Download audio file (TS-235829.mp3)

Download : TS-235829.mp3

Michael Graves and I have both talked about how we think these phones are a revolution for the SoHo market. How will they be supported? Who will set them up, provision them, get them working with different  pbx and SIP providers? Michael’s most recent blog post talks about the Gigaset DE380IPR, the inexpensive wideband capable desk phone.

Our guest today is Anthony Stankus, Gigaset Communications product Manager for North America. The Gigaset IP DECT products which include: A580IP system (base and handset), S675IP system (base and handset), A58H accessory handset, S67H accessory handset, SL78H high-end accessory handset.

Tony will be with us on the ZipDX wideband conference bridge to answer these questions and any others you can collect.

More on these phones:

Latest mgraves.org on the new Gigaset phones

Graves On SOHO VoIP » Newsworthy: Siemens Gigaset S675IP

Alan Lord’s The Open Sourcerer.com

My own modest consumer review

Siemens Phones - voip-info.org

Steven Perich » Blog Archive » Siemens Gigaset IP phones

Siemens Gigaset S685IP VoIP phone (Personal Computer World)

DECT phones arrive

IRC Transcript 2009-07-10

The contest consisted of finding the movie whose soundtrack featured the VoIP-appropriate song “Calling You”. Karl was first to type  “Bagdad Cafe” in our IRC channel #voip-users-conference on Freenode.net. The song is a beautiful, haunting piece of music and I would like to use an excerpt from time to time in our opening or closing theme.

Thanks again to Tony Stankus, Product Manager of Emerging Technologies Gigaset Communications USA, LLC for providing this phone as a prize and for being a great guest. I am counting on Tony to come back and tell us when the phone features evolve, which they do from time to time.

Early on, we spoke about the lack of a mute button on the S675IP, and lo and behold, they added one to firmware, which is easy to update. The phone shows a message when new firmware is ready, and asks if you want to update. See the original post for more articles on these phones.

Thanks to Dave Michels, who met him at Glue Con, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and CTO Evan Cooke join us to discuss their “cloud telephony” offering. You can prepare by getting a free account and checking out what can be done with the platform. Note that speech to text (transcription) is a part of it.

“Twilio provides an in-cloud API for voice communications that leverages existing web development skills, resources and infrastructure.”

Twilio are giving away a free netbook book each week to developers that build cool voice applications: http://www.twilio.com/contest/netbook/

Jeff Lawson will be speaking at OSCon July 20-24th later this month about open source, telephony, and Twilio.

Spend an hour and a half with Matt Florell talking about VICIDIAL, the Open Source Call Center software, and plenty of other subjects including CentOS, Ubuntu, resource issues, hardware for robust asterisk systems.

About VICIDIAL:

VICIDIAL is an enterprise class, open source, call center suite in use by many large call centers around the world.

VICIDIAL has a full featured predictive dialer. It can also function as an ACD for inbound calls, or closer calls coming from VICIDIAL outbound fronters. It is capable of inbound, outbound, and blended call handling. VICIDIAL even allows you to have agents logged in from remote locations.

IRC Transcript 2009-06-26

Part 1: (Talkshoe) Download audio file (TS-224823.mp3)

Part 2 (ZipDX recording served from CloudFront): Download audio file (ZipDX20090619.mp3)

We’ve tried to get people to talk about this before, but we didn’t get a deep explanation. Here’s a chance to ask Nir, who did a compelling presentation at AMOOCON on Asterisk on EC2, to clear up any of those nagging questions you might have.

Nir’s AMOOCON presentation, Dynamic Asterisk Scalability with Amazon EC2 and videos are available on the AMOOCON site. Nir’s company is Greenfield Tech.

Nir is also the author of Asterisk Gateway Interface 1.4 and 1.6 Programming

Jerry Shuman of Perssonas (@theagent) joined the call with some great input, too.

IRC Transcript 2009-06-19

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@voipusers @e4voip @mjgraves @viperdudeuk @steely_glint @teamforrest @fredposner @asteriskbot

Transcription

Nir Simionovich: I have to admit that the first person that got me heavily into EC2 is actually here and it’s John Todd. I’ve been dealing over the past two years a lot with Asterisk and Virtualization mostly VMware, and one day on the list there was this question about Asterisk and VMware if it’s doable, what is the performance, and I actually replied to it, and John came up with the idea, “Well, there’s been some talk about EC2 and Cloud computing,” and I said, “Well, why not? Let’s give it a try and see what we can do.” As time progress and what’s really progressively fast00 was the time of the Israeli elections and I was working with a company in Israel that was doing outbound dialing to get people to come into to vote. So, we ended up building the entire infrastructure of EC2 because in order to generate as many calls as we needed to, there was simply no infrastructure big enough here in Israel to hold like 32 servers. So, we ended up opening multiple EC2 accounts and doing everything from EC2 and it worked really well and that actually sprung everything into like real rapid motion and it got me heavier and heavier into EC2.

Zeeek: I think the first question in most people’s mind before they know anything about EC2 and I don’t know how many people know much, I don’t know a lot. I know about S3. I’ve used it. We use S3 and CloudFront of services extensively as somebody just posted the Amoocon talks, that nearest talk is number 27 and if you’re looking in IRC, you can see that, the link, otherwise, just find the talk number 27 on Amoocon.de.

Anyway, Nir, the first perception of EC2, you have to wonder because for years, Asterisk has been this full thing. You’ve got a Linux box and you download it and you install it. It’s fairly easy to install if you have any experience in Linux at all, and then the thing is working and you got it on your machine and you play with it, and you know, it’s free and blah blah blah, but when you’re doing an EC2 Instance of it, I guess one of the main reasons to do this is because it’s inexpensive but it’s extensible, right? During the elections if there were thousands of thousands of calls being made, you’re not going to be able to do that on your old 386 that you threw together, right?

Nir Simionovich: No. That would have been impossible. The thing was that we actually needed a way to expand really fast. Now, we have an infrastructure here in Israel of servers. We have like six different tools beyond servers and because we were doing also media and outbound dialing and we’re handling a lot of capacity here in Israel, we got limited by the number of concurrent calls we’re able to per machine. So, sure we’re able to push it up to about 240 concurrent calls, 260 per server. So that wasn’t big deal but we needed more and the idea of using the EC2 just sprung up saying, “OK, let’s see what we can get out of that specific system.” So, we ended up going over there initiating what’s called the medium AMI. That’s AMI based on, I believe it’s a dual core and it has 8 gigs of RAM and 160 gigabyte of disk, and we created our own AMI image, sprung those up and each one was able to get about 120 concurrent channels on it with media and we’re really happy because we could now expand as much as we want.

As you said, it’s pretty easy to get Asterisk up and running on your own machine. It’s pretty easy also to get Asterisk up and running on Amazon EC2. The main problem after you get it up and running is to make sure that the work that you’ve done actually stays there because the one thing that, for me at least, is pretty annoying about Amazon EC2 is that once you bring up an instance inside EC2, if you shut it down, it will simply go away. It will get deleted. So you have to maintain your work somewhere else and going about on expanding your system with EC2 requires a fairly new skill set that most Asterisk developers currently don’t yet have, but it’s like completely mashing up the entire voice world that Asterisk is pretty much dominant in the web world where most, let’s say, IVR developers are not that accustomed to working with.

Fred: Hi, this is Fred. I was wondering on 260 things, you said that you’re limited to about 260 calls per server and that seems a little low for a dedicated hardware back and I was wondering what kind of setup you were using or what the limiting factor was.

