Industry-Standard VOIP Phone Using All Free Software

Ralf Ackermann writes: "Voice over IP on a HardPhone running Linux and just using Open Source software became real. We have sucessfully installed and tested (interoperability with Cisco 7960 as well as Pingtel xPressa in an environment with a partysip SIP registrar and proxy) the linphone SIP phone on a StrongARM based TuxScreen. Here is the link describing the steps for others to use the setup as well: TuxScreen running SIP. All the infos for setting up a comparable installation can be found on the URL, please also feel free to ask or drop opinions. Many thanks to the linphone developers as well as to my student Florian Winterstein (for working on a console linphonec version). The setup (on a StrongARM system) is well suited for PDA (iPAQ) or wearable environments as well."

SIP

SIP is an open protocol [isi.edu], so what is special about this?

This would be great with a Wireless connection...

With a VOIP WiFi "cell phone" you could conceivable talk to anyone in range (peer-to-peer) at no cost, and to anyone connected to the internet if you are in range of a base station.

You even already have an MPL'd H.323 protocol library [openh323.org] to provide communication with NetMeeting and GnomeMeeting [beardedlinuxhippies.org] users. In fact, I've been looking for something like this which could compile on the LinuxARM architecture, in order to turn my iPAQ running Linux into a WiFi cellular phone.

What about SNOM?

Check this [snomag.de] out for another linux-based VoIP, standards-compliant (both SIP *and* H323) phone.

It's been out for quite awhile, over a year. My company is a reseller. They're cheap (~ $199 each) and they rock.

Phone companies had 50+ years to become efficient

But I'm still coughing up $20/month for basic phone service. That's $240/year folks. And where's that $240 going? Maintenance? I'll enjoy seeing these fat dinosaurs be replaced by VOIP.

Xeyes

They just -had- to include the Xeyes in the screenshot.

Turns a PDA into a cell phone...

The setup (on a StrongARM system) is well suited for PDA (iPAQ) or wearable environments as well."

But can it turn a cell phone into a PDA?

How do I use one of these?

How would I go about replacing my regular land line with VOIP? Do I have to sign up with a VOIP phone service provider? I've looked at all of these pages, but none of them actually tell you how to use them.

One step closer...

The company I work for has been looking at VoIP for several months now. Since we have several offices across the country, it would be very advantageous, technologically, for us to use VoIP for the end-user phones, rather than the hodge-podge of systems we use today.

Unfortunately, the prohibiting factor has been the cost of the phones themselves. The cost for an actual system is within reason, but some VoIP telephones run into the $700 range.

At this pricepoint, it seems much more affordable and reasonable. And while the GUI would need work to make it dummy-friendly, we have no shortage of graphics designers and programmers who could make that work.

One step closer to VoIP from beginning to end makes me happy. And I know it'd make our CFO happy, too. =)

jrbd

Wireless is making net phones less relevent.

I used to run something like that on the dark side of OSes, but now my cell phone plan is so cheap with practically unlimited nationwide long distance and free roaming, I have *zero* need for such a thing. The only time I could see that it might be useful nowadays is if I were making a lot of overseas calls.

Civil rights restored?

Just mix in a few 1000 digit primes.
Chop fish into 128 pieces, add and blow.
Simmer and stir, and allow 1-3 secs for CPU to cool.
Talk when done.

Why so low market penetration?

I do not understand why IP phones
a) have so low market penetration
b) cost so much
-- I know part of the problem with a is b.

What I think really is needed is a low cost, high quality server system for one of these systems. Based on what little research I have done, it costs almost as much, if not more, for hardware for a small office system as it would to get a real small PBX like phone system.

I don't think a phone really needs a 9" LCD screen, or whatever was in the screen shot, but the "Java Phone" from the other company has a screen size perfect for the company phone directory. That I think could be the "killer app" for these things.

Anyway, anyone know of low cost PBX software (if that is even what is is called in the IP phone world)? Open Source, under a BSD like license would be cool, and lower the barrier to market entry for companies wanting to roll a system like this out. Of course, cards to hook up to a POTS connection would also be needed. Voicemail over the web, via shoutcast or something would rock. I havn't listened to my voicemail at work in 3 months. With a better interface, I may stop refusing to use it.

