Signal Quality

My current GPS is still in perfect condition. I say this to preface how difficult it is for me to make a decision about upgrading, even though the desire to upgrade is most decidedly there.
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At IdeaSIP, we’re constantly doing everything we can to keep our users happy — even the non-paying ones. As a user myself, I want to have the best service we can have, and I feel it’s only fair to give everyone the best care we can possibly give. One of the guys on the team put it best when he said, “The measure of a company’s customer service shouldn’t just be how it treats its biggest paying customers, it should be how it treats all its customers.” I take that to heart, and I think everyone on the team does as well.

This, however, seems to be a rarity in the communications world. (more…)

There’s really nothing Zen about fighting fraud on the Web. It’s a frustrating, draining, and painful experience.

At IdeaSIP, we’ve been fighting fraud from day one. We just didn’t realise it. It wasn’t until we had our premium (read: pay) services up and running that we discovered that some of our new users were simply waiting for the opportunity to hit us in our blind side. We took all the standard precautions — limiting credit card transactions to valid addresses and card verification numbers, relying on the credit processors to work their magic. We made it impossible to authorise a transaction based on an invalid billing address (you can actually allow invalid billing addresses, which I found amusing). We made it impossible to do this, that and the other — all within the limit our processing gateway would allow.
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Skype recently created a pretty flimsy excuse for their outage last Thursday, blaming the outage on a statistically unlikely massive reboot of Windows systems after a Windows Update. While several blogs have their own take on the explanation, with some picking apart the explanation, to some coming up with possible, but elaborate ideas for what might have ‘really’ happened, the overall concensus is that no matter what actually happened, Skype really let people down.

The basic problem for this comes down to a desire on the part of Skype to control every aspect of their service from the basics, down to how every end user is allowed to connect. The Skype communications protocol, the basic way that Skype’s network works, is kept a complete secret, allowing them to charge licensing fees to anyone who wants to make hardware or software that runs on the network.  As opposed to an open communications protocol like SIP, however, this means that you rely on the Skype developers when it comes to choices about security, stability, and user-experience.

With SIP, if there were a major bug in the backbone of the system, as there was in Skype, the fact that everyone can see the SIP protocol and how it works lets far more people find solutions to potential problems long before they become an issue for millions of helpless subscribers.

This reliance on obscurity for the sake of security and control is Skype’s biggest achilles heel, and is what makes use of their protocol a danger to anyone relying on them for business or essential communications. While one can hope that they might learn something from this lesson, or that users might realise that perhaps Skype is not all it’s hyped up to be, only time will tell for sure.

I was noticing something earlier today when reading the USAC’s (Universal Service Administrative Company) interpretation of who must contribute to the USF (Universal Service Fund) according to FCC 06-94. The FCC 06-94 order specifically states that interconnected VoIP providers must pay into the USF, and they go on to define an interconnected VoIP provider as a service that: “(1) Enables real-time, two-way voice communications; (2) Requires a broadband connection from the user’s location; (3) Requires Internet protocol-compatible customer premises equipment (CPE); and (4) Permits users generally to receive calls that originate on the public switched telephone network and to terminate calls to the public switched telephone network.”

Note the use of ‘and’ in that statement to imply that in order to be considered interconnected, you must meet all the four criteria.

The USAC’s interpretation of this regulation, however, is vastly different from everyone else’s interpretation. According to the USAC, “The obligations established by the FCC apply to all VoIP communications made using an interconnected VoIP service, even those that do not involve the PSTN…” which reads as though they think that an interconnected VoIP provider is not necessarily one which connects to the PSTN.

This seems to be a somewhat radical interpretation of what an ‘interconnected’ VoIP provider is, expanding their interpretation to even directly VoIP to VoIP services that never touch the PSTN such as FWD or even MSN to MSN calls.

I note that their site was updated as of the 17th of July, 2007, and that the site archive doesn’t mention this interpretation prior to this date, so I’m wondering if this means they’re going to start to pressure VoIP providers that don’t actually provide connection with the PSTN to pay into the USF.

Always pushing the boundaries, I often wonder how long it will be before we see the USAC and the FCC attempting to charge users who send instant messages back and forth across states ‘interstate communications’ fees, or requiring companies such as AOL, MSN, and Google to pay into the USF for their AIM, MSN, and Gtalk IM services.