Nir Simionovich: Well, actually the limiting factor was not Asterisk itself. It was actually the number of file descriptors we had opened on the box and the network that we had, and the boxes themselves were just dual cores. These were old IBM x335 servers and we were getting about 240, 260 concurrent calls, concurrent channels with media which were interacting with the database and external sources and the application itself was pretty heavy. So, we ended up running into a load average on the box itself around four, 4 ½ and we didn’t want to breach that one. We could have gone higher. That is for sure. That shouldn’t be a problem. Yeah, we could have gone higher to about 360, 400 but we didn’t want to. We were afraid of actually harming the quality of the call.

Man 3: Yeah. I’m curious if you’re using Amazon Elastic Block Store for persistent drive space for any of this architecture and if you’re noticing any sort of timing issues with it?

Nir Simionovich: Well, I have to admit that we hadn’t used it. We didn’t see any reason to do so but the minute I’ll do a test of that, I’ll be sure to publish those.

Man 3: Thanks.

Zeeek:  I can kind of see what EC2 is about but as far as Asterisk goes, first of all, I assume that someone has—you have the possibility now just finding instances that are already built and kind of throwing them up there? In other words, rather than starting from the beginning, someone’s already done this work, correct?

Nir Simionovich: That is correct. There was a lot of work done by Eric Chamberlain from Voxilla. The main issue that EC2 suffered from, the main kernel issue that each of the ES, let’s say, the standard AMI images that EC2 used was a different clock being compiled into the kernel and that caused issues with things about, let’s say, conference calls. It will just come up wrong. What Eric did is create a new image that is based off a 1,000 hertz clock which is pre-set. I think its 1,000 kilohertz, sorry. The thing was that—what Eric created was something really optimized for Asterisk to be working off Amazon EC2 and that made a lot of things in a lot of the work. It took a lot of the edge of working with Asterisk and the EC2 because it came in a pre-packaged AMI. You can just take it, you can modify it, whatever you want, and you can get your systems up and running really, really fast.

I know of a few companies that actually managed, like these virtual call centers. What they do is actually, they initiate small instances of EC2 according to the customers they have and what they do, they just initiate the instances as they go along. That means that if somebody right now is working and they need like four hours to do an outbound campaign or 10 hours to do an inbound campaign, then they’ll just bring out a proper EC2 image saying, “OK, work off of that,” and they will just rented you a call center per hour and it’s a completely new way of thinking about how to do call centers and how to visualize PBX systems and host PBX systems. So it brings a lot of possibilities back into the mix.

Zeeek: Jim is asking you, Nir, in IRC about how you distribute the load among multiple EC2 instances. It’s a good question. I’m trying to picture this stuff and it’s pretty foreign to me.

Nir Simionovich: Well, basically what we did, we used carriers that we’re able to distribute the load according to what we needed. We just gave them all the IP numbers, all the public IP numbers of our EC2 Instances and they actually distributed the loads for us, but we could have also easily taken, let’s say, an open sear, put it in front of the system and use that to distribute the load to each of the instances.

Zeeek: Other question I had was with regard to configuring. So, I don’t even understand how you access this. This looks to you like you’re going to login to it and it just looks like any box, is that it? You go with SSH into it?”

Nir Simionovich:  …basically, Amazon EC2 is based on Xen.  So, essentially what you’re getting is, you’re getting your own Xen domain.  Basically, imagine that, if you’re familiar with Xen, then imagine that EC2 is like this enormous Xen dom zero that operates, and whatever host, whatever AMI you issue, or you initiate, you go about and you actually create your own dom inside that, let’s say that big cloud.  Now what you get is your own virtual machine.  So, you get a machine that you can SSH into it, and work with it, and do whatever you want.  It behaves exactly like a normal machine.  Sure, you have no control, well, you have some level of control about where it is located in the world, in terms of geographically saying, “Okay, I want to be in this specific data center or in that specific data center”.  But, again, that level of control doesn’t give you a lot of ability to say, “Okay, if I initiate two, or four, or five different AMI instances”, that they will be located in the same area.  And that is the main problem with using EC2, because the normal, let’s say, coupling of servers that we are very much accustomed to when building Asterisk environments doesn’t exist there.  There is no ability to say, “Okay, if I initiate database, then the database is sitting right next to the application, and there’s no latency between those two.  So, if you do that, that’s kind of a hassle.  So, you need to go about, and say, “Okay, we need to decouple our application.  We need to decouple our information storage”, and say, “Okay, we’re going to move everything outward, into a completely new location, and have Asterisk work off of that”.  And that requires new skills.

Zeeek:  No question about that.

Nir Simionovich:  By the way, somebody on the IRC just said that Open Series is now called Open SIPS, that’s not entirely correct.  Open Series is now referred to as Camie-Camiellio[sp?], and Open SIPS is a fork of Open [unintelligible], so these are two different things.

Dean Collins:  Randy, it’s Dean Collins.  I just wanted to jump in.  So, are you going to set up a consultancy practice offering this type of technology, and if so, what’s the URL for your company, so people know how to get in touch with you?

Nir Simionovich:  Well, okay.  The easiest way to get to my website is [omitted, since it was an incorrect address].

Zeeek:  We’ll have to remember to post that in the…

Nir Simionovich:  Yeah, well actually, it’s…

Zeeek:  …BBC site.  Oops.  Ooh, bad URL.  Bad.

Nir Simionovich:  [laughs]  Yeah.  Or, if you’re able, well, because most of the audience here are English speakers, it’ll be a lot easier if you go into www.greenfieldtech.net, then you’ll get to the same place, it seems.

Zeeek:  How did John Todd get involved in EC2, by the way?

John Todd:  Because it seemed to be fairly obvious, that in order to do something really big that scaled, that EC2 is a good platform for it.  There have been, previously there have been some people doing work with EC2 doing experiments, really.  But kind of a formalized test with actual results that’s been kind of lacking.  We still don’t have really good, quantifiable tests with EC2, saying we can handle this many media channels on a particular instance, before we start to see pattern problems.  And, well, really, the whole point of my talking with Neer[sp?], actually, and a couple of other people, was to see if we could get some quantifiable results on Amazon’s network.  Because, of course, Voice Over IP is very subject to things like packet loss and jitter.  I wanted to see if Amazon’s network was going to hold up to Asterisk, or RTP, in general, operating over their fairly large infrastructure, and all, I guess, non quantifiable reports seemed to indicate that it does work just fine.  But I still am having…

John Todd:  I don’t have any actual numbers saying that, you know, for these three days, we tested RTP streams, and we saw this packet loss to this provider.  My goal is to get Amazon to offer, and this still may happen, we had some brief conversations with the folks at Amazon, but I’d love to see them offer a service where service providers, meaning PSTN termination providers, could interconnect with Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure at no cost, and those voice packets would be transmitted at no cost to the instance users.  In other words, don’t pay for the bits in and out of Amazon’s network if you’re using this particular service provider, who is bearing the burden of network interconnect.  That would make this much more appealing for VoIP services, and application providers to outsource their activity to Amazon, and I think that that’s really just waiting for kind of a critical mass of EC2 infrastructure stuff to happen…

Zeeek:  And of course, you were channeling Don Quixote, as always, John.

