[Gllug] VoIP at home, softphone, interoperability

[amd_uk]

A couple of years ago I found myself in the position of needing to talk 
to decidedly non-technical people over in yankland, so I ended up with a 
couple of solutions running at the same time depending on whether or not 
the people at the other end had access to a computer to run a soft phone on.

I had a Zoom X5v ADSL modem (router) that had an ATA built in. It also 
had Zoom's own SIP provider, Global Village, pre-installed and, whilst 
costlier than many of the VoIP providers, was fairly simple to set-up 
and use. I hired myself a number in a specific US city for £5-£6 a month 
and could receive normal phone calls at no cost to the person making the 
phone call (I had to pay about 1.5p per minute to receive the calls but 
there are cheaper alternatives).
The hardware was all built in to the router so there were no issues with 
the firewall and QoS had less steps in the network to worry about.

I also tried several different VoIP clients. Unfortunately Skype 
wouldn't run on some machines at their end so I ended up going through 
some generic SIP soft phones and ended up with Gizmo Project (running on 
Windows, I've only used it on windows so that's where my experience 
comes from). This is a SIP client that echoes Skype in its simplicity of 
set-up and use. Your connection is linked to an account and you log-in 
to the service with a user name and password. I don't recall any other 
SIP-specific setting up beyond that and the non-technical people at the 
other end had no problems installing and using the software.
Whilst Gizmo Project is not open, it can use SIP (apparently, I only 
ever had Gizmo Project at both ends) and would sort of inhabit the 
ground between Skype, closed to anyone other than other Skype users, and 
purely SIP, which can be used by any number of different soft-phones and 
ATAs.


I had a look at Asterix, but it was way too much for what I wanted to 
do. trixbox (which was Asterix at home) looks to be a Linux distro with 
Asterix built in and may be worth having a play with if you're interested.


Andrew.


Peter Childs wrote:
>
>
> Some of you seam to think SIP is difficult the other half seam to 
> think its really really easy. This is a reoccurring subject on gllug 
> as well! I think a meet on VOIP (and Linux) might be a good plan.
>
> For those thinking SIP is complicated from what I've heard of TAPI its 
> worse. Try 33 operations just to create a new user and I got that 
> quote from a telephone sales guy.
>
> Peter.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
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>   

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