GrandCentral via Asterisk

Tue Jan 20 12:26:53 MST 2009

Okay, 

You can go a few ways:

1) Call Jim Rhodes at Rhino Equipment and buy one of his pre-engineered hardware drop and dial systems (Trixbox I believe).

2) Build your own:

Let's spec this out to get good quality VOIP with good equipment:

First, you can end up paying a good deal for lines from the phone company.  You want to judge your expansion accordingly and order T1/ISDN or fractional frame cards instead of phone line cards (referred to as FX0 cards) and circuits from the telco.  [Note, ordering the lines can be tricky - be sure to completely spec and research your project].

FAST Processor and sufficient memory with no less than RAID 1 (hardware preferred) for read/write speed. 
FX0 cards come in 4 line cards which gives us the 2 in and 2 out available from Digium or Rhino Equipment.
I also would add a nice IAX2 or SIP trunk defined via source and destination to the outbound provider also.  

Installing the cards, since they are PCI cards, can become and IRQ issue, some motherboards are more efficient with FX0 and Digium cards, see voip-info.org and Digium sources.  Also, be prepared to do some PCI BIOS work to ensure that one IRQ is not kicking off something or power management causing the warbling sound as the ethernet card wakes on lan.  

The last peice that can be especially problematic is your VOIP handset or softphones.  You can buy low end ATA's like Grandsteam that you plug a handset into (even cordless ones will work here), or get nice VOIP handsets of all quality. 

The last thing to consider is your bandwidth and QoS network.  If you have 10baseT network cards, no switch and extensive bottlenecks your voice quality will suffer before ever getting to the far side of the connection.  So, obviously good downstream and upsteam is optimal.  As you can see you would best get a nice  T1 or ISDN with 1/2 of the circuits applied to data and the other 1/2 to voice (there are some pros and cons industry wide) with 1000baseT throughout so that would entail an additional splitter or  channel bank.

By this time you might have just bought a Cisco Digital T1 packet voice network module.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps259/product_data_sheet09186a0080194e20.html

To play with Voip, all you really need is a computer.  I built a home based Trixbox on a 2.0Ghz Fry's barebones system I built in 1998 custom that worked fine.  My SIP trunk was axvoice.com and my VOIP phones were soft and a Grandsteam ATA plugged into a free analog phone.

It worked. The quality was acceptable enough to run with full recording on.  I could enhance the recordings to  separate out portions of the analog signal and enhance.  Everyone could hear me better than my BlackBerry at times.   It rang whatever line I wanted including my cell phone (with unlimited calls to home, I could then grab and outside line and dial/talk for free) and it did all this over cox cable, but it took me (with VOIP and Linux experience) about 10 hours to build and setup as well as about 1 hour to maintain.

If you are seriously interested in having assistance for this solution and want rates  contact me offlist.

I am confident that anyone on this list is capable of building one of these systems, given time and accessing the various VOIP resources.

www.Obnosis.com |  http://wiki.obnosis.com | http://hackfest.obnosis.com (503)754-4452
PLUG HACKFESTS - http://uat.edu Second Saturday of Each Month Noon - 3PM
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:07:37 -0800
From: klsmith2020 at yahoo.com
Subject: RE: GrandCentral via Asterisk
To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us

Okay, all this sounds really cool.  What would it cost a small business to set one of these up?

Say a simple 2 inbound lines, 2 outbound lines, and a fax.  3 or 4 simple handsets (What kind of handsets do you use?)  cost?

Is this strictly VOIP?  VOIP has shown to have lower quality the few times I have been exposed to it.  

My point of reference is 1992 or 1993 when one would buy an ATT or one of the many other small business phone switches for maybe $3,000 - $5,000.

Also someone mentioned buying a trunk.  What is the number of lines?

I get the feeling I'm looking at this through 15 year old technology and things have changes significantly.  For instance I worked at a place that had a trunk of about 100 lines as I recall.

------------------------
Keith Smith

--- On Tue, 1/20/09, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold at obnosis.com> wrote:
From: Lisa Kachold <lisakachold at obnosis.com>
Subject: RE: GrandCentral via Asterisk
To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 9:15 AM

Yes,  I agree with jd at twingeckos.com:

I have been a Stromberg Carlson Central Office DCO Technician,  Senior Voice/Data Network Analyst for Nike, VOIP Engineer for AffinityVoipTelecom.com and Support Engineer Manager for RhinoEquipment.com 

Asterisk can do a great deal all based on the configuration files in /etc/asterisk.
Fonality does not have deep technical support, rather providing cost based services and failing to fix breakage.
Since there are so many different applications of Asterisk, Trixbox, FreePBX this is a good place for profit for the entrepreneur.
Compiled sources is a better solution, obviously.
FreePBX is the magic behind the solution allowing a GUI to setup most of the user applications, testing and CMS.