John Todd:  Yeah, to some degree.  But actually, Amazon is pretty clueful, if they see this as a way to increase the number of hours people use the machines, then I don’t think that, you know, their network costs, I think, are pretty close to break even, unless you’re doing something like video.  But I think anything you’ve got to do to encourage people to get onto their system, they would be interested in.  One of the big services that is based on EC2 and Asterisk is Toolio[sp?].  All of their infrastructure right now, from what I’ve understood them to say, is that it is running on EC2, scalably, with Asterisk as the back end.  And, as a matter of fact, they’re going to be giving a talk about that at AstriCon this fall, in October.

Zeeek:  There was a question about, and a very good question from Jim, about bandwidth cost calculations.  Now, you did give us some idea, Neer[sp?], during your presentation about the costs.  Why don’t you run over that a little?  Whatever you can, or want to reveal about the cost of the campaign, some of the numbers.

Nir Simionovich:  Well, the calculation is based on…well, okay.  Let’s start from square one.  Amazon EC2 economics, the way they calculate your usage is a little different.  That means that they calculate your usage according to your instances.  For example John, I’ll just punch it up for a second.  For example, they would go about and say, “Okay, for every gigabyte that you consume, up to a certain level, you will pay something like, let’s say a cent”.  Now, if you know that specific calculation, and you’re able able to calculate what is your projected traffic, and you can calculate you’re projected traffic according to the codecs you use, and how many concurring calls you have, and how many sessions you…and how much time you will be operating the system, you’re pretty much easy to say, “Okay, I can go about and say, okay, I’ll be utilizing, let’s say 800 gigabytes over the next two weeks of traffic”.  So, you’re able to say, “Okay, 800 gigabytes of traffic, multiplied by one cent, that’s eight dollars worth of traffic”.  So, that’s how the math actually works.  Now, to say that there is a calculator that enables you to calculate that exactly, it’s a little hard to say.  I don’t think that one exists, but the math, in itself, isn’t that complex to do.  In general, just use any type of bandwidth calculator that you’ll be using for any VoIP application, and just calculate your, let’s say, megabit per second ratio, and once you have that, just multiply that by the number of seconds you have over a course of your operation, and you’ll have your number.

Zeeek:  It’s interesting, Dave EG[sp?], from EGW, we have a customer who uses EC2 for their telephony apps, multiple Asterisk instances, front ended by Open SIPS, you have some logic which brings up and down additional Asterisk instances for peak load times, which is basically, Neer[sp?], what you did during that election campaign.  Interesting.

Nir Simionovich:  That’s exactly the same.  Same idea.

Zeeek:  Yeah.  No question, this is great for things that you pointed out, and one of those was, hey, you’ve got this project that lasts, what was that, three days, is that right?  Something like that?

Nir Simionovich:  It was three days worth of dial out, and it was operating about ten to twelve hours every day.  So, we got out about 36 hours, 38 hours worth of dial out.

Zeeek:  It would be incredibly hard to put together a hardware platform, and stupid [laughs], to put together a hardware platform for three days, unless, you know, you worked in a hardware store, or something, to do this project of over a couple of days.  Even if it was a few weeks, whereas this is one of the things where…

Nir Simionovich:  That’s exactly the case.

Zeeek:  The whole EC2 thing shines.

Nir: This is exactly what it pays. Awhile back, John and I did some mass going about and saying, trying to understand if there is a validity to actually going about and running a host PBX on top of Amazon EC2, and we realized that if you operate for 24 hours, a full system is operating 24 hours, then there is no real usage for Amazon EC2 as is. If you’re a business which is doing a hosted environment, then Amazon EC2 is the best you’ll find, really. It gives you that immediate quantifiable capacity that is really, really fast,but if you’re on business, let’s say, if you’re in an office and needed a PBX system, then Amazon EC2 isn’t really the thing for you because you can get an equivalent server with inside dedicated hosting facility today for like $59 a month and that one already has 16 gigabytes of traffic with it, maintenance, managed hosting and so on and so on. So, some services make sense working off of EC2, some don’t. If you’re going to say, “OK, we want to move into the Cloud,” that specific move has to be calculated and has to be tested, let’s say, economic wise.

Zeeek: The agent has posted—now, I’ve seen calculators for S3 before and this is it, right? Well, I’m going to read this because I don’t have time to make a short URL, Calculator.S3.AmazonEWS.com/calc5.html.

Nir: That will give some insights as to how much money you’ll need to pay.

Zeeek: I think it’s worth trying a project, maybe messing with it to see. So once you’ve got your instance ready to go, I mean, if the elections are held next weekend, are you ready to bring that same instance up? What’s involved in bringing that back to life? Can it be done?

Nir: Yeah, it’ll take about five minutes.

Zeeek: So where is this thing stored? I mean, it’s in your account and you just click, you just check a box and click submit and you can bring it back up or is it something locally stored somewhere with you or what?

Nir: It’s exactly how you described. What you do is, once you build your own box, you can actually create your own AMI image that contains all your software. That’s exactly what we did. Once we had our own AMI image, the private image, we can then store inside S3 and what will happen is, the minute we may want it, we’ll just go into our AWS account and we’ll just say, “OK, we need now five instances of this specific AMI running,” and we’ll just click that and punch it up immediately. No big deal.

Zeeek: Interesting. The agent is talking about the ElasticFox extension and start playing with EC2. I have absolutely no notion of what that is but hopefully, either you do or he’ll call in and tell us about it.

Nir: Yeah. ElasticFox is a Firefox extension that enables you to play with Amazon EC2 instead of working with the web interface. It’s only for Firefox, that’s one. I think a combination of both ElasticFox and the web interface as is because the new web interfaces they’ve created which is currently and still in beta is, in my view, just a bit easier to use than the ElasticFox, just a bit.

Zeeek: OK, and as I mentioned, IRC, I use a Firefox plug-in sometimes for S3 or for CloudFront. So, I assume it’s a similar concept. You just kind of dumps it down.

Nir: Yeah, similar concept. Yeah.

Zeeek: It’s kind of amazing to me that—and this goes back to what we were saying with John Todd that there’s no good reason to think that Amazon’s network would allow for real time. The CloudFront thing, the idea there is that you can be serving video and stuff like that and that it will push it out to the edge servers that will be the most efficient. On the other hand, I’m not sure how that translates to VoIP and I’m surprised to learn that they’re able to do the real time. Who knew, you know. That’s the way I feel about it. So it’s kind of surprising that they have the capacity—you don’t have any problem with call quality apparently, right?

Nir: No. Well, let’s say this, as long as you’re working with carriers which were interconnected with, let’s say…

[Music playing]

Zeeek: Yeah. Let me try to find the source of that.

Nir: OK.

Zeeek: That may have been Digium. Hello, Digium. Thank you. They may not. Sorry.

Nir: That was a good one.

Zeeek: Yeah. Well, that’s the Asterisk built-in…

Nir: We can talk over the music.

Zeeek: Frankly, I think that was somebody in Huntsville or else I just happened to click it by accident. Sorry. That happens from time to time.

Nir: Yeah.

Zeeek: Where were we?

Nir: In any case—where were we? Yeah, in any case, we were working with three or four different providers in the U.S. which are considered somewhere around, let’s say the tier 2. Then, usually, these carriers are interconnected on the backbone with links that are very, very efficient and reliable over to Amazon EC2 as long as you’re hosting your instances in the U.S. So, the end result that were, let’s say one of the carriers that we were using was called TSG Global and we were getting about 24 millisecond roundtrip from Amazon EC2 to TSG Global. Now, you’ll run voice over IP on that and will have perfect quality always.