Telephone conversations, while these days often taking place on mobile phones in public places, have often been considered to be, by many people, private conversations. Even when one person (or a whole crowded room) can hear half of a conversation, it’s not always readily apparent what the entire discourse is about.

This false sense of security has been the focal point of many a Hollywood film, often with the police, the government, or even the villains listening in and recording phone conversations through various methods. Traditional telephones are, after all, very easy to listen in on, as the technology behind them is exceedingly simple.

When cordless and early mobile phones became popular, this sort of listening in became even easier. Anyone with $30USD and a nearby Radio Shack could buy all the equipment he needed to hear the intimate conversations of his neighbors. A famous incident involving someone listening into phone conversations was one in which Prince Charles was overheard telling his mistress at the time, Camilla Parker Bowles, that he wished to be her tampon. The ease with which the conversation was overheard helped more people become aware of the inherent insecurity in phone conversations.

Since then, many mobile phones have gone digital and implemented several methods to help protect their users’ conversations from anyone trying to listen in. Conversations on mobile networks are interleaved and portions of the conversation are carried out on different, random channels to make it difficult to intercept any whole conversation as it flies through the air. They use this method of encryption to secure their calls.

There is an inherent flaw in these methods work, however: All data is disassembled and reassembled via a ‘trusted’ party (in this case, the mobile phone company). This is for the dual purpose of centralised management and ease of governmental wire-tapping. The phone company, then, is the ‘man in the middle’ who facilitates the security of the conversation. At any time, the phone company could choose to share the secure conversation with another third party, and in cases of police wire tapping, that’s exactly what’s done.

Enter into the equation VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). VoIP conversations, by their very nature, are more difficult for the layman to intercept, as they’re sent over the Internet as opposed to floating through the air or winding along wires as raw, unencrypted audio signals. It takes a little more expertise to tap into an Internet conversation and convert the data back into audio, but there is plenty of computer software available that takes the expertise out of the equation, allowing anyone to tap in and record if he can somehow find his way into the data stream. With Wi-Fi networks, this is quite easy, as all the data is just bouncing through the air.

It makes reasonable sense that VoIP, with its modern, technological origin, would have some sort of encryption built in that would make listening in on conversations more difficult, but in truth, encryption is still not always readily available in the VoIP world.

In VoIP, there are several issues to worry about. For one, if you’re using a VoIP phone to talk to a regular old landline or mobile phone, you run into the inherent limitations of both the traditional telephone network or the mobile phone network (as mentioned above). For another, while there are encryption methods available for VoIP calls, not many phones readily support them, and they each have their own flaws as well.

The major method of encrypting a VoIP conversation is called SRTP. The audio part of a VoIP phone call gets passed through the Internet using something called the RTP protocol (Real Time Transport). The S in SRTP stands for ’secure.’ SRTP works a lot like a secure web page works. A centralised authority hands the digital equivalent of a code word out to each phone, allowing the phones to encrypt their conversations back and forth. The centralised authority, often the VoIP provider itself, is considered to be a ‘trusted’ authority. However, there is still concern that such an authority could allow back-door access to a conversation to other people — governments or other authorities. It’s also possible that a particularly unscrupulous trusted authority could faciliate access to anyone it chooses.

This brings us to a different kind of encryption, ZRTP. ZRTP, created by Phil Zimmermann, the man who almost went to jail in the US for writing and openly sharing the high-powered encryption software, PGP, is a method of handling VoIP encryption without relying on a trusted authority in the middle. The phones themselves negotiate a secret code pair and share them with each other in a secure way, creating an encrypted conversation between the two phones. ZRTP uses a method of encryption called Diffie-Hellmann, which uses a public and private key encryption scheme. Each phone has a private code key and a public code key, and the only key ever shared is the public key. One end uses the public key to encrypt the conversation, and the other end uses its private key (unknown to anyone but him) to decrypt the conversation.

Diffie-Hellmann is an incredibly secure method of communication, that suffers only one weakness — a ‘man in the middle’ attack. The idea of a man in the middle attack is that someone COULD be in the middle of a conversation, intercepting all the calls and all the keys. He passes out his own keys to both sides, pretending to be the other person. He is able to decrypt and re-encrypt the conversation in both directions, thereby listening in to the entire conversation.

