18 May 09 Asterisk’s New Friend in Israel - Cellcom

Since early 2006, an ever increasing competition between the local PTT carriers in Israel, had introduced an unlikely friend to the Asterisk community in Israel. While Cellcom, one of Israel’s largest cellular carriers, isn’t closely associated with the PSTN market - it’s entrance to the local PTT market, especially into the E1 PRI market, had introduced the most unlikely friend to Asterisk.

Cellcom’s highly aggressive marketing techniques, rapid deployment of skillful sales agents and a highly motivating sales campaign - had yielded a migration of many customers from the local PTT carrier (Bezeq) utilizing Analog lines with traditional PBX systems, to low cost, PRI circuits provided by Cellcom, with low cost Asterisk based IP PBX systems.

Now, coming 2009, Cellcom had sprung up a new marketing campaign for their new service line: all-in-one Internet access and telephony service for your home. The service is rendered via the utilization of an OPTION GlobeSurfer II devices, allowing you to connect your home wireless network and an analog phone directly to the device.

So, why is Cellcom becoming a better Asterisk friend? very simple, the usage of the GlobeSurfer II device, in an SMB environment is the ideal companion for a small time Asterisk installation - in the office. Each GlobeSurfer devices allow us up to 2.4Mbps of downlink Internet with 384kbps of uplink - and a dedicated phone line. All of this, for a low cost of 29$ per month (give or take a few dollars). By all standards, that price is lower than any of the high-power uplink Broadband connections in Israel - thus, this is an ideal choice for a small office. Now, all that we need to facilitate an office of 4-6 people, is to have two of these units, get a router that can support multiple (2 or 3) Internet uplinks - walla - we have the perfect office communications suite. Another added value is that our office is now truely mobile - we want to move offices, no problem, takes 10 minutes to move the offices and start working again. Now, the only thing that’s missing from the mix is the availability of static IP addresses on the link, and you’ve got a serious potential looking at the new PTT killer in Israel - Wireless Internet and telephony to go - at a price you can afford.

Other questions that remain are:

1. Will Cellcom allow for a single mobile number/landline number to be associated with multiple SIM card gateways such as this, allowing for office redundancy and maybe in the future true IVR capabilities?
2. Will Cellcom allow its customers to aggregate more bandwidth in the future, allowing for true VoIP services to operate using these units?
3. While the units are fully capable of rendering up to 7.2Mbps downlink and 2.4 Mbps uplink, Cellcom is limiting these to 2.8 Mbps downlink and 384kbps uplink - will they increase that in the near future?

All things considered, I believe that this unit will make Cellcom into a new contender in the market, allowing for new residential services and competition to exist - in other words, the heat in the Israeli residential and SMB market in on - let’s get cooking.

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14 May 09 Asterisk and Amazon EC2 - Amoocon Presentation

I recently gave a presentation at the Amoocon convention, held in Rostock, Germany - about Asterisk and Amazon EC2. Below is a medium quality video of that presentation:

or you may download it here:
Amazon EC2 and Asterisk video files

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19 Apr 09 Asterisk Fax, Cheap VoIP Providers, Free Calls and more …

As I recently explained to a good friend of mine, the essence of Jewish holidays is, more or less, the ever growing consumption of food - due to our great fortune with people trying to kill us and not being able to do so. Putting that aside, now a days, the essence of Jewish holidays, at least in Israel, is to basically sit at home and do nothing.

Last week was Passover. For those not in the know, Passover is the weird Jewish holiday when we’re not allowed to consume any bread or bread like products. On one hand, it reminds us our ancestors who travelled the desert for 40 years, and had to leave Egypt in a rush, so their bread didn’t rise. So, we eat Matza Bread to remember that time. However, today, you can make bread from a multitude of other ingredients, not only White Flour. For example, you can make bread from Potato Flour, Soy Flour or even Rice Flour - in other words, anything else by White Flour. I’m confident the orthodox Jew will claim that I’m wrong - but hey, that’s my 2c on the matter. In any case, Passover started on the 7th of April, and lasts 7 days. The first 2 days and the last 2 days are national holidays. So, the only work days that remained were: 9th, 12th, 13th. The 9th was a Thursday, no use working for one day, 12th was a Sunday, most of my customers abroad are not working, 13th was a Monday - hence - a single day of actual work to do. For a workaholic, like myself, that is more or less a nightmare.