Zeeek: I’m trying of course the agent to call in, trying to figure out because it would be more interesting to have a discussion here than reading the stuff in IRC.

Nir: Yeah, absolutely.

Zeeek: OK. My arguments have won over. He’s going to call. He or she, you never know, right?

Nir: Well, he brought up a very interesting point of how to bundle your own AMI and this is actually what I was talking about, creating your own AMI image. It’s not that simple. I have to be honest. It took me about four or five hours to actually understand how to do it right and it never works from the first try. It’s really annoying. What happens is that you need to take your running machine, your running AMI and you’re creating a raw06:25 image of the hard drive, of the virtual hard drive and then you upload that into S3. That’s complicated to do but if done right it will work on the second or third try. It never works on the first try, never.

Zeeek: OK and we have a bleep from Southwest British Columbia. Can you hear us? Could be the agent, you never know.

Nir: Actually, I’d love to hear about what he just wrote on Openfire XMPP and Red5 Flash Server for video conferencing. That is really interesting because I’ve been trying to play around with Red5 but I have to admit that Flash isn’t really my thing. So, I’d love to hear about that.

Zeeek: OK, the agent is coming out of the wild of Southern California. Who is in the Southwest British Columbia? Say hello. Come on, don’t be shy. We’re waiting for the agent to call in. We have time.

Man 2: What do you do for your logs then here, just logs if you’re just bringing up these instances and using for so many hours and shutting them down? Are you uploading those at some point, back up to S3 or do you just not care about them?

Nir: Well, the application as is doesn’t really carry that much logging into the actual server itself but I have to admit that I never really needed to go about and offload the logs anywhere because we don’t really are about those. CDR’s are kept completely separated from the system but you could offload those into a different machine or you can, before shutting down the system, go back and offload those out of EC2. It shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Or if you really want to, you can use the—it’s not S3—what was that again—it’s called…

Zeeek: CloudFront?

Nir: No, not CloudFront. They’ve got servers where you can actually map a storage device to your AMI and then you can share…”

Nir Simionovich: This is exactly what it pays. Awhile back, John and I did some mass going about and saying, trying to understand if there is a validity to actually going about and running a host PBX on top of Amazon EC2, and we realized that if you operate for 24 hours, a full system is operating 24 hours, then there is no real usage for Amazon EC2 as is. If you’re a business which is doing a hosted environment, then Amazon EC2 is the best you’ll find, really. It gives you that immediate quantifiable capacity that is really, really fast,but if you’re on business, let’s say, if you’re in an office and needed a PBX system, then Amazon EC2 isn’t really the thing for you because you can get an equivalent server with inside dedicated hosting facility today for like $59 a month and that one already has 16 gigabytes of traffic with it, maintenance, managed hosting and so on and so on. So, some services make sense working off of EC2, some don’t. If you’re going to say, “OK, we want to move into the Cloud,” that specific move has to be calculated and has to be tested, let’s say, economic wise. Moderator: The agent has posted—now, I’ve seen calculators for S3 before and this is it, right? Well, I’m going to read this because I don’t have time to make a short URL, Calculator.S3.AmazonEWS.com/calc5.html. Nir Simionovich: That will give some insights as to how much money you’ll need to pay. Moderator: I think it’s worth trying a project, maybe messing with it to see. So once you’ve got your instance ready to go, I mean, if the elections are held next weekend, are you ready to bring that same instance up? What’s involved in bringing that back to life? Can it be done? Nir Simionovich: Yeah, it’ll take about five minutes. Moderator: So where is this thing stored? I mean, it’s in your account and you just click, you just check a box and click submit and you can bring it back up or is it something locally stored somewhere with you or what? Nir Simionovich: It’s exactly how you described. What you do is, once you build your own box, you can actually create your own AMI image that contains all your software. That’s exactly what we did. Once we had our own AMI image, the private image, we can then store inside S3 and what will happen is, the minute we may want it, we’ll just go into our AWS account and we’ll just say, “OK, we need now five instances of this specific AMI running,” and we’ll just click that and punch it up immediately. No big deal. Moderator: Interesting. The agent is talking about the ElasticFox extension and start playing with EC2. I have absolutely no notion of what that is but hopefully, either you do or he’ll call in and tell us about it. Nir Simionovich: Yeah. ElasticFox is a Firefox extension that enables you to play with Amazon EC2 instead of working with the web interface. It’s only for Firefox, that’s one. I think a combination of both ElasticFox and the web interface as is because the new web interfaces they’ve created which is currently and still in beta is, in my view, just a bit easier to use than the ElasticFox, just a bit. Moderator: OK, and as I mentioned, IRC, I use a Firefox plug-in sometimes for S3 or for CloudFront. So, I assume it’s a similar concept. You just kind of dumps it down. Nir Simionovich: Yeah, similar concept. Yeah. Moderator: It’s kind of amazing to me that—and this goes back to what we were saying with John Todd that there’s no good reason to think that Amazon’s network would allow for real time. The CloudFront thing, the idea there is that you can be serving video and stuff like that and that it will push it out to the edge servers that will be the most efficient. On the other hand, I’m not sure how that translates to VoIP and I’m surprised to learn that they’re able to do the real time. Who knew, you know. That’s the way I feel about it. So it’s kind of surprising that they have the capacity—you don’t have any problem with call quality apparently, right? Nir Simionovich: No. Well, let’s say this, as long as you’re working with carriers which were interconnected with, let’s say… [Music playing] Moderator: Yeah. Let me try to find the source of that. Nir Simionovich: OK. Moderator: That may have been DGM. Hello, DGM. Thank you. They may not. Sorry. Nir Simionovich: That was a good one. Moderator: Yeah. Well, that’s the Asterisk built-in… Nir Simionovich: We can talk over the music. Moderator: Frankly, I think that was somebody in Huntsville or else I just happened to click it by accident. Sorry. That happens from time to time. Nir Simionovich: Yeah. Moderator: Where were we? Nir Simionovich: In any case—where were we? Yeah, in any case, we were working with three or four different providers in the U.S. which are considered somewhere around, let’s say the tier 2. Then, usually, these carriers are interconnected on the backbone with links that are very, very efficient and reliable over to Amazon EC2 as long as you’re hosting your instances in the U.S. So, the end result that were, let’s say one of the carriers that we were using was called TSG Global and we were getting about 24 millisecond roundtrip from Amazon EC2 to TSG Global. Now, you’ll run voice over IP on that and will have perfect quality always. Moderator: I’m trying of course the agent to call in, trying to figure out because it would be more interesting to have a discussion here than reading the stuff in IRC. Nir Simionovich: Yeah, absolutely. Moderator: OK. My arguments have won over. He’s going to call. He or she, you never know, right? Nir Simionovich: Well, he brought up a very interesting point of how to bundle your own AMI and this is actually what I was talking about, creating your own AMI image. It’s not that simple. I have to be honest. It took me about four or five hours to actually understand how to do it right and it never works from the first try. It’s really annoying. What happens is that you need to take your running machine, your running AMI and you’re creating a raw06:25 image of the hard drive, of the virtual hard drive and then you upload that into S3. That’s complicated to do but if done right it will work on the second or third try. It never works on the first try, never. Moderator: OK and we have a bleep from Southwest British Columbia. Can you hear us? Could be the agent, you never know. Nir Simionovich: Actually, I’d love to hear about what he just wrote on Openfire XMPP and Red5 Flash Server for video conferencing. That is really interesting because I’ve been trying to play around with Red5 but I have to admit that Flash isn’t really my thing. So, I’d love to hear about that. Moderator: OK, the agent is coming out of the wild of Southern California. Who is in the Southwest British Columbia? Say hello. Come on, don’t be shy. We’re waiting for the agent to call in. We have time. Man 2: I’m here. Moderator: Yeah. Man 2: What do you do for your logs then here, just logs if you’re just bringing up these instances and using for so many hours and shutting them down? Are you uploading those at some point, back up to S3 or do you just not care about them? Nir Simionovich: Well, the application as is doesn’t really carry that much logging into the actual server itself but I have to admit that I never really needed to go about and offload the logs anywhere because we don’t really are about those. CDR’s are kept completely separated from the system but you could offload those into a different machine or you can, before shutting down the system, go back and offload those out of EC2. It shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Or if you really want to, you can use the—it’s not S3—what was that again—it’s called… Moderator: CloudFront? Nir Simionovich: No, not CloudFront. They’ve got servers where you can actually map a storage device to your AMI and then you can share…

