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Hope to see you there,

Colman

I have recently upgraded my mobile phone to a Nokia E51, partly because I wanted to test out it’s potential as a SIP extension on our Asterisk network. This, of course, opens up the possibility of having one phone that you use whether you are in the office, on the road, or even at home. The detail of these scenarios needs to be determined by your particular circumstances, but it is certainly feasible.

There is plenty of information on how to actually set up this phone on an Asterisk system (Google is your friend here), so I will merely say that this aspect of the test was pretty painless.  Within minutes of taking the E51 out of it’s box I had it registered as an extension and happily making and receiving calls. Personally I would rather not have this as my only office phone, so any incoming calls are actually routed to both my desk phone and my E51, but you may wish to set it up differently.

Whilst the E51 has great battery life in what might be described as a traditional setup (i.e. not using the wi-fi capability) it is a known fact that wi-fi does drain the battery much more quickly than would otherwise be the case. This phone is very much business-oriented, so is designed to have pretty good battery life (amazing when you have it in your hand and feel how slim it is). I have heard estimates of 4 or 5 days between charges mentioned. All that goes out of the window when you turn wi-fi on. I have been doing a lot of testing over the last few days, so my use is atypical, but I have still had to charge the phone once a day ! I would expect that to improve slightly when my testing is complete, but I can’t imagine it lasting more than 2 days.

Anyway, back to the Asterisk interoperability. The E51 allows you to choose which type of call routing (i.e. mobile or internet) to use as default. If you choose internet, it will always fall back on standard mobile calling should the internet route fail. In practice this seems to work well, with one exception.

Having one device for all situations means having a single telephone address book. At first glance this might seem to be ‘a good thing’ and in truth it is…but it did throw up one interesting problem. As I travel abroad from time to time I like to store phone numbers in my mobile in ‘international’ forma, namely with a plus sign at the start, followed by the 2-digit country code, followed by the actual number. So, for instance, I would store our office number as +441233888240

This is all well and dandy, except the first time I fed such a number into an internet call, and therefore on to Asterisk, it didn’t work. It didn’t work to the extent that the call was not made rather than passing through from Asterisk to the mobile network. Thinking the problem was in Asterisk, I looked in the log and found….nothing ! A bit more testing suggested the phone was trying to place the call via Asterisk, but it wasn’t getting anywhere.

To cut a long story short, it transpires that passing a plus sign to Asterisk, without specific consideration for that within an outbound route, will result in the call being dropped pretty unceremoniously. So I proceeded to add the following to the outbound route dial pattern ‘+|.’ This matches the plus sign, strips it out and then passes the rest of the string on to the relevant trunk. This is important as stripping more out would remove the country code, and you’d get into a bit of a tizz trying to put it back on.

The IAX2 trunk I use for most outbound calls expects national numbers without country codes or international numbers starting with a ’0′ followed by the country code. Since I wasn’t passing numbers in either of these formats, and didn’t want to reconstruct my dialing logic completely, I set up a second trunk in asterisk for the same provider. I haven’t tested this with a SIP provider, and I have my suspicions that it wouldn’t work, but for IAX2 it is fine. Within the second trunk I know what’s coming in (i.e. an international number starting with the 2-digit country code) so I merely tag ’00′ on to the start  (using ’00+Z.’) and send it off down the trunk. So far it works very smoothly and I can have all my mobile phonebook numbers in international format.

For a small business, however, Websense and it’s competing products just don’t make sense. Financially they are aimed at corporations, not a small office, and they require quite a bit of work to set up and maintain, let alone keep on top of the reports that are generated.

There are hosted services out there, through the likes of Messagelabs and Blackspider, that take the need for installing your own equipment away. However, there is still an ongoing cost involved, and you are likely to be faced with significant configuration and monitoring still.

If, however, all you want is basic web filtering (i.e. don’t let anyone access gambling sites) then this can be achieved for free. How, well it’s quite easy really, and it’s all achieved through DNS. For those that don’t know, DNS (Domain Name Services) converts those ever-so friendly website and email address names (e.g. www.fourlakes.co.uk) into much less friendly but very necessary IP addresses (e.g. 72.52.225.30) which tell your PC exactly where to find the relevant web page. Your network is probably set up to use your ISP’s DNS servers, which makes sense as they are located quite close (in network terms anyway) to your computer. However, if you change your DNS server settings on your ADSL or Cable router to point at those run by OpenDNS.com (namely 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) then you open up basic web filtering for your network. You need to register on the OpenDNS site first, but once you’ve done that it will recognise any traffic from your network and filter it against a whole raft of website categories. You can choose which ones you want blocked, resulting in a standard message which can be tailored to include your logo. This page also contains some fairly discrete advertising which is how the service pays for itself.

Additional feature include some pretty basic stats…you won’t get filtering or reporting to a user level, but you will find out if someone is trying to access unwanted websites on your network, allowing you to take action to track down the culprit if you so wish.

Worth a look.

Proponents of open source software will have their favourites, in my case that consists of Firefox for browsing; Thunderbird for email with the Lightning plugin for calendars; OpenOffice for documents, spreadsheets, etc.; Joomla for my website content management; and SugarCRM for management of Customer activities. I am also looking at phpList as a possible mechanism for running an email newsletter. The total cost of implementing the above, nothing but my time and the rewarding process of gaining knowledge.

Many more people go further than I have at the moment and use a Linux-based operating system such as Ubuntu. The one real issue with open source, though, is knowing what to choose, even for evaluation purposes. Whilst you can happily download and install any open source software to try it out, it can take a while to get a good appreciation of what is actually available in any particular area.