A man in the middle attack is a difficult thing to accomplish, but it’s possible, so one usually takes precautions such as sharing code words decided in advance, to ensure that the person you’re talking to is REALLY the person you expect to talk to on the other end.

The ZRTP code is freely available for anyone to use in his own software, and Zimmermann has also created ZFone, a program which encrypts the conversations from most popular VoIP softphones.

Unfortunately, VoIP hardware phones and PBX switches have yet to implement any form of ZRTP, so in order to use this newer, more secure communication method, you’re limited to VoIP to VoIP calls (remember, the limitations of traditional and mobile phone networks don’t allow for the same type of encryption yet) between other ZFone users on compatible VoIP networks (IdeaSIP, FWD, Gizmo Project, etc.)

There is simple no such thing as an unbreakable method of securing a phone call. Given enough time and enough resources, any encryption scheme could be broken. Strong encryption, however, is often impractical to break, and it’s usually much easier to rely on people and their misunderstanding of the privacy of their calls as the weak link in any security scheme. While, in this modern age of VoIP, one can still have a reasonably private conversation, secure in the knowledge that his intimate discussions won’t make it to the media, the best way to keep a secret is, and always will be, never to tell it to anyone.

While it still hasn’t reached mass acceptance, VoIP communication is rapidly insinuating itself into every facet of our daily lives. Many long-distance and calling-card providers have used VoIP to reduce costs for years now, and consumers are getting more and more choices for VoIP services every day. VoIP companies are springing up like Spring flowers, offering everything from inexpensive long-distance calling to quality phone features such as caller ID and voicemail.  It’s become quick, easy, and often free for a consumer to sign up to one of the thousands of available VoIP services like Skype, IdeaSIP, or Gizmo Project, and all the consumer needs is a broadband internet connection and the right hardware or software.

It seems only natural that the next big thing will be Wi-Fi VoIP. Wi-Fi phones and Wi-Fi-capable mobile phones  are beginning to crop up on the market from leading manufacturers such as Apple, Nokia, and Linksys. Some, like the Linksys and UTStarCom Wi-Fi phones offer only Wi-Fi-based VoIP, while others such as the Nokia and Apple iPhone offer both traditional mobile phone service, but also have Wi-Fi connectivity to allow connections to most VoIP providers directly without incurring mobile connectivity charges.

With the increasing prevalence of Wi-Fi hotspots, and the soon to appear WiMax zones covering entire cities, connecting to a VoIP company and bypassing usual cell charges whenever possible makes perfect sense; however, this terrifies the mobile companies, who see their revenue streams dropping over the course of the coming years.

In fact, it’s terrified mobile phone companies so much, that the underhanded tricks are beginning to appear in abundance.  Verizon has made the news lately by claiming patent ownership over the mere idea of using Wi-Fi VoIP phones to make phone calls, a fact that is likely to cause any number of providers that currently allow customers to connect via Wi-Fi VoIP phones to worry about repercussions. It seems the next logical step in VoIP, and that such a patents even exists is ludicrous, but it is still cause for real concern, as Vonage was recently found guilty of infringing upon this patent and ordered to pay $58 million USD in damages.

In the UK, Orange and Vodafone have gone so far as to require Nokia to remove VoIP capability from their N95 telephones in an effort to keep users from avoiding cell charges. This has caused somewhat of an uproar from customers, as Nokia clearly advertises the VoIP capability of its N95 handsets, and neither Orange nor Vodafone bother to mention to customers that such capability has been forcibly removed from their own versions of the N95 phones.

In the US, it’s almost impossible to find a mobile phone provider that has VoIP-capable phones available at all. Nokia’s VoIP-capable E61 PDA/phone, exceptionally popular in Europe, has an almost identical counterpart in the US (marketed by Cingular/AT&T) called the E62. It has all the same features, but no Wi-Fi capability at all, leaving the only Internet connectivity to be that which the cell provider allows through its own charged network.