Open Fire XMPP and the Red Five. Let’s get into that. You guys… Sure. …go ahead. I mean, I’d love to hear about that one. Yeah, so. Well, let me, let me, kind of, lay out the landscape a little bit for why I would even go down this path. I don’t know if you’ve heard of a specific podcast or video podcast that’s done and has been done for a couple of years, called Gilmor Gang It’s run by a guy named Steve Gilmore who’s a well know technology columnist here in, or up in Silicon Valley. Anyways, I’m basically an executive producer of that show and for the longest period of time we’ve been trying to put together, you know, a remote TV studio on the fly. And the biggest thing with this scenario without doing any hardware was really the concept of having, having remote individuals around the world that could dial in, in whatever manner they had available to them. If they had the ability to use a video teleconference capability either through a flash or through a Skype connection or if they just had a basic call-in functionality we needed to incorporate all those things because we wanted to see, we want to use a remote video teleconference capability as an actual remote camera so that we can bring them into the show. We can switch in and out of the different guests because generally Gilmor Gang handles 4-6 different guests on a given show. There’s a lot of banter. So, really, this has been an ongoing investigation of mine for probably over a year. And I’ve been using EC2’s primarily for, at this point, for Personis itself. That is completely hosted on EC2 all the way, all the way through. S3, EC2 SQS. I mean, I probably use almost every service floating around inside of Amazon at this point. And, I also had played a number of months ago, using, putting Asterisk up and running it there, playing around with it to see how well that would work. Which, it works extremely well. I mean, you’re able to take advantage of Amazon’s significant infrastructure, their tremendous pipe, that they have going throughout their data centers and their multiple peering relationships that they have for Internet access. So, I was very pleased with that. So we’re moving on to the next go-round. Okay. Hold on. Sorry about that. It’s okay. It’s hard to predict. But once I see the wave front, it’s over. Go ahead. Anyways. I thought, I thought the angels were coming for me or something. So. The a, so anyway, we’ve gone to this capability in an attempt to basically create this real-time audio-video capability that can be brought up or down on the fly. And that’s, kind of, the real story. Because, I mean, as he was mentioning regarding the phone, the service that they were running where it’s, they only need it for a short period of time. That’s the extreme value of Amazon. I mean, that’s where you really, really, really can take advantage of the system. Because you only need to bring up an instance for as long as you need it and then you can bring the instance down. You know, you can use it in such a, in that manner for a [R?] escape function, so that if you have, you know you’re going to have a burst of traffic coming in. You know, depending on how you set it up, you can pre-stage servers sitting there waiting for the burst or you can even do, you can get a little more sophisticated and create an auto-scale mechanism that, as traffic builds, it automatically instantiates new instances to handle the traffic burst and shuts them down accordingly as the traffic falls off. So, I mean, if you looking at, just to give you a price understanding, from an Amazon perspective. Just on a small instance. If you’re running an instance. The smallest instance that Amazon has. It costs you approximately, and this is without, you know, significant bandwidth going in or out. It’s only $70, it’s about 70 bucks a month. Now, the real significance, though, is that if you don’t need it up all the time, take it down. And that’s, kind of, what we’re doing with this whole remote video communication capability, in that, we can pull-up or pull-down anybody actually. We’re setting it up so that we can have remote. If somebody else wants to do a show that we want to add to our network, we’re going to have this all pre-configured so that they’ll have, they’ll have video-conferencing, they’ll have, and that’s the whole Red Five to XMPP integration. So we have our own chat functionality through XMPP. Don’t need IRC. We also have all the video capability that is, and SIP capabilities that are inherent inside of XMPP itself with Open Fire. And then we have the complete telecommunications capability that we’re embedding with Asterisk. And then, of course, the Red Five stuff, which is really handling the, you know, the multiple videos simultaneously function. That’s why the Red Five exists. So that I can have a room, literally, of ten, you know, video, teleconference, or video pieces coming in from all the participants. So those are the types of things that we’re currently working, or I’m currently on, that hopefully, we’ll see as, basically, a package that we’re going to load out into the world, that people can run. And that’s the other part of it. You can take advantage of the really big thing about the AMI’s, the other big part that I take a lot of, that I take advantage of all the time, is just that there’s a lot of people out there packaging these AMI’s. They, if they put them out in the public space, you can just go and click on one of them and say, “hey, what is this one, oh, look, there’s a Red Five server already configured by somebody. I’m going to go ahead and launch that AMI.” You can customize that AMI to your heart’s content and then ultimately save that to your, save that yourself as a private version of that instance. There’s a vast amount of power sitting within the Amazon infrastructure to take advantage of.

