aside their traditional land based phone lines and opted for the freedom and cheapness of VoIP. Empowered with SIP technology it is uniquely able to provide you with virtually free calling, anywhere in the world, anytime in the world, without having to forward calls, change your number, or rely on others to check important messages. It is truly a technology for the future of business as well as the future of communication.

Empirix and Digium (of Asterisk fame) have announced that Empirix has been named as "a premier participant in the Digium Partner Program", as well as Digium's sole partner for VoIP testing. Digium, Inc., the leader in open source PBX solutions, utilizes the Empirix Hammer FX and Hammer Call Analyzer to test its current open source products, including the Asterisk Business Edition product.

"We're delighted to have Empirix as our test system partner. Hammer systems are central to the comprehensive test program that ensures Asterisk's reliability, performance, and interoperability with key hardware, software, and protocols, "said Jim Webster, director of software technologies for Digium. "We use Hammer to test Digium hardware for full compatibility with Asterisk Business Edition, as well as several select models of our open source VoIP devices. Our test bed systems are also subjected to extreme stress conditions, using Hammer test equipment, to simulate hundreds of complex VoIP calls in various real-world combinations and configurations."

"Empirix has worked closely with Digium to develop and implement test methodologies that meet the challenges of open source system development," said Duane Sword, vice president of product marketing for Empirix. "We look forward to extending that relationship through the Digium Partner Program, and to working with Digium on future product testing."