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The Telecom Digest for January 30, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 30 : "text" Format
====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:10:51 -0600
From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Cloud-based PBX service
Message-ID: <ZZqdnTWV561GSbnSnZ2dnUVZ_vOdnZ2d@posted.nuvoxcommunications>
In article <1327766899.38345.YahooMailClassic@web111722.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>,
Wes Leatherock <wleathus@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>--- On Fri, 1/27/12, Robert Bonomi <bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com> wrote:
>> Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
>>> Well, Bell sure sold a lot of them when they called them Centrex....
>
>> Yes Bell did, BUT what they were selling was remotely-located,
>> managed, physical PBX service, with hard-wire trunk circuits and
>> dedicated wire-pairs to the customer equipment.
>
>That was centrex-CO. Most Bell centrexes were CU (on customer
>premises). The first one I know of that was served directly out of
>the C.O. was for Bartlesville, Okla., for the Phillips Petroleum
>Company headquarters. I caused quite a stir because of the physical
>plant required, but Phiilips was only a block from the C.O., and a
>study showed it would be cheaper to serve it out of the C.O., which
>was already all 5XB. Phillips requirements would have required
>another 5XB on their premises to handle their needs.
Obviously, a dedicated Centrex on customer premises would not be considered
a 'virtual' PBX by any rational meaning of the word, either. grin
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:32:54 -0600
From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Cloud-based PBX service
Message-ID: <j8udnSupyJ-LdbnSnZ2dnUVZ_r6dnZ2d@posted.nuvoxcommunications>
In article <jg1757$7j9$1@dont-email.me>, Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> wrote:
>On 1/27/2012 5:48 PM, John Levine wrote:
>>>> Could it be that there is a very limited 'need' for pure virtual PBXes?
>>>
>>> Well, Bell sure sold a lot of them when they called them Centrex....
>>
>> Indeed, but that was back when a PBX was couple of racks of noisy
>> equipment that needed a dedicated maintenance guy. Now that a quite
>> usable PBX can be a couple of cards in a PC, the arithmetic is quite
>> different.
>>
>> These days, I'd think the main market for a virtual PBX would be
>> virtual companies where everyone works in a home office, so the
>> location of the PBX is arbitrary anyway.
>>
>>> Sure, but PSTN interconnectivity is now very, very cheap.
>>
>> Agreed. If you pay 1 cpm for outgoing VoIP to the US, that's a lot.
>
>I've thought about using a virtual PBX in the past, but the costs of the
>SIP-capable phones always put me off. I'd like to have a "business"
>line, and the usual auto-attendant features, but I don't want to spend a
>month's worth of income to get it.
>
>Are there other options now?
Asterisk will run on d*mn near any old 386 box you have sitting around.
Reasonably featured SIP phones can be found, new, for around $60
(Polycom Soundpoint IP 320 or 321), and a refurb 4-line Linksys is just
over $70. And you can find used phones on eBay for much less. Beyond
that, you can use POTS phones with Asterisk, either with 'line cards'
in the PC -- with access to any 'advanced' features you want via '*" codes
(possibly with a switch-hook 'flash' required) -- or an external analog
telephone adapter. I see 1-4 port cards on eBay for around $25/port,
in various combinations of FXS or FXO ports.
A SIP phone with -all- the bells-and-whistles you could possibly want is the
Aastra 57i, circa $300 list, but readily available under $200.
See
http://pbxinaflash.com
for a "near plug-and-play" Asterisk package,
It's a Centos Linux distribution, with Asterisk and your choice of scads
of add-ons for it, all in a single install.
They've even got a add-on module specifically for configuring the Aastra
phone into the system. <grin>
Date: 29 Jan 2012 00:14:13 -0500
From: "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Config advice for asterisk?
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1201282342110.68826@joyce.lan>
Speaking of asterisk, can someone suggest a good source of configuration
advice for asterisk?
I currently have a SIP phone on my home LAN that is set up with external
providers for inbound and outbound calling but it's just a phone, no voice
mail, no three-way calling, no baffling voice jail menus. So I also have
an old laptop that's running FreeBSD, and I've installed asterisk from the
ports collection, currently version 1.8.8. Now what?
I'd like to start with ordinary stuff like voice mail and three-way
calling, eventually do fancier stuff like announcements to tell me which
of my three VoIP numbers an incoming call is arriving on. (It's in the SIP
header which my phone isn't smart enough to display on its own.) I've
looked at the O'Reilly asterisk book which is full of advice for stuff I
don't care about like interfacing to external phone lines, and doesn't
seem to correspond very well any anything I actually want to do.
Any suggestions where to find simple canned configs and related advice?
I'm a reasonably competent programmer, so something that explained the
programming model as well as giving examples would be nice.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.
http://jl.ly
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:59:13 -0800
From: dplatt@radagast.org (Dave Platt)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Cloud-based PBX service
Message-ID: <hq3fv8-le7.ln1@radagast.org>
In article <jg22p8$6jq$1@reader1.panix.com>,
David Scheidt <dscheidt@panix.com> wrote:
>Having said that, I don't have a current hosted provider
>recommendation. If you've got the technical chops to run a server
>your self, but just don't want to deal with it in your house, it's
>quite possible to run an asterisk installation on a virtual server
>hosted by someone else.
A word of caution on that one... some Asterisk functions require
fairly tight timing control (low latency and fairly high timing
accuracy) on the server. Audio-conference mixing seems to be one of
these. Many virtual-server setups do not guarantee sufficiently tight
timing to the virtualized clients for this to work well, and audio
quality can suffer.
--
Dave Platt <dplatt@radagast.org> AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:
http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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