anchorite.org

Per Matt Singley’s recommendation, I decided to give SpinVox a try. I don’t use voicemail on my cell phone so I decided to run it on my office line. Setting it up with our Asterisk PBX was pretty straightforward.

When you sign up with SpinVox they give you a DID (Direct Inward Dial) number to forward your calls too. They tell you to setup call forward no answer (CFNA) and call forward busy (CFB) to direct to that DID number.

I have the calls coming in to my DID at the church forwarding to a ring group that rings (ringall) my desk phone at church, my desk phone at home and the soft phone on my laptop. I setup another ring group that dials the external DID given to me by SpinVox (just put in the phone number followed by #). I then set the “Destination if no answer” on my initial ring group to the ring group that calls the SpinVox DID.

So far it is working great, I am amazed at how accurate SpinVox is at converting speech to text.

For those of you who are interested in an open source VoIP PBX but don’t have the time or desire to build your own Asterisk box, Fonality is releasing the Trixbox Appliance. Trixbox is the new name for Asterisk@Home, the platform we currently run at church. Asterisk@Home 2.7 is working well for us, although we do look forward to upgrading soon so that we can take advantage of the new features in trixbox.

Pricing runs from $999 for a base VoIP only appliance to $3,199 for an enterprise unit with support for two T1s.

Digium, the creater of Asterisk, is also releasing a smaller appliance, designed for 2 to 50 users. The standard (development) kit is going for $2,195.

Over the past few weeks I have gotten asked several times about what we are doing at St. Mark’s about the date changes for the start and end of Daylight Savings Time (DST). The US Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in August 2005 that moves the start of DST three weeks earlier and the end one week later.

We looked at every component, operating system and application for possible issues with the Daylight Savings Time change. Of course, some are more critical than others.

We started with Windows/Exchange/Good Mobile Messaging knowing that they would be affected most by the changes. Microsoft recommends the following order for applying patches:

(Note that Microsoft has different guidance for organization that rely heavily on Outlook Web Access.)

For the first step we manually patched our Windows 2003 servers, this went smoothly for us.
We used WSUS to push out the operating system patches to our Windows XP desktops.
After step 3 we had to update Good Messaging Server to 4.9.3. Then we ran the Exchange Calendar Update tool. We didn’t have to immediately update our Palm OS Treos because we have them set to use network time and we don’t use any of the native applications. We probably will get to updating them later on.

As for our Linux boxes, all of them are running Centos 4.4 and are patched (via yum) with the latest tzdata packages, they also are set to use NTP. NTP is running on our Asterisk box, and relies only on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – DST information is handled by the operating system.

We then looked at the various applications we have running and found that all of our applications rely on the operating system for time and date, so no patching was necessary. I would still check on each application and verify that it isn’t affected. Note: Some applications running Java Development Kits or Virtual Machines may need to be updated.

For our Linksys IP SPA-941 and SPA-922 phones we have to update the DST string to:
start=3/8/7/2:0:0;end=11/1/7/2:0:0;save=1

Our surveillance camera vendor, Envysion released a patch for their DVR software, instructions are here.

Our Cisco network infrastructure is all configured to use NTP, so it should be fine but we are looking at the patches.

Others on DST updates:
Jason Powell – 2007 Daylight Savings Time Changes This Year
Tony Dye – DST Update Woes
Techsoup Discussion on DST
Technorati Search: Daylight Savings Time

Microsoft
Cisco

Update: Geeks Are Sexy points to a great site (DSTPatch.com) for addressing DST issues.

After a successful few months with PhoneGnome, I looked at how much we were paying per month for Verizon (around $30) and the VocalNet service ($14.99) and said that it just wasn’t worth it for the amount we use our home phone. Sherry and I both have cell phones and we have plenty of minutes on our plan. I was considering canceling when a friend of mine referred me to SunRocket. SunRocket is a VoIP only player similar to Vonage and is in the number two spot in the market.

They have a deal where you can pay $199 for the year and get unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. The disadvantage compared to the PhoneGnome setup I had before is there is no backup and or traditional 911 support (SunRocket does provide Enhanced Emergency 911), but we have our cell phones for that.

I ordered it and they assigned us a temporary number to use until we port our home number. We ported our number on Monday and it is working well. What is cool is that you get to keep the temporary number at no extra cost, so I setup up with distinctive ring and the fax machine picks it up.