Meanwhile, strictly Wi-Fi phones such as the Linksys WIP330 or the UTStarCom F3000, offer only limited performance, and have connectivity trouble when moving from Wi-Fi hotspot to Wi-Fi hotpot. Their inability to utilise a mobile cell network as a backup makes them of limited overall use for the moment except in offices or homes, where traditional VoIP-connected cordless phones might work just as well.

The technology is ready for Wi-Fi VoIP, and its popularity is guaranteed with price-conscious consumers, but there is still a considerably amount of pressure from mobile providers to keep the technology from reaching the populous.

While the news of Wi-Fi VoIP is bombarding the media, it still has significant hurdles to overcome before it is truly the next big thing.

Stanaphone, one of the better consumer-targeted VoIP companies, shut down its consumer operations at the beginning of this month. It had been a holdout for quite some time, and I’m honestly surprised they lasted as long as they did. They were one of those companies that offered free DIDs to attract customers, but they still offered excellent calling rates to global locations.

The problem, of course, with that business plan is that you have to ensure that the people who use your service are on the phone long enough to recoup your substantial losses for the free DIDs. That’s a huge gamble, and with their dial-out pricing, it was more of a pipe dream than anything else. On average, with Internet businesses, you can assume that, if you offer a free service, then 1-2% of your users will ever actually pay for any additional services you may offer. That’s a good average.

Let’s assume they were able to get DIDs for some outrageously inexpensive price of $3.00 per DID (with unlimited incoming minutes, which is pretty unusual for a DID of that price). That means if you offer a free DID, you have to make at least $3.00 in profit every month from other pay services to cover your basic costs. That’s per user. Now, Stanaphone was charging $0.016US per minute for US-Canada calls. We’ll assume they were making a pretty heft profit of about $0.007US per minute — $0.009/minute is a very good price, so that’s a high estimate. That would mean that, just to make up the costs for the free DID, each user would have to be spending more than 430 minutes per month dialing out.

That’s totally unrealistic.

As I say, I’m honestly surprised Stanaphone lasted as long as it did in that arena.

The VoIP market is, today, flooded with providers all offering their own take on what customers want. Open VoIP networks are becoming increasingly rare, as more companies try and close their services to keep users from being able to easily switch to other networks. The free DIDs are getting harder and harder to find from providers, as more and more providers either go out of business or simply realise that the usage they expected from customers is far more limited than they’d anticipated. More and more companies, like Stanaphone, are deciding that business VoIP is where all the money is, and are closing up shop in the consumer market. And many companies are simply discovering that the VoIP market is not the gold mine everyone thought it would be a couple of years ago, and have closed down after losing all their capital.

Some companies are doing well for publicity — Vonage and Skype being the top two known brand names in VoIP. Others, such as Gizmo Project are poised on the brink of being the next big name by offering flashy and full-featured software phones and becoming less a VoIP company and more an IM/VoIP offering. Some, such as IdeaSIP, are relying on a careful and close customer service focus that is unusual if not unheard of in the VoIP world. But the gold mine simply isn’t there. Vonage has been fraught with money problems even before the latest Verizon suit brought them to the edge of bankruptcy. Skype, backed by eBay, has been able to leverage its massive funding to attempt to gain customers by offering calls for free or close to it, but it’s simply losing money hand over fist to increase its customer base. Gizmo Project gained an influx of capital funding about a year ago that allowed them to create a new client and gain a large user surge, but their offerings of free calling to anyone else using Gizmo Project has the ring of a Skype-like attempt to burn capital in exchange for a larger user base.

Every day, there are more obstacles to avoid and more hurdles to jump. Legislation pushed by the telecom lobby creates an anti-competitive market. The sheer number of VoIP companies springing up out of the woodwork creates tough competition. The number of VoIP companies that go out of business every month frightens consumers away from adopting the technology, worried that their provider may suddenly vanish. The technology itself has yet to become transparent enough for many users to understand it enough to be able to use it. And marketing VoIP services is still an obstacle that no one has quite figured out how to overcome.

In the end, the products that survive will either have the capital required to survive the lean times, such as the ones already run by the large telecom companies or cable companies, or will somehow find a way to gain the appropriate grass roots momentum to carry them into the future.

It is with great trepidation and no small amount of morbid curiosity that I wander through sites like the VoIP Graveyard, wherein lie the brands that have already fallen. May they rest in peace.