Nir: Jerry, one small question in regards to Red5, and this is something I have been toying around with, and maybe you’ll have an answer, because I didn’t get much work into it. Are you working with the, by any chance, with the Fontventa extensions for 3G, 3.5G cellular video transmission? Jerry: No I’m not. It’s an interesting… I’ve seen the extensions, I haven’t played with them at all. That would be kind of a next evolution for us. The other thing is that right now I’m kind of using, it’s kind of a limited version of Red5, in the sense that I’m actually running, and I didn’t even know this could exist until I found the ability through some board. There is actually, you can take Openfire and you can actually run Red5. Somebody’s written an extension that actually runs Red5 inside of Openfire. So, you don’t need to set up multiple servers. It’s basically an instance that’s prepackaged and you can basically bring it up and you’ve got full blown Jabber and you’ve got full blown Open5 sitting there, I mean Red5 sitting there, ready for you to use. The extensions that could take advantage of 3G, 3.5G, and 4, I mean those are all things that would be very, very cool to be able to put in. Because as you can see with things KiteTV and QIK, and a bunch of the other ones, you know there is no doubt that kind of capability from a video teleconference capability is going to be big, and big in the very near term.
Nir: I have to admit that I didn’t have much time to play around with… Well l did play around with the Fontventa extensions, and I’ve done some work with that, in trying to integrate video, IP Video cams and Asterisk, and have, I’d say, some fair success with that. The thing is a lot of people now are talking about it. They are actually integrating a flash environment back into your cellular phone over 3G instead of writing your complete IBPR and doing that through Red5 seems like a good idea. But I will have to admit, that I hadn’t been playing with that lately. Again it’s very reassuring for me saying – OK there’s actually somebody out there really doing it. I mean, really progressing in that direction and we’re doing that on top of EZ2 is really exciting. Jerry: Yeah, and we think it’s really powerful, too. Again, the concept is that once this is a kind of an operational tapestry that we’ve kind of, or are orchestrating, that we really plan on bundling it as a kind of a preconfigured service that people in our… You know the concept, as we can all tell, media is changing for the worst, for the better, however you want to look at it doesn’t really matter to me, but bottom line is this entire users interface content and community that’s floating around out there and taking over, and watching mainstream media die. I mean, the idea that we can have this full blown, on the fly network capability brought up at will any where in the world and have multiple correspondence with basically multiple instances of both video and voice, there is an exorbitant amount of power there, especially when you start looking at what’s happening with the real time, in the real-time space, with things like Twitter and others. So, I think this whole new real-time space is actually going to usher in with Twitter and others, the ability to usher in this whole new paradigm for real-time, instantaneous, dynamic virtual, in essence radio stations, television stations, that can pop up on the fly and shut down on the fly at will. And it’s all going to be run through, basically, a cloud. So, that’s kind of what I’m focusing in on.
Nir: Well I totally agree that there is a shift. Where we can all… well you know people who are already in it and are dealing with the shift, they are all feeling it pretty strongly. I remember when they started talking about cloud computing here in Israel that actually, the thing is that I was in this, there’s the Grid Community here in Israel, they were doing this event and I was looking at it saying – Well it’s pretty interesting but it doesn’t do much for real-time. Then I got back home and started to talk again with John Todd and saying – Well why not do it? It’s pretty interesting that there are real usage of real-time applications that can be done on the cloud and that’s really interesting to me, and really exciting. Not only from a commercial point of view or the economical point of view, but also from a technical point of view, because we have to rethink every thing. Where we’re really used to using like this enormous servers and saying – OK I’ve got 8 cores, I’ve got 16 cores, I’ve got 32 gigabytes of ram, and suddenly we don’t have that and it brings up a lot of the old paradigms that I used to work on back in the days of lets say Commodore 64 and saying – OK we need to be something really, really optimal, and the optimization is really interesting. It’s bringing back really old paradigms in terms of optimizations and really new paradigms in terms of economics.

Jerry: Yeah, yeah. I agree with you. I think what’s been happening, I mean it’s kind of how software leads hardware in some ways. You know, over the course of the past decade or more, the extreme focus on, or at least in the places I’ve played, a very laser guided focus on abstraction and decoupling. I mean that’s been a big part of a lot of systems that I’ve been a part of in the past 10 years. I think now it’s interesting to see cloud computing and the way it’s basically being pushed out from a hardware standpoint and how all the aspects of abstraction and decoupling are instrumental in being able to do these systems. Because you really do need a fairly significant abstractional error because you don’t know where the hardware exists. You don’t know how much memory you’re necessarily playing with. So, this whole decoupling is pretty paramount but it’s also been a trend that’s been going on for at least a decade or more.

Nir: Yeah, it’s been around here but not many people were using it, you know. I started my, let’s say, I started using the main frame computer somewhere around the age 18 or 19, when I was in the Army, and decoupling applications and the world of the main frame just sounds logical. It’s there, there’s nothing else. But when you are used to working on PC’s and servers, decoupling applications looked really weird. When you come to the company saying – OK you need to decouple this and they go – What? What are you talking about? What I don’t have access to the data base? That doesn’t sound right. The paradigm shift is going in a few directions and I’ve seen some companies that they, company like Giga Spaces, it’s an Israeli company, and they build like this enormous middle layer between your application and the Amazon EC2 cloud, which gives you the, let’s say, the imaginary effect of working inside a coupled system while you are completely decoupled. Which is really interesting. Jerry: Yeah, yeah.
Nir: There is a lot of work being done right now. I think we are heading, in terms of technology, we’re heading for the next, I believe, is like the next three years is going to be really interesting in terms of cloud computing. Jerry: Yeah. I think the biggest thing for me, I’m somewhat of serial entrepreneur, and have been that way for a couple of decades now, but I think the thing that really excited me about the advent of things like EZ2 or Rackspace’s mossomo, or any of the other ones that are floating around there. There’s Slicehost which actually is now owned by Rackspace. It’s just the cost at which somebody could bootstrap up something, an idea, a concept. To be able to sit there and create a new business in this new paradigm and do it at a cost that is unheard of. Having done a few startups in my lifetime, you ultimately throw out an inurnment amount of money upfront just to handle, from a capital standpoint, the hardware that you are going to run on, especially if you’re a service offering. So I mean, that’s one of the things here, where you can get away with some, a couple of weeks worth of coding, you know, a $70 fee and you’ve got a service up and running in an hour or more, or a little bit more. But it’s nothing. It’s nothing to do and it’s cost effective, and if it doesn’t pan out, you basically shut down the AMI and you walk away from it.

Today we talked about the EXPERIMENTAL link using Skype for Asterisk (SfA for short). The more we use SfA, the more the Skype people will see that we the Asterisk community are serious about it.

The whole thing began as a phone call made by Tim P. to my Skype number. I almost never have Skype on but the number is forwarded via Gizmo5 to my phone, so when I heard it ring and saw the Skype ID, I realized the call was going through a bunch of servers and trancodings. The quality of that call was striking: total silence when no one was speaking (the equivalent of very black on an LCD display) and very good quality audio with a comfortably small latency. The call lasted at least 30 minutes, too and remaind of good quality.

So, we had at least 6 people called in via Skype from the USA, Israel, Barbados and the UK. The quality varied with the number of channels in use and time, but it was pretty good by and large.In fact, the quality when there was no packets dropped sounded good, even though it was g711.

IRC Text Transcript 2009-06-12

Download audio file (TS-224821.mp3)

Transcript IRC 2009-06-05

Open a free Sipgate account and check out what they offer so your questions can be answered and your opinions aired!

Above is the Sipgate user panel. Sipgate offers 200 free minutes to test their system and a free USA phone number. Free calling between Sipgate extensions, of course but you can put several phones on a single account. I did just that and then called myself (from Europe to Europe) and found the lag to be as expected but what a great solution for newbies and people who want to experiment.

Sipgate does voicemail as expected but also, Google Voice-like ringing of multiple extensions. Try it out if you dare.

Part 1:

Download audio file (TS-224820.mp3)

Part 2:

Download audio file (TS-229501.mp3)

Jim Van Meggelen is one of the author’s of O’Reilly’s Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, and an old school PBX guy. Jim is probably a bit of a masochist, which would explain why he got into the telecom business in the first place, and why he now loves Asterisk. Jim is pretty friendly, kinda like a puppy that gets your shoes dirty. His enthusiasm is infectious, but also a little bit frightening if you stand too close. Jim is a partner in Core Telecom Innovations, a recognized leader in the Asterisk Telephony Revolution, and iConverged Inc. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three kids, and loves writing, photography, speaking, improv, choral singing, and old shoes.

Jim will talk about building an embedded-like system using x86 hardware (Intel Atom Mini-ITX) and a stock Linux distro for well under $1000, including FX cards with hardware echo cancellation — this is a great way to build a system that’s almost like an embedded system, but with much less software complexity or incompatibility.