If you are interested in signing up, click here to give me credit for the referral.

We have been toying with a new video calling service from SightSpeed. We are using it in two different ways, first we are using it to allow Father Anthony to host meetings on college campuses from his home. Second, I have started an online small group with a few guys who are spread out around the country but still want to involved in a small group.

In the first setup, Father Anthony was using a video camera connected to his computer via firewire and a headset. At the University of Maryland – College Park, I setup a computer with a webcam, projector and conferencing microphone. Father Anthony gave a word and answered questions from a group of about 15 students.

I had a hard time getting a good shot with the webcam and the only Internet connection available was wireless (and it wasn’t reliable). Otherwise, once we got going it went pretty well (except for a few seconds of lost communication thanks to the spotty wireless). The video and audio was clear on both sides and the interaction was almost as good as if Father Anthony was there himself.

We are working on putting together a case that would have a video camera, computer, mic, speakers, and a projector all in one that we could send out to universities for video meetings. That would allow us to avoid all the setup issues and an assure good quality audio and video. We also are asking the students to work on reserving rooms with wired ethernet connections.

For my online small group, I asked all the members to go out and get a webcam and headset if they did not already have one. I had them install SightSpeed and test it with me before our meeting. I upgraded my SightSpeed Free plan to the Pro plan for $50 year (include free webcam and headset) so that I can host multi-party conferences (up to 4 people). Group members can use the free SightSpeed plan to connect to the conference.

One of the group members couldn’t get SightSpeed to connect, turned out it was because he had a bad proxy set in Internet Explorer (he used Firefox) and SightSpeed was using those settings.

The conference worked pretty well, video was great, but audio wasn’t perfect (I think it may have been due to one of the members poor quality headset or bad internet connections). To get past the bad audio, I had them all call into our conference bridge and we had a great first meeting.

We have our Asterisk phone system setup to receive faxes and forward them to email, it is a handy feature that saves a lot of paper considering that the majority of our faxes are junk. A few days ago, after an extended power outage, when we brought the system back up, fax to email stopped working. A quick investigation found that it would just drop the call whenever it tried to detect the fax tones. I remembered that getting fax to email working initially had been tricky and that the forums had stated that the feature was flaky. I didn’t have the time to troubleshoot but I couldn’t just leave us without fax support. I decided that I could temporarily forward our fax lines to eFax or something similar until I had the time to troubleshoot or upgrade the phone system to the latest version of TrixBox, where faxing is stable.

Before going with eFax I did a little searching and found a lot of discontentment on the web with them. Users were not happy that they kept raising prices and I did want to deal with limits on incoming faxes.

I stumbled upon a free unified messaging service K7.net that channels voicemails and faxes to email for free. They assign you a number with a 206 area code and your account will stay active as long as you receive a call or fax message every 30 days. We have used K7.net for several days now and it works great.

I also found FaxZero, a service that allows you to send free faxes by uploading a doc or PDF. There is a limit of two 3 page faxes per day for the free service and they put an ad on the cover page. It does come in handy when you are in pinch or just need to test faxing.

Well, we have been running on Verizon/PhoneGnome for about a month now and I am pretty happy with it, overall sound quality has been great and everything is working well. It looks like Verizon charges will total to about $25 a month (they have hefty fees and charges) and VocalNet $15 a month, which works out to about $12 more than what I was paying for Vonage.

When I got my bill from Verizon, I found a line connection and order processing charges for over $40. When I had ordered the service the representative specifically said that because I was a returning customer (porting from Vonage), there would be no installation or connection charges. I called Verizon, they apologized for the mistake but said there was nothing they could do about it and I would have to pay the charges, I asked for a supervisor and was told the same thing. I think that if a representative of a company states something and the company agrees that a mistake is made they should do their best to resolve it. I decided to quickly file a complaint online apprising the SCC, FCC and BBB of what had happened (thank God for online forms and copy/paste).

I have to give credit to the SCC (Virginia State Corporation Commission), they emailed a personal response to me 15 minutes later and assigned my case to an investigator. A couple of days later I got a voicemail from a Verizon representative apologizing for what had happened and asking me to call back and discuss a resolution. When I called she offered to credit all the install charges. I am very impressed with the quick turnaround and resolution.