VoIP Providers

Recently, a post on voip-info.org had caught my eye:

• 2009-04-15 - VoIP Providers Ranking AZ-VoIP-Providers publishes latest International Top 10 VoIP Providers Ranking on 15-April-2009.

I’ve decided to visit that website and take a look at the providers the “so-called” list offers. So, in general, the site is nothing more that a so-called “VoIP Link Farm”, promoting some services over others. In general, the site only contains some logos of service providers, a shit-load of Google banners, and some poor content relating to the actual pricing of the service providers - in other words, nothing new. So, if you’re looking for the real thing, stay away from this site, there is nothing special in there.

Digium Releases Fax for Asterisk

Per Digium’s website, the Digium Fax for Asterisk is:

Digium's Fax For Asterisk is a commercial facsimile (Fax) termination and origination
solution designed to enhance the capabilities of Open Source and commercial Asterisk
as well as Switchvox. Fax For Asterisk bundles a suite of user-friendly Asterisk
applications and a licensed version of the industry's leading fax modem software from
Commetrex. Fax For Asterisk provides low speed (14400bps) PSTN faxing via DAHDI-
compatible telephony boards as well as VoIP faxing to T.38-compatible SIP endpoints
and service providers. Licensed on a per-channel basis, Digium's Fax For Asterisk
provides a complete, cost-effective, commercial fax solution for Asterisk users.

Ok, Fax is one of the most anticipated parts that Asterisk had been in need, since the creation of Asterisk. While back in the days of SpanDSP and Hylafax you were able to go about and send/receive faxes, in a somewhat reliable manner (who am I kidding, it was only 80% reliable), Digium’s Fax for Asterisk is surely a new step-up. This new add-on shows that Digium is maturing, becoming increasingly serious about their approach to the Enterprise market. I’ve been working with the FREE Fax-For-Asterisk license, which provides a single license and I have to admit - it works fairly well (what am I talking about, currently, 100% of faxes pass through without a hitch!).

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01 Apr 09 GreenfieldTech announces the general availability of app_cashmaker for Asterisk

Udim, Israel. April 1, 2009 -GreenfieldTech Ltd., a leading provider of Asterisk solutions and Asterisk training services in Israel, today announced the availability of it’s patented app_cashmaker application for the Asterisk Open Source PBX system. The CashMaker application is intended to be used by various content suppliers, wishing to distribute Audio and Video based content, utilizing their Asterisk server.

The application is built to accept an inbound call into it, then, according to various information gathered in correlation to the callers caller ID and/or inbound DID number, will correlate a relevant content stream directly to the caller. The content distributor doesn’t even have to care about what content to distribute, as the application will connect directly, via the Internet, to a remotely available RTBSP streaming server at GreenfieldTech data center.

“The app_cashmaker application is the result of the cumulative work of over 3 years in the making, testing various content business models and applications. The main problems most content distributors have is how to gather the content and manage it, with app_cashmaker, this requirement is negated, thus allowing the distributor to concentrate on what they do best - flooding the newpapers with ads and marketing material to promote their content delivery service”, says Nir Simionovich, CEO and Founder of GreenfieldTech.

Simionovich indicated that the central content distribution facility is managed via a GTBS cluster environment, implemented partially utilizing Amazon’s EC2 and S3 structures, while utilizing GreenfieldTech’s proprietary streaming and clustering technologies. Currently, GreenfieldTech had submitted 10 different provisional patents, relating to the technologies comprising the app_cashmaker application and service. GreenfieldTech marketing team had indicated that initial beta trials had showed an increase in content availability, via the GreenfieldTech BSC Cloud facilityof over 40% with an increase of almost 80% in content delivery success.