IRC TRanscript 2009-05-29

Jeff Pulver sends a letter out pretty often with a 1998 ALL CAPS PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COPY THIS notice, so here are the relevant paragraphs of his latest missive:

Looking back, I believe May 21, 2009 will be known as a milestone date in the history of the VoIP Industry. For certain it was one of the most significant gatherings of the communications industry in 2009. It was a day that 100+ people from: Across the United States, Israel, Canada, France, Germany and Russia gathered to explore the state of the HD VoIP ecosystem.

Special thanks goes to Daniel Berninger who helped organize the event and the support our sponsors: AudioCodes, Global IP Sound, Gigaset, Polycom, Snom and the DECT Forum. Thanks also to all the speakers who each shared their HD VoIP Pearls of Wisdom while they were on stage. And thanks also goes to everyone who took the time to twitter the event and share their experience with others who were not able to be with us in New York City.

Yesterday at the first HD Communications Summit was a moment in time when the VoIP Industry got together, compared notes, explored the state of HD VoIP and started a down a path I believe will have a positive effect for the future of the industry as a whole. Yesterday ushered in an era of coopitition in the HD VoIP space, a time where competitors realized it was time to work together to promote a common goal. Together we forged a bond which us take us forward as HD VoIP gains widespread adoption.

While I had strong feelings about the possible significance of the day, I was never really sure how to express this reality while promoting the HD Communications Summit. I was certain whatever I said would have been looked at as promotional language in support of the event and not heard in terms of the possible historical significance of what the day represented.

I opened the day by sharing some of my thoughts about “Hyper Communications” and the absolute need for HD Voice to become the norm. Along the way I announced the formation of a new HD VoIP marketing association, HD Connect and our plans to go to Wall Street and help educate the Buy Side and Sell Side about the possibilities of HD Voice. I also shared my plans to reach out to the FCC later this year in support of a High Definition Voice / HDV initiative and I announced the next HD Communications Summit will be taking place September 15-16th. Plans are also underway for both a European and an Asia Pac event for later this year.

On a personal note yesterday was a reunion of sorts for me. For the first time in a number of years, some of the pioneers from the early days of VoIP gathered again and while it was great to reminisce about the past, the conversations quickly moved to the future and the open possibilities of what we can help make happen.

So it turns out that the “purple minutes” I first spoke about at Spring 2002 VON are really HD VoIP Minutes. It took seven years to get there, but I left the day feeling positive about the future of VoIP and feeling re-energized. It turns out that sometimes the answers we are looking for are sometimes hiding in plain sight..and sometimes the answers we seek are hiding in our own denial. For the communications industry I believe the way we will see the restoration of billions of dollars in both market cap and (eventually) in sales is the embracing of HD VoIP technologies and the realization that this represents a future of things to come.

Part 2: Yate and g722 Download audio file (TS-227343.mp3)

YATE with Diana Cionoiu, who always shoots from the hip. Yate is an open source software developed with reliability, scalability and flexibility in mind for tomorrow’s telephony networks. I guarantee an interesting call this week, but then we always have interesting calls, right? Otherwise, why would they last up to four hours like today’s call?Here is a link to Diana’s presentation at Asterisk Tag 2008. She was also at AMOOCON 2009, here’s the page for her presentation. (Almost all the presentations are now available on the AMOOCON site. Nice work, Stefan!)

Acting upon the suggestion of our group, here is the IRC transcript of the call which again lasted over 4 hours.

IRC Transcript 2009-05-22

Part 2: Yate and g722

Stefan has posted the video of my presentation at AMOOCON. We all look at our talks and say “OMG, was I really that bad?” I warn you in advance, and have made note of it, my talk starts way too slowly.

The idea was to compare social networking in 1976, 1996 and 2006 and then today, 2009 by evoking my ham radio days in L.A. We used a 220 Mhz repeater and walkie talkies to talk on the phone from anywhere years before the cellphone became ubiquitous. In 1986, I was using the Internet without even knowing what it was with rlogin, rpipe, etc. In 1996, I built a PHP 2 site that basically did exactly what Twitter does, an open IM with a web interface. In 2006, Twitter came along and in 2009 we have a growing number of how to keep track of friends and more importantly, make new connections in our centers of interest.

The link with VoIP is that we now are able to meet people like Dan York, Jeff Pulver and many other movers in the VoIP space through all the usual channels and hopefully through the our own VUC as well. The VUC started around March 2007 and has grown in many ways since then, thanks to Mark Spencer’s immediate support and later, Digium’s realization of the importance of the whole social transformation that is taking place on the Internet. We have had some help from the people whose logos you see at the top of the page and I’m grateful to them and of course to every participant, especially the core group of “friends”, all of whom I hope to meet some day.

r/z

Askozia PBX is an embedded PBX solution which eases system upgrades, backups and provisioning. Currently running under FreeBSD, they are in the process of porting it to linux, which is also worthy of discussion. (File under trials and tribulations!)

I met Michael at AMOOCON and invited him to join us after he told me a funny story: someone had sent him to a VUC session recording that had a laugh track sounding after a mention of Askozia (or was it FreeBSD?). Anyway, I do recall that the laughs were for our friend Rich, not Askozia. We would never make fun of an Asterisk-based project in that way. Except if Rich is behind it :-). Just kidding, Rich!

Watch the AMOOCON video of Michael’s presentation is available here thanks to Stefan Wintermeyer’s quick work.

I apologize for mis-pronouncing Michael’s name throughout the discussion, it’s pronounced “eeee-demah”-, not “Eyedemah”.

Part 2:

Download audio file (TS-224860.mp3)

Part 1 MP3 DOWNLOAD LINK

Part 2 MP3 DOWNLOAD LINK

IRC Transcript 2009-05-15

And now, hot off the FlipVideo, here’s a taste of Rostock and AMOOCON from a human perspective:

THE DIGIUM you didn’t know existed:

And then there was the “C Shanties”

A great time was had by all, John Todd and I hash over some of the highlights. Part two: Diana and Paul from YATE.

Download audio file (TS-222070.mp3)

MP3 DOWNLOAD PART 1 MP3 OWNLOAD PART 2

IRC TRanscript 2009-05-08

Although I managed to herd a great group of people into the speakers’ lounge and record a wide-ranging discussion, the first part was lost due to a software glitch on the recorder. It seems that the low battery level shut things down and ditched the file. The part posted here is only the second hour (heh) but there are some interesting things to hear.

Topics covered include codecs, video, Skype for Asterisk, teleconference robots, “robot Mark”, presence, stereo codecs, and lots more. One side (Zoa, Diana Cionoiu etc) rags on the iPhone, the other side says “get used to it”.

MP3 DOWNLOAD LINK

This video was shot with a tool I just got so there are mistakes in the switching. I’d rather leave it rough, including the audio dropping out, because the most interesting stuff is there. I promise to do better next time.

I had the pleasure of meeting one of the more vibrant and outgoing characters at the conference and recorded this interview about his latest PHP AGI book. I only wish I could have shared the stories, jokes and general mirth happening in the traditional German restaurant when Tim Panton, Jason Goeke, Nir and I shared a meal.

Nir’s presentation at AMOOCON was about running Asterisk under EC2 and I hope to get him to talk about this some day as he has an actual large-scale case he deployed in this way rather than just a theoretical one.

Nir’s book, Asterisk Gateway Interface 1.4 and 1.6 Programming is a great introduction to serious programming using the AGI and PHP. The book takes you through some good solid advice for truly professional programmers on how to do stable programming in the Asterisk AGI environment. This is the book you need if you are trying to do anything serious with Asterisk in PHP.