You can’t escape the news these days about how Verizon is suing Vonage for patent infringement. Every week, there’s a new legal twist. The latest of these was that Verizon got the court to issue an injunction against Vonage, disallowing Vonage to sign up new customers. Vonage almost immediately got a stay on that injunction, so they’re back to where they were before — waiting for an appeal.

There are a lot of problems with this court case, and it’s very dear to my heart, since I run a VoIP company. How can Vonage be infringing on so many patents? Why is Verizon just now choosing to enforce them? What does this mean for the future of other VoIP companies? What are the patents involved, and why wasn’t Vonage given an option to license the technology instead of Verizon doing everything in its power simply to shut them down?

The answer to all of these questions is simple. The US Patent system is horribly, massively broken.

A brief look at how the patent system used to work:

You create an invention of some kind. You want to protect your rights, so you file for a patent. In the filing process, one of the requirements for you to receive a patent is that the information you provide must give step by step instructions and details to the point that anyone with materials and time and a little expertise could rebuild your invention from the patent. You are then granted an exclusive patent to this invention, and you can sell it or sell the idea to companies that are able to build it in mass quantities. If someone comes along and creates something that’s like your patented invention, you sue them for breach of patent, and either require them to pay you royalties, licensing fees, or simply require them to stop manufacturing the item.

Lawsuits are built into the patent process. In order to maintain your rights to your patent, you are required to ‘actively defend’ your patent. This means that, if you DON’T sue a company that’s making a device like yours, you are almost certain to lose your patent. As you can see, the patent offers you protection, but only protection to the point that you can police it. If you can’t afford the lawsuit, or you aren’t watching the marketplace like a hawk, or the company that’s infringing your patent is in a country that doesn’t care about your US patent, then your patent was, essentially, a huge waste of money.

For the most part, however, patents on objects are relatively easy to police. If an item comes out and is being marketed, it’s likely it will be marketed in the same segment as your item. You’ll see it on the shelves next to your device. You’ll see it in catalogs alongside your own. It’s easy enough to spot and track down so you can fight to save your rights.

The problem came, however, when the US Patent Office decided to allow method or process patents. Now, anyone can create a process in his head, using technology he may or may not have invented, and patent that process. For instance, I could try and patent the process of using a mouse to click on back and forward buttons on a web browser. As long as the process doesn’t currently exist, and the patent office clerk doing the filing is unaware of the technology in question, it’s very likely I will get my patent.

Suddenly, anyone who tries to create a web browser with forward and back buttons owes me money.

Now, if I try to sue Microsoft, for example, for using forward and back buttons on their Internet Explorer web browser, I’m liable to run into the problem of something called prior art. Microsoft is an enormous company, and has the legal power to crush my little claim. They will say that the concept of forward and back buttons has existed since the days before web browsers, and that my patent has no merit.

From this, we learn two lessons.  One, don’t make your patent easy to understand, and two, don’t target the rich companies first.

I should therefore create a process patent that is far more obtuse. Don’t mention forward and back buttons. Don’t mention web browsers. Make the patent more vague.  For instance, I should patent a system whereby navigation through a series of user-displayed screens and/or menus is facilitated by the local caching of content, allowing a user to proceed through pages or to previous pages more rapidly.

There. No mention of web browsers. No mention of forward and back buttons. And instantly, my idea is applicable not only to web browsers, but to any menuing system that has a back button. I added the little bit about local caching so that it will help explain the technology to the point that it looks like I’m giving a more concrete example. This sort of method patent is far more likely to make it through the patent system, and it gives me a distinct advantage.

My first lawsuit will be against the smallest mom and pop company I can find. They’re not liable to have enough money to fight me, and they’ll have to settle out of court.

As soon as I get a single company to settle, I win. This creates what’s called a precedent. Patent disputes with a precedent are far easier for judges to decide upon. They don’t need to really understand the technology (and face it, there are not a slew of technologically-savvy judges in the US legal system). They can simply rely on the added weight of the precedent to help them make their decision. Obviously, I won before, so I should win again.