Well, that aspect of the choosing process has just improved with the creation of a pretty good list of open source software on mashable (link). You still have to compare the software and evaluate against your needs, but that is a process that should be followed regardless of the licence under which the software is provided. At least now, though, you know what you should be looking at.

Zonbu have borrowed from this business model to sell their Linux-based PC’s and Laptops. You can purchase their products as you can from any other PC manufacturer. However, they also give you the option of entering into what is, in effect, a hire-purchase agreement. Pay your money up front (for their laptop, $279), pay a monthly fee for a couple of years ($14.95) and you get an entry-level laptop with unlimited maintenance and support, online backup and a free replacement should anything untoward happen.

Will it work ? I can see it being attractive in the home or small business where IT knowledge is limited. Would I buy one? Nope, not when I can carry out my own support and maintenance, and organise online backup if I so desire (in fact I have an old PC running Bacula to protect my data). Most importantly, though, when I buy a PC or laptop I want to be able to control the spec.

Still, it’s something relatively new in the marketplace, and I applaud them for giving it a good shot and wish it every success.

A quick read through the detailed tender document made it apparent that this was one contract not worth taking any further. When you see selection criteria such as

“The system will not be based on open source code”

then you suspect that they have had their fingers burnt. A more in depth perusal confirmed the suspicion:

“Since implementation London users and Homeworkers have experienced a variety of
issues with voice quality. The voice quality has varied from acceptable to unusable.
Outbound voice quality has been mostly acceptable but inbound voice quality has on
occasions contained dropouts or has been completely inaudible, preventing users
from hearing what callers are saying.”

They go on to say that WAN changes and the introduction of G.729 have improved matters, but obviously not enough. They also bemoan the lack of available expert Asterisk knowledge making it difficult to troubleshoot effectively.

There are a number of checks that any half-decent Asterisk consultant should have made at this site. Is the server up to the job? Is there adequate bandwidth for their requirements? Has QoS been implemented correctly across the board? Are there unnecessary codec translation going on? Is the VoIP provider up to the job? Instead company or consultant who carried out the initial implementation has left them in the lurch, and now a company that could have been very happy with an Asterisk solution are determined never to touch it again, and if anyone asks their opinion they will no doubt be very disparaging.

The solution? The best way to avoid the situation, in my opinion, is for any consultant or company selling an Asterisk-based solution/service to make sure that their customers have an alternative contact should things go belly-up. Do your homework and get in touch with someone who knows their way around Asterisk blindfolded. Your customer is more likely, not less, to stick with you if you can demonstrate that you have their best interests at heart and can provide them with a level of service that they require. That does not need you to be an Asterisk guru, but you do need to know where to turn if such a person is required.

I must admit to wondering about the wisdom of the arrangement myself. Fonality have certainly got a pretty mature product with, in Asterisk terms at least, good market penetration. This deal will drive that through the roof, and one has to wonder just where the support for a huge increase in the installed base will come from ? If it’s Dell, then they have to train up a lot of people in a subject where they currently have little or no knowledge. Then there’s the mixed bag of customer experience with Dell support, which is bad enough if you’re dealing with an important server, but unacceptable if your phone system has just crashed and customers can’t call you.

That’s fixable, though, and I suspect that Fonality will provide 3rd-level support in a classic support scenario so that the easy stuff can be handled by Dell and the tough stuff goes where the knowledge lies.

My biggest concern is that I don’t think there’s a good fit between the way VoIP should be sold to SME’s (or any business) and the way in which Dell normally does business in this market.  Let me explain. If you have a look on my website you will see that I, in common with Fonality, offer a number of VoIP system ‘packages’. I suspect that Fonality view this in the same way I do…as a means of illustrating the ball-park cost of a VoIP system and of initiating a conversation about a particular customer’s specific and unique needs. I have no intention or experience of a customer phoning up to say “I want to buy package no. 2, can you send it tomorrow”. It just doesn’t happen that way, and so it shouldn’t as getting the phone system right is crucial to each and every business, big or small.

You can see where this is going, I’m sure. Dell’s business model, the one that has made them into the massive company they are now, is geared on the assumption that the customer knows exactly what they want, and Dell can provide it quicker and cheaper then anyone else. You start doing that with phone systems and businesses are going to suffer. The MD of a small company will not be an expert in VoIP-enabled telephony, and he probably won’t employ anyone who is an expert either. They will be focused on selling their widgets or whatever it is that makes them successfiul. And whilst they may be interested in buying a phone system that has the potential to save them money and provide more functionality, if it starts taking a lot of their time to install, maintain and support then that advantage is lost.

Putting a PBX into an SME is not just about selling them the server and a few phones. Crucial to the success of an install are factors such as how to minimise disruption, which codec to use, the efficient use of the existing network or installation of a separate VoIP network, the means of hooking up branch offices and homes to the VoIP system (another PBX, use a VPN, etc ?), and many other questions. These all need someone with knowledge and experience to assess before coming up with the best solution for that particular customer. Will Dell be doing all that…I have my doubts.

This could be a great thing, or it could set VoIP for SME’s back 5 years. I have my fingers crossed that it’s not the latter.

Currently the extra content is a bit limited, but expect to see more articles and offers over the coming weeks and months. In addition, the website pulls in content from this blog too, making it the best place to keep abreast of all our news and information.

Whatever happened to telephones ‘just working’ ?