Asterisk :: Well it works, now what?

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IABX -- Inter-Asterisk Exchange (20-Sep-2004)

I was still intimidated by the prospect of connecting to a VoIP dial tone provider, but there's only so much fun you can have just in calling your laptop from your desktop that's a few feet away.

Since this was technically all Tom's fault for getting me interested in asterisk I decided that he should bear the burden of helping me get things going. I pestered him one evening and we managed to get our respective asterisk boxes talking to one another and able to route calls between themselves. I was able to set him up with an extension on my asterisk pbx which routed the call (over IP) to his asterisk and his extension defined there. He did the same. Additionally, he allowed me to set up my asterisk to direct all normal phone number calls in 1-317- via his machine.

This gained me my first real link to the POTS network. I could call Tom's house and dial "my" extension and it would ring here at my house via the asterisk box connection. Moreover, I could now call people in Indianapolis and it would use Tom's POTS line to place the call. Pretty cool, but it was late by this time and I wasn't going to wake anyone up just so that they could experience the full glory of x-lite's echo-chamber audio quality. I called 317-222-2222 a bunch of times and learned more about Indianapolis weather than any one person should know.

It's aesthetic -- pure VoIP calls

I also set up a SRV record on macnugget.org which points inbound calls to the proper host and port for VoIP traffic. This neatly turns "nugget@macnugget.org" into a valid VoIP destination. How cool is that?

The snowball picked up speed

This finally put me in a position to do some of the cool things I'd wanted to do. With the experience from hooking up to Tom's asterisk I now felt confident enough to invest $10 in the scheme. I signed up for an account with Voicepulse in order to do outbound dialing to the POTS network. Even at 2am this is an instantaneous process and I was making calls less than 10 minutes after giving them my credit card info. I figured if it didn't pan out that I could afford to drop $10 on the attempt.

With voicepulse I was now able to call regular phone numbers. I still use Tom's asterisk for calls to 1-317, though. Why pay voicepulse if I can make the call for free? Now I just need to make friends with people in every other area code. :)

Being able to dial out unlocked the key to one of the features I'd seen at Tom's which I was really enthusiastic about: multiple targets for calls. I re-worked my sip:nugget@macnugget.org extension and made it ring three places instead of one. If I placed a call to the extension it would now ring simultaneously on my home phone (via voicepulse dialer), my mobile phone (also via voicepulse), and my laptop's sip client (x-lite, over ip). Whichever of the three picked up would be handed the call. It just worked, as simple as that.

This one feature would save me $6 a month. I relied on call forwarding from the phone company to redirect my home phone to my mobile whenever I went out. Since I work from home I get quite a few calls from my colleagues and I didn't want to burden them with having to keep track of several numbers for me and then have to try each in turn. Being able to do multiple targets was a key asterisk feature for me.

Is it viable?

My enthusiasm for the ease and flexibility of call routing was tempered by the abysmally crappy audio quality I'd been getting. A few trial calls to my mom over x-lite were unacceptably poor quality. I certainly couldn't use it for professional calls. Even with headphones I sounded "tinny and far away". It was total crap. I did a lot of experimenting with the various codecs available in asterisk, I played with bandwidth by shutting down my web servers and comparing call quality, I tried lots of things. At best I could get the quality up to marginal and it was very inconsistent. Sadly, I finally realized that there was a limit to what I could accomplish using software phones. I knew plenty of people who enjoyed good quality calls using voicepulse and asterisk and the one thing they all had in common was some real hardware to use the system.

As averse as I was to spending a lot of money on an unproven scheme which I wasn't sure I'd embrace I decided to go ahead and drop the money on a real VOIP phone. I just didn't think I was going to be able to adequately evaluate asterisk without making that investment. Tom hooked me up with a cheap, used Cisco 7960 and I also bought a ZyXEL P2000W wireless handset.

Next: The ZyXEL arrived first.