My first five or six targets will be small shops that can’t afford the legal fees. Target anyone who might go out of business if he fought me, and anyone and everyone who used a menuing system in his software.  Once I gain a few decent precedents, I can start going after the larger companies with ease. It’s almost a given that a judge will side on the side of precedent, and with several precedents, it’s a no-brainer. It then becomes increasingly difficult and increasingly more expensive to fight against the patent holder, even if the patent is vague, has prior art, or the patent holder has ever made anything based on his own patent.

Enter the Verizon/Vonage patent lawsuit.

Verizon, one of the US’ only two remaining phone companies (AT&T, Verizon) is having trouble competing with Vonage. Verizon’s VoIP product is riddled with restrictions on usage, and their rates aren’t terribly competitive. To top it off, few people even know Verizon offers VoIP service. Their chosen service name is VoiceWing, which leaves most to wonder what it has to do with VoIP or Verizon. Vonage, on the other hand, is a well-known brand in the US. Their commercials, while horribly inane, certainly leave you knowing who they are.

Verizon simply can’t compete. The rule for competition in the US is, if you can’t compete, legislate your competition out of business.  Verizon tried this. Regulations from the FCC were passed (after heavy lobbying from AT&T and Verizon) that required Vonage to get all of their customers to sign a notice saying that it was understood that Vonage didn’t offer the same level of Emergency 911 services that a traditional land line offered. Regulations were passed to force Vonage to offer E911 service to all their customers, regardless of feasibility.  Vonage was almost shut down because it was given a ridiculously short time table to innovate, install, and verify new technology to allow E911 access for all its customers, but it made it over that hurdle.

It looked like Verizon would have to compete the traditional way after all, but they still had a trick or two up their sleeves. In order to stop Vonage once and for all, Verizon dragged up 7 rather vaguely-worded patents that might, in some way, apply to things Vonage is doing, and decided to sue Vonage for breach of patent. Yet again Vonage is on the brink of being shut down by a court order unless they can modify their technology to no longer fall under the patents.

The patents that Vonage was declared guilty of violating are vague to the point of being worthless, but they’re so convoluted that, having read them over and over, I still couldn’t tell you exactly what they are for. One of them talks about a method by which a telecommunications service can somehow be linked with a name or telephone number. This could refer to standard DNS, or it could be referring to ENUM, which is a way of linking telephone numbers to telephone or non-telephone services, or it could be referring to something that was a standard long before the patent in question existed, mapping a URI using DNS. Since the patent is both verbose and vague, it could very well be applied to all of these things.

Another of the patents allegedly infringed by Vonage was that of a method by which one uses a wireless phone to connect to talk over the internet.  No, I’m not making this up. While it seems pretty obvious that, given a VoIP network, one might want to use a phone without wires to talk over it, this was apparently a patented ‘idea’ granted in 2002.

And therein lies a problem for any number of VoIP companies. Wi-Fi VoIP-only or VoIP-capable phones have become a big thing lately. It really only makes sense that, given the growing availability of Wi-Fi, and the number of VoIP options, using a Wi-Fi phone to make VoIP calls is going to be huge.  Unfortunately, if Verizon gets its way, no one will be able to do that without either paying them money for ‘coming up with the idea.’ That is, if Verizon allows it at all. With its new found patent madness, it may simply disallow companies to use this technology if it doesn’t want them to be able to compete. IdeaSIP has several users that use Wi-Fi phones on our network. Will I be forced to block them because Verizon says they own the rights to the technology?

How about companies like Yahoo and MSN, which allow phone calls via their IM program? Technically, anyone using their IM on a wireless laptop is violating their patent. Where does the madness end? Will companies stop making Wi-Fi VoIP phones because of patent violation worries?

The allowance of process or method patents has become so rampant, that it’s even affecting new technology standards. There are few standards out there that someone hasn’t patented. Usually, the patent-holder is not the person who created the standard.  This was the case recently with Microsoft and its spate of XML-related patents, patenting everything from XML serialisation to XML conversions.  The XML standard was created as an open standard to encourage interoperability, and that a company would choose to patent changes to XML means that XML loses its standardisation and its very reason for being. More and more companies will have to worry about which parts of XML are and are not patented, and some may opt not to use it at all for fear of patent infringement reprisals.