The BBB replied a week later saying they can’t help and the FCC never replied, looks like the SCC is the way to go when it comes to resolving complaint with the local utilities.

We are going to stick to this combination of service for now, it seems to be working well and give us the redundancy we need.

We have had Vonage at home for about three and half years and have been reasonably happy with them. We mainly had two issues, one was that we would be out of phone service during extended power/internet outages and two was that international calls frequently did not go through (when they would connect fine with other providers). I figured we had been with them long enough and it was time for a change, I had been reading up on PhoneGnome lately and it seemed quite interesting.

PhoneGnome is a customized analog terminal adapter (the Sipura SPA-3000) that connects to the internet and an existing phone line. The existing phone line is used to receive calls, dial 911 calls and as a backup during power/internet outages. PhoneGnome can be configured to receive voicemails and send them to email as a .wav file and dial out using any SIP VoIP provider.

I have a choice of Verizon or Cox for local analog phone service, I chose to go with Verizon because it gives me some redundancy (my internet is with Cox) and the wire is buried underground, Cox is strung up on poles and cuts through some trees to get to my house. Verizon has an economy messaging plan that gives you basic dial tone and free incoming calls for $5.50 a month and charges 9.6¢ per outbound call. Caller ID was an extra $7 a month and call waiting $4. I schedule my number to be ported from Verizon on Monday, July 10th.

I ordered PhoneGnome + SoftGnome package for $119.00. SoftGnome allow you to receive and place calls from soft client on your PC anywhere you have an internet connection.

Verizon came a day late on Monday, July 11th to install the phone line, but said there was a problem with the main cable on the street and they would come back another day. A few days later I found out that our number must have ported because we weren’t receiving calls on Vonage, Verizon didn’t leave any notice that they were done with the install (some things never change).

We had a visiting bishop in town so it was a few days before I could connect everything up and check what was going on. Our line with Verizon was active and I connected it to the PhoneGnome box. I connected the PhoneGnome box to our internal wiring.

I could receive calls now, but PhoneGnome would not complete its initial self-configuration process. I emailed their tech support and tried to call, but you cannot reach them directly, you have to leave a message (a little annoying). I got an email response half an hour later to submit a form online detailing the problem. I did so and got a response about an hour later saying that I need to enable stateful pinholes enabled on my Cisco Pix. I did a little research and found that all I had to do was add “fixup protocol sip 5060″ to the configuration. I checked the configuration and found that it was already there.

I decided to bypass the PIX and connnect PhoneGnome directly to my cable modem. I still couldn’t connect, so I emailed PhoneGnome tech support back. Tech support requested that I leave it connected directly to the cable modem and contact them. So this morning, I tried again and this time it worked. Once the initial self-configuration process completed, I put PhoneGnome back behind the PIX and it still worked.

I logged into PhoneGnome’s portal and enable basic voicemail to email and setup an outbound VoIP provider. I picked one of their existing options, VocalNet Gold Flate Rate Service, they are $14.99 for unlimited calling in the US and Canada. I may play with using SIPphone with their 1¢/min calling later on.

So far the combination is working great, Caller ID is passing correctly in both directions and call quality is good. This may be a good option for those who want to have the benefits of VoIP without losing the advantages of the PSTN. PhoneGnome also supports Iotum, a very slick call screening service.

Once I get my Verizon bill, I will do an exact price comparison with Vonage, including taxes and all. I will also post a follow up review once we have been using the service for a while.

I spent several years working in telecom, at Winstar and for small vendors installing traditional hybrid PBX phone systems. I installed mainly Nortel systems, but we did service Avaya (Lucent), Toshiba, Panasonic and NEC on occasion. I originally installed a donated Nortel Norstar 824 with Startalk B Voicemail for the church back around 2000. Over the years we kept expanding it the system, but were limited by the two ports on the Startalk. I looked into upgrading the voicemail and it would be several thousand dollars and we would still be limited on features. The other issue with the Nortel is that programming was complex and it was limited and what it could do.

I began to look into newer hybrid PBX systems, but they were very pricey. At that time we had 8 analog lines and 20 phones, we were looking at $8,000 plus. Not only, was the initial cost high, but we would have to buy proprietary phones, and add expensive cards as we grow. It was around the same time that Asterisk started to gain traction. I played with it for over a year before I felt it was ready for production, my main concern was finding a good VoIP phone at a reasonable price. Late last year Linksys began to roll out good quality VoIP phones at a very reasonable price. Also, the release of Asterisk@Home, now called TrixBox, made installation and administration of Asterisk much easier.