-Pete

The next step

This is fine for intraoffice communication, but what about the real world? I think that a solution for connection VoIP -> POTS could be easy, with a little knowledge of Linux drivers.

Get an older box (P2 400 or so), with plenty of PCI slots, and preferrably an onboard NIC also. Get some Winmodems equal to the # of pci slots.

WinModems, even in all of their Microsoft-sponsored godless evil towards open source platforms, are basically A/D and D/A converters hooked to a phone jack. It should be relatively simple to talk (no pun intended) to them in software and use one as an interface to POTS. It has all of the neccesary hardware, and writing a sound driver for it shouldn't be too difficult. A brand of WinModem with fairly standard hardware could be decided on by the implementer, and drivers written for that. (Winmodems? Standard? ...)

Client software with available source code could be modified to use those, as well as control the phone-line functions. Just run an instance per WinModem.

Honestly, I think that this could work, and it would be a great hack to accomplish. Anyone fancy a go at it?

All well and good. Any for sale?

I could not find any mention of the TuxPhone hardware (phone) itself on the site other than the photo, and discussions about the embeded lcd/strongarm thing. No mention of how it links with the phone in the picture, etc.

Are there any "low cost" IP telephones in the market today? $600 (what looks like the going rate) seems like too much to me.

-Pete

Open-source speech coding

(shameless plug) Take a look at Speex, an open-source, patent-free speech codec (Speex is to speech what Vorbis is to music). Speex should soon be available in Linphone too!

Market penetration

Although it seems liek VOIP has little or no market share in north america, it is a completely different story in the developing world.

I was travelling through asia and later in south america. Callign home using a conventional calling card was ridiculously expensive.

But, a lot of little businesses were around offering international calls for very cheap. From Laos to canada for 15 cents a minute. Sure there was a little delay, but it was well worth it. All of these were using some sort of VOIP box./

In places without much telecommunications infrastructure, especially when most of the peopel own cell phones and not land phones, VOIP allows the convergence of all sorts of telecommunications traffic onto one simple infrastructure.

And by using open source software, free to all, the third world can much more easily afford it.

VOIP for PCs?

Any info on VOIP for a regular PC? I need international long-distance access. I saw this Ask Slashdot article [slashdot.org] that recommended Speakfreely [speakfreely.org], but I haven't had time to try it.

Any advice?

Cross-Platform Voice Chat

Kind of off-topic, but does anybody know of a voice chat package that works on both Windows and Linux? Preferably usable over slow (4 KB/s) connections. I know about Speak Freely, but it gives my friends (who use Windows) only noise.

FYI

Just a couple of points I'd like to comment on.
Open Source VoIP and telephony is tracked at http://www.linuxtelephony.org.

VoIP hardware (PCI cards) is IIRC $79, gateways are $179, drivers have been in the kernel since (again IIRC) 2.2.16. http://www.quicknet.net.

VoIP in the U.S. is almost pointless because the PSTN is too good. No one wants near perfect when perfect is cheap and easy. In the third world, if you can get a phone circuit it averages $1.27 per minute, whereas VoIP through a hop-off provider like Net2Phone (http://www.net2phone.com) runs average about $0.23 per minute or less. Straight IP to IP (like across a VPN from company branch to branch) is just the cost of the ISP (usually flat rate). So VoIP cafes are a popular way for the non-super-rich and powerful to make calls to their relatives in the first world.

Personally, the VoIP calls I have made have an almost imperceptible latency problem and sounded *far* better than any GSM call I have ever heard. Then again, these calls were during business hours so net congestion was not an issue for me.

The Ogg Vorbis has a low bit rate mode that is useful for VoIP telephony, and is grossly better than GSM to my ear.

Finally, VoIP is used by the big players here in the US. Qwest and Sprint use VoIP in preference to ATM due to cost of the equipment (Bits per second/price of hardware. IP is more efficient than ATM due to less overhead). Any cross-country call is VoIP nowadays.

Just my two bits.

-C

Check this out.....

This is what Vonage gives their subs....I've had it for about 3 months and the quality is indistinguishable from a normal phone... http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/pcat/ata18 6.htm

VoIP on Linux available for several years

VoIP using only Open Source isn't new, nor is interoperability with Cisco equipment, nor is SIP, or even embedded VoIP using Linux.