In the VoIP world, this is happening all the time.  ENUM, a proposed standard for allowing easy interoperability between regular phones and Internet-based phone networks has been patented. That patent might fly in the face of Verizon’s earlier patent that vaguely describes a system that could be ENUM. Calling features get patented — like call return and call waiting.  Someone has a patent out there on using SIP to communicate with customer service people.  All of these patents are vague, process-related patents whose only real purpose appears to be patenting new standards so that, someday down the road, someone can come to collect rewards for technology they didn’t even create.

Innovation and standardisation go out the window (why standardise when someone else can patent your creation and force others to pay for it?), and consumers are left with fewer choices and less competition in the market. And this will continue to be the case until someone takes the brave step of completely overhauling and redoing the patent system — a daunting task, likely to bring lawyers and megacorporations screaming from their corners, ready to crush anyone who suggests an alternative to the current broken system.

In my last post, I talked about the disappointing performance of embedded Asterisk on a mini router.

Today, I’m going to discuss Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@home). Trixbox is a handy little open-source software package containing a combination ready-to-go linux install combined with an install of Asterisk with all the bells and whistles. It makes installing an Asterisk PBX as simple as it possibly can be. You take your Trixbox CD, drop it into the CD Rom drive of a machine, boot off the CD, and off goes the install.

After answering a couple of questions about a password and the timezone I’m in, the install adds all the necessary packages, reboots a few times while it does its work, and comes up running Asterisk. At this point, you can either log in via the console or, preferably, open up a web browser and point it at the newly-installed machine.

Coming from a background of installing Asterisk by hand and hand-editing the configuration files to do what I wanted and how I wanted, I’ll admit that the web-based interface was a little confusing. Documentation can be found online (and is extensive) , although there’s a trick to finding it from the interface which I found a little odd. You have to click on ‘Forums’ and it brings up an online page which includes a tab for documentation. That could have been labeled a little better (or had a direct link), but overall, I found the layout to be pretty good.

I would not, however, call the interface transparent. While there are several different interfaces combined into one (system configuration, recording management, etc), they all assume some Asterisk and phone knowledge, as the terms, layout, and configuration options are all Asterisk-specific. One couldn’t, for example, with no prior knowledge, load up Trixbox and have a phone system running in a matter of hours. It’s just not that simple.

With some careful reading, however, and if one uses all the resources of the internet available, it’s very easy to set up a basic running system to the point that you could then easily add or remove additional phones and users, work with voicemail, and configure some important features one would expect from a full phone system: conference calling and conference bridges, call waiting, call forwarding, do not disturb, call transfers, etc.

For those with Asterisk experience already, however, the experience can be frustrating. I’ll admit, I had to avoid the urge to uninstall the whole thing and just go back to my old ways of manually editing the config files. It would have been easier for me, but I was determined to understand the Trixbox solution, so I often forced myself to plod ahead.

As an install for a newer user, however, Trixbox comes wholly recommended. It takes the guesswork out of setting up a PBX either for home or at the office. Supporting large numbers of users would be a breeze with the web-based interface, and managing all the system files and configurations could be done by practically anyone with only a little bit of training.

I installed Trixbox at home, hooked it up to my IdeaSIP account using the instructions on the Asterisk@home wiki, and connected a device with an FXO port so that all my incoming PSTN calls go straight to my Asterisk box. From there, it determines whether or not I’m home or at the office by ringing first my local extensions, and then my remote extensions. If I’m nowhere to be found, and it’s during the day, it will forward off to my cell phone using my IdeasOUT minutes. If it’s night-time (sleep time), it just goes straight into voicemail.

And since I’ve become somewhat of a VoIP aficionado, and have many different VoIP-capable phones around the home, from the Snom phone to the wi-fi SIP phone to the ATA connected to my Uniden phones, I’m able to easily manage them all graphically with the Trixbox suite of interfaces. It’s quite effective.

The only real disappointment from Trixbox isn’t a Trixbox problem at all, really. It’s just that it requires a separate computer to use, and that means power, noise, space, and heat — something I’d been trying to avoid with the embedded asterisk install.

However, I can say that the whole suite works effectively enough that it’s worth investing in a small, shoebox-sized computer with a fanless power supply so at the very least I can keep space and noise down to a minimum.

If you’ve been thrilled with your VoIP account, but had been wondering what the next step might be in its evolution, I urge you to give Trixbox a try — for work or for home.