All asterisk VOIP products can be a huge security issue, but the spyware was especially shameful.

This solution with PBXInAFlash is an EASY solution that will be able to provide a
 fine dialaround, voicemail, record all calls, Unlimited calls to home (from Cell provider) for dial around to get unlimited cell minutes from SIP trunk line, CMS, click to fax from Windows, etc.  

You can configure your autoattendant, provide even an outside line with a password, get a nice SIP signature for your email.  Call sip people, put a few VOIP Clients on your linux boxes and a nice hunt group (try grandstream ATA in bathroom, then call my Linux desktop, then my laptop. then my office phone, finally my cell phone) for any incoming call.  You can setup a DialAVOIP Technician line?  DialAClownJoke would be nice on the main menu?  Setup record all calls, then GabCast call to Cox Cable, or your Senator, or Bank in comedic ways?

www.Obnosis.com |  http://wiki.obnosis.com | http://hackfest.obnosis.com (503)754-4452
PLUG HACKFESTS - http://uat.edu Second Saturday of Each Month Noon -
 3PM
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:35:07 -0700
Subject: Re: GrandCentral via Asterisk
From: jd at twingeckos.com
To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us

The main reason I recommend PBXInAFlash over Trixbox is that 
1. After the famous root exploit pre-installed spyware incident I don't trust Fonality.
2. They have a long history of delivering broken installs but have been getting better in the last year or so.

3. They say they're an open source project but don't really act like one.
4. Trixbox is RPM based , and PBXInAFlash uses Centos 5 but compiles all of the asterisk components from source (which is what you have to do most of the time to fix Trixbox).

5. Unlike a lot of other distributions PBXInAFlash doesn't try to hide that FreePBX is doing all of he real magic that those distributions taking credit for.
6. PBXInAFlash works reliably and doesn't have everything under the sun thrown in that you don't need. 

That said, Kerry Garrison's tutorials are pretty good.
In either case if you want to learn start here:
http://dumbme.mbit.com.au/
http://dumbme.mbit.com.au/piaf/piaf_without_tears.pdf

http://dumbme.mbit.com.au/trixbox2/trixbox2_without_tears.pdf

JD--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC

jd at twingeckos.com
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com

Emo Philips  - "I was sleeping the other night, alone, thanks to the exterminator."

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 10:01 PM, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold at obnosis.com> wrote:

Yea Howdy!

Trixbox ala Kerry Garrison is a really easy PBX setup (complete with everything you need for an AutoAttendant, Voicemail, Fax, CMS, dial around and through apps)  that installs from an ISO:  http://www.trixbox.org/downloads

Kerry Garrison offers easy to follow videos here: asterisktutorials.com  - search for trixbox.

Simple setup How-Tos exist at voip-info.org

Course you can get a fine PSTN SIP trunk from axvoice.com for $9.99 a month or buy FX0 cards for a phone line (or lines).

You can buy a drop and dial asterisk based configuration from Jim Rhodes over at Rhinoequipment.com.

I think my name is still on some of the bash scripts for the Trixbox 2.0 release from contributions?

www.Obnosis.com |  http://wiki.obnosis.com | http://hackfest.obnosis.com (503)754-4452

PLUG HACKFESTS - http://uat.edu Second Saturday of Each Month Noon - 3PM

Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:19:24 -0700
Subject: Re: GrandCentral via Asterisk
From: jd at twingeckos.com

To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us

Asterisk is the engine that enables pstn/voip connectivity (think linux kernel).

Asterisk when bundled with other open source software can do all the things GrandCentral does and more provided you give it the connectivity it needs to do so (PSTN or voip).  A good place to start is with PBXInAFlash (pbxinaflash.org).

JD--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC
jd at twingeckos.com
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com

Katharine Hepburn  - "Death will be a great relief. No more interviews."

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Kurt Granroth <kurt+plug-discuss at granroth.com> wrote:

I know that there are some people on this list that use Asterisk a

decent bit.  Those that do... are you familiar with GrandCentral?  If

so, how do they compare?

http://www.grandcentral.com/home/features

I really like the control that something like GrandCentral gives you.

The ability to choose where you receive a call (home, cell, work, etc)

based on who is calling or when they are calling is a killer feature for me.

Alas, there are just too many potential gotchas with that service to

really commit to it other than as a play-thing (or as a number passed

out freely to businesses and warranty cards and the like).  What I would

like is that kind of control... but in a way that *I* control it all!

So no calls being routed through a 3rd party server; no voicemails

stored on their server; no need to upload all of my contacts to a search

company; etc.

Asterisk seems like it might be able to do all that... but who can tell?

 Their site is horribly disorganized and when you do find a "feature"

page, they spend all their time in an acronym frenzy.

So... does anybody know?

Kurt

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