We purchased 20 Linksys SPA-941 Two-Line VoIP Phones, a Polycom SoundStation IP 4000 VoIP Speaker Phone, and a Digium Wildcard TE205P Dual T1 card ( I would recommend getting the newer 207P because it comes with hardware echo cancellation) for less than $5,000 from VoIP Supply. I had an old Adit 600 channel bank sitting in my basement, remnants from my Winstar days, which turned out to be perfect for setting up an additional 24 analog extensions (hence the need for a dual T1 card). We had an extra Sony Vaio P4 2.8 HT 1 GB RAM and 120 GB Hard Disk that we installed the T1 card and setup Asterisk@Home 2.7 on. Ward Mundy over at Nerd Vittles has a great walk through: Newbie’s Guide to Asterisk@Home 2.7: Unabridged Installation and Upgrade Guide. The only thing we had to do different was the configuration for the T1 card and channel bank. We configured the VoIP phones one by one through their web interface, we are researching how to get the automatic provisioning via tftp working. Because our ISDN PRI wasn’t installed yet, we ran on VoIP trunks from Teliax until Cox cut us over.

To ensure good voice quality on the internal lan, we put all the VoIP phones on a separate VLAN, for those without managed switches, this could be accomplished by using a separate switch, isolated from your data network. Note, for those who have heard about sound quality issues with VoIP, this becomes a moot point when you can guarantee quality of service, such as on an internal LAN. The only potential for sound quality issues comes in when you are running calls over the Internet. For business quality service, I recommend routing service over the PSTN for now, with VoIP trunked over the Internet as a backup or secondary option (dial a prefix to route long distance calls over VoIP).

We have now been running the system for over two months on the ISDN PRI without any problems, thank God. We are enjoying the benefits of an enterprise class phone system, voicemail/fax to email, remote extensions and soft clients. We plan on adding at least 20 more phones this summer and setup paging so that school principal can call all the naughty kids to the office.

Recently, we also setup a smaller system for Coptic Orphans, they are running 10 Linksys SPA-941 VoIP phones and 4 analog lines using the Sangoma A200 PCI Card 4 FXO Ports + Echo Cancellation, costing just under $2000, not including the server (another Sony Vaio). This time we kept the fax outside the system to keep things simpler. Installation was fairly straightforward, make sure to follow the driver instructions on the Sangoma card closely, as that we got hung up when we missed one seemingly minor step.

Generally, ISDN PRI is used when you exceed 8 analog lines of service, it works out to be the same price or cheaper and you get the benefits of direct inward dialing (DID), caller ID, faster call setup, and 23 channels available for inbound/outbound calling. Upfront cost is a little higher due to the more expensive cards.

In the past couple months, Linksys had released more VoIP phone models which increase flexibility in planning out a system. If you are in the market for a new phone system, I would seriously consider a similar configuration.

VoIP PBX Links:
Trixbox – Latest version of Asterisk@Home.
Trixbox Asterisk-based PBX virtual machine
Asterisk Open Source PBX - Asterisk is the core PBX powering Trixbox.
Digium – Original Developers of Asterisk, they sell/support PSTN cards and an enterprise grade version of Asterisk.
Linksys – VoIP Phones and analog terminal adapters.
Nerd Vittles – Great guides on installing, configuring and tweaking Trixbox.
Voip Supply – We have been working with Brian Dooley, so far they have been great with us but I did see this post go up yesterday VoIPSupply.com disappoints, again.
Atacomm – Another VoIP equipment vendor.
VoIP Wiki – The best resource for all things VoIP, including driver configs for cards and sample setups.
Fonality – Preconfigured Asterisk VoIP servers, for those who don’t want to get their hands dirty.
Teliax – VoIP Trunking, they allow multiple simultaneous inbound and outbound calls on the same VoIP lines, but they do charge 2 cents a minute for incoming and outgoing traffic. Useful for testing and as a backup service provider.
CounterPath – X-Lite Free is a good soft client but you have to upgrade to transfer calls.
SJ Labs – SJphone is a full featured free soft phone for Windows