The OpenH323 Project (http://www.openh323.org) has had a H.323 protocol stack availble since 1999. This stack works with Cisco gear and most other commercial H.323 products, and works on Linux, *BSD, Windows and other systems.

A full GUI Linux client using this stack can be found at http://www.gnomemeeting.org.

There is also a SIP stack available as part of the OPAL Project available from the same site. Others are also available (see http://www.vovida.org) for one example.

Lots of companies (including my own) have been doing "real" VoIP using Open Source for years.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of OpenH323)

If you want a TuxScreen...

...head over to TuxScreen.net [tuxscreen.net]. Be quick there are only a couple of hundred left. They are $99 each. Have Fun.

SIP is great but...

All of the phones put out by Cisco and Call Manager (the server that runs everything) don't use SIP, they use the open protocol SCCP or Skinny. If you hook up a SIP phone and try to register with Call Manager, it won't even work, as Call Manager dosen't support SIP. Nor is Cisco too hot to trot on SIP, as you can do less with SIP than with SCCP or even H.323. I've spoken to Cisco about SIP (including CCIE's) and SIP isn't anything special, especially in the enterprise market.

whats the big deal?

Ok so someone figures out how to put phone call data over ip. I'm still looking for someone that has a clue and isn't going to make the excessivly difficult. I currently have two 3com NBX100 (with only a small part GNU code but you can't get source even though they link it all together). These things are 486 boxes (that will boot linux!) that run a complete crap Os/custom app. I've got a cyclades pr4000 but they can't seem to figure out how to dump an analog call into a socket. I can do it fine on a cisco 5200 or a 2600 but not the only device I've got hooked up to a E1 (read T1 for the north american folks). They cyclades people came up with some lame ass excuse that "we figured people wanted "standards" which we couldn't do so we fucked it off. How lame. Oh well, its the last cyclades box I buy unless they seriously get ther act together...

I can take most of the devices that I've got that hook to decent phone lines and if I get a 64kbit data stream in (aka a phone call), I can dump it to a port. That port can dump audio out in ISDN format (mulaw or alaw depending on its place in the world) and the callie can get a nice message of "press 1 to do splat and press two for garfarbinsplat". Its trival to do an fft that can figure out which touchtone they are pressing and then I can cope with it in one of seval ways. All of this just by redirecting any call taffic to a tcp port on a linux box. Funny thing is I have yet to take advntage of any call set up or three way calling features in this code. It jusst answers the phone, plays back .wav files and figures out which buttons the press. Funny thing is I forgot all about h323 or h3 or any other protcolo but it does work. Maybe I sould got buy a few books on voip to find out how to do this right.

Cost/Benefit

My employer is in the process of rolling out a Cisco Callmanager based VoIP system. Cisco 7960 phones are around $250, which probably isn't that outrageous compared to other phones that can handle up to 5 lines.

The system over all is pretty spendy to install. Servers for call manager, server for Voice Mail system, all new phones, retrofiting with Cat5e. I can't see a big reason for this if I just need to switch 3 phone lines between 5 people. But for a couple of hunded people in a few locations, it's a different story. Phone company here charges $100/hr for a tech to work on our system. That adds up quickly, and much of the work seems trivial. Move this line from this office to another. Change this or that extension. Blah blah $100 blah. We're basically doing this to squeeze the local telco out of our service costs. Now it's all soft, we control extensions, we control dialing rules, we control call blocking and such. All of this is fine because our IT staff isn't overworked, so adding this layer probably won't add any bodies.

Bottom line is if you are installing network infrastructure and are spending money for managed switches and other hardware, and have more than a handfull of employees, consider making sure your switches and routers are VoIP capable, i.e. QOS, VLAN, etc., and consider replacing your PBX with a VoIP server solution when it comes time to expand or replace. The primary beauty of VoIP for us is 1. Scalability, 2. Independence from local telco 3. More feature rich phones.

That said, IMO the VoIP revolution is of the LAN, not WAN type.

Holy shit.

For the first time in my life I think I believe that some censorship is OK, and that the government isn't intrusive enough. I wish slashdot would just erase this horror.

Re:ooh fucking yES!!

This is some funny shit.

Any more code examples ?