The other Adhearsion guy, Jay Philips

Adhearsion is a new way to write voice-enabled applications. It’s not just an API or library — it’s a fully-featured framework, the first of its kind, designed for maximal code reuse and intuitiveness. The name “Adhearsion” is a combination of “adhesion” and “hear” because Adhearsion shines best when integrating technologies with voice.

Disclaimer, like the other videos, this was shot in the first experience with the new video tools and there are mistakes in switching. The spirit of these are linked to the fact that they are live (undeited) so please excuse ther warts.

More info here

Assuming this works, I hope tp post some AMOOCON interviews here Monday and Tuesday.

We talk about home automation and random asterisk and telephony news, including the possible final demise of Nufone. On the home automation front, it seems every product uses proprietary systems so little progress has been made with anything standard. We were lucky enough to rope in an expert on the subject so listen to what Tony has to say on the recording of Part 1. X10, ZigBee  and many other systems are discussed by people with hands-on experience.

http://delicious.com/voipusersconference for all the links discussed. A lot of names were mentioned so check the links.

IRC Transcript 2009-05-01

Daniel Berninger - Washington, DC based independent technolgy analyst. Expert in technical and regulatory aspects of Internet enabled disruptive communications. Active in VoIP since 1995. Daniel worked on the original assessment of VoIP at Bell Laboratories and led early gateway deployments at Verizon , HP, and NASA after joining VocalTec Communications. He won the 1999 VON Pioneer Award as co-founder of the VON Coalition and worked on the founding of ITXC , Vonage , and Free World Dialup . Daniel gets quoted frequently on regulatory, antitrust, and VoIP matters.

Dan’s last visit on September 14, 2007 is here.

Here are a few articles about wideband:

Wideband Audio Codecs Gaining Steam,

Wideband Audio Boosts VoIP Quality

G.722, WideBand Audio

Download: Part 1 Part 2
IRC Transcript 2009-04-24

I didn’t know that Nir has also written the book “Asterisk Now“, also for Packt Publishing. I am waiting for a review copy and when I can, I will review the book here. However, having met Nir and watched his presentation on EC2, I’m already recommending you consider the book.

Randal Schwartz (FLOSS Weekly) chatted with us about paid support for Open Source software.

Steve Sokol joined us to talk about what this means to the community and to small, medium and large busines installations.

With Digium’s support subscriptions for open source Asterisk, enterprise developers and systems administrators can call on the expertise of the company that created Asterisk. Digium’s technical support team offers professional assistance with installation, configuration, and systems operation issues.

Digium’s blog has a post about this, and that sends you to the product page.

A lot more happened including discussion of Digium’s new free FAX channel that replaces drop in solutions such as SpanDSP and the eternal questions about SfA (Skype for Asterisk).

Note the name siptosis, unlike the similar word “halitosis” is pro-nounced “SIP 2 SIS”. These calls are educational!

IRC Transcript 2009-04-17

Problem: PCI wifi cards don’t work for us in our new apartment

Solution: dLAN powerline Internet

After little research, I thought the Devolo dLAN 200 Wireless G Starter kit was a way to fix things. It turned out I didn’t get what I expected, but it does appear to solve the problem in an efficient way (if you consider $220 or so efficient). I will get into some configuration detail, but long story short, had I understood what this hardware does, the install would have taken maybe 30 minutes tops.

This is for claiming our Mevio channel {Mevio-f85e64a2e4adfd5c58f1890138665d71}

The kits is delivered with software for Windows, Mac OS X and linux. I tried the first two. Maybe I’ll try the linux one some day.

Anyway, there are two main bits, the dLAN config and the Wifi config tools. Also, the manual in several languages is on the CD.

Plugging a computer into one of the LAN ports on the back of the unit and starting the Wifi config tool, you are immediately told to change the password which I did. Then you can choose to use DHCP or assign an IP. Since the default ranges was in 192.168.0 and my network is 192.168.1 I changed the IP to be 192.168.1.10. Then I set the channel to auto and allowed it to be compatible with both WPA and WPA2. This seemed to work although the Deveolo wifi signal is weaker than the Linksys upstairs.

Here’s what I didn’t understand

The Devolo main unit (wifi + 4 LAN ports) does not connect to a modem, or if it does this didn’t work on my modem to replace the Linksys. What I find odd is that it does work connected to a Linksys LAN port and the entire 192.168.1.??? network is pingable. Since this solves our problem, I may leave it that way, giving us two independent wifi signals in the house plus the powerline signal.

Security

So to the one adapter that comes with this kit. I plugged it into an outlet, fired up Windows and started the dLAN config app. It asks for the system password (set during the wifi setup) and then you need to enter security codes for the devices you want to allow to connect. This was the big question from people on VUC, what about the neighbors connecting or sniffing the powerline signal? There is an encryption button on the main unit. I haven’t tried that yet nor am I sure the encryption is really necessary. What I see is that the computer can’t connect to the network unless you have the security code for the Devolo router and the strong, user-configurable system password.

All in all, I am not sure a person without the curiosity and a little experience would ever get this to work or even understand what it is.

I like the look of these, and it’s all very lightweight and discrete, even the LEDs. The security seems adequate. Compared to the Linksys, there are four, not five LAN ports (the Linky has 4 LAN and a WAN). With the current setup I suddenly have 2 more LAN ports than before so maybe I can stick the AA50 Astersik Appliance in there somewhere

Polycom IP450

Congratulations to Barry (”beek”), winner of the Polycom ip450 phone kindly donated to VUC by e4strategies.com

I am trying to index the VUC Delicious Links page to make it easier to document what we discuss. I am now tagging each article with a date of ther session in the form  VUC-2009-04-10 so search for those if you need something specific to a session. I’m also trying to keep transcripts of all links so it will be easier to add them.

IRC Transcript 2009-04-10

If you’re into telephony whether for business or pleasure, you need to know more about the service Google finally rolled out. I’ve been testing it for the past few weeks (along with Gizmo5) and I hope others will bring their input, too. The current version features groups, with separate vmail announcement messages for each group (and even for each person). It can screen calls, send you an email transcript, record calls, allow you to listen to incoming vmails, send an SMS alert, etc. Your incoming calls on your lifetime number can be routed to any number of phones, cells, Gizmo accounts and even… GTalk.

Part II: Download audio file (TS-212912.mp3)

Try the web click 2 call. Enter a name and your phone number:

The name will be read to me if I’m listening in. Or, try to leave a message and let’s see what the transcription looks like!

We also talked about a call I was on where a deaf person spoke with several people by using sign language to an interpreter through his webcam and the interpreter skpoke the words to us on Talkshoe. Amazing! He was using viable.net which is apparently a free service.

Check out the voipusersconference Delicious bookmarks page for more related to each session.

1965 Beatles Concert in Minneapolis

Always joking about Zeeek’s age: here he is in an old video document with the Beatles in 1965, giving George a 12-string guitar instead of the keys to the city.

Or, see the still shot and a few more details. Not enough? Here is the full story.

This all came to my attention thanks to a gentleman in the UK who emailed me for details about the guitar. I had no idea that I was in the foreground of a large format printed poster. This of the success I’d have had with the girls if I knew about that big poster!

Is this one of the first times a small market slice consumer product went this route?

Michael Graves reviewed this phone and compared it to the Snom M3.

Alan Lord’s Open Sourcerer has a lot of good info about the phone as does voip-info.org.

I also did a very non-tech review of the phone in this article.