Simionovich estimates that by the year 2010, over 20,000,000 will use the GreenfieldTech app_cashmaker facility, disrupting completely the way mobile, audio and video content is distributed around the world.

Asterisk is the world’s leading open source PBX telephony engine, and telephony applications solution. It offers unmatched flexibility in a world previously dominated by expensive proprietary communications systems. The Asterisk solution offers a rich and flexible voice infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with both traditional and advanced VoIP telephony systems. For more information on Asterisk visit http://www.asterisk.org 

For more information, please refer to the GreenfieldTech website at http://www.greenfieldtech.net.

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01 Apr 09 Asterisk updates, rants and raves

Well, I guess it’s time for another Israeli Asterisk update post - one that was well due a long time now. This post was written after the recent hectic 3 weeks of Asterisk events and news here in Israel. So, I guess we’ll open with some news - beep, beep, beep.

Asterisk based Contact Centers

EasyRun, a world wide provider of Call Center and Contact Center solutions had announced the availability of its EpicAcce solution.

EasyRun Partners with Xorcom to Offer the Industry’s First Enterprise Grade PBX Agnostic Contact Center

EPICAcce Delivers the Industry’s First PBX Agnostic Enterprise Grade Contact Center Solution

For those in the know, the EpicAcce solution is based upon the Asterisk Open Source PBX system, bundled inside a Xorcom XR3000 appliance. I’m proud to say that I had some involvement in the development of this product, mainly, having trained the EasyRun lead developers in the workings of Asterisk - in the first Asterisk Bootcamp that was held in Israel last year. The EpicAcce appliance is defined as a PBX agnostic contact center solution, thus, it will work in any type of PBX or enterprise installation - making it the ideal solution for any company wishing to embed a contact center to their customer care, without the requirement of changing their entire company telephony infrastructure. In addition, the same unit can also be used as a the company PBX system - after all, it is based on Asterisk underneath and FreePBX as the management interface for Asterisk.

Asterisk gains recognition by the TheMarker.Com

About 3 weeks ago, I got interviewed by Amitai Ziv, a telecom reported from the TheMarker.Com IT news section. The interview (in hebrew) is available at the following URL:

http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/6255

Now, while the article had mentioned about 25% of the actual interview and also summed up various statements from other people two, in general, it was very supportive of the Asterisk initiative and movement in Israel. I guess, well at least from my point of view, this article is a valid turning point - where the Israeli main stream industry acknowledges Asterisk as a valid business viable solution. In addition, as the founding father of the Israeli Asterisk users forum (www.asterisk.org.il) it is a great honor to be interviewed for this magazine. Sure, I make a living from promoting Asterisk and developing Asterisk based platforms, but having your face (although a horid picture) in the paper and having your name mentioned in a positive manner - is always a good thing.

Israeli Telecom Manager Club recognizes Asterisk

Yesterday I attended the “Israeli Telecom Manager’s Club” quarterly meeting, which was focused entirely on the viability of Asterisk and other Open Source based solutions. While most of the audience was made of large companies and captains of industry (Coca-Cola, TEVA, Israeli Electric Company, others) - I didn’t get the dreaded lazy eye I got almost 3 years ago.

When I started promoting Asterisk in Israel, almost 7 years ago, people looked at me as the crazy guy that has no idea what he was talking about. After all, I was an IP/Web technologies engineer, suddenly, starting to talk about telephony - in a world where 50 year old engineers were controlling and dominating entirely. Suddenly, a new kid on the block comes in and says: “Listen, Open Source can do it as good - if not better“. Yesterday was a turning point, suddenly, all these people came in to listen to me, preach and promote, both Asterisk and proper Open Source adoptation and GPL compliancy.

Israel is changing, companies start realizing that using GPL and modifying GPL products isn’t something to be taken lightly - it must be done with experts, and people that actually know what they are doing in the Open Source world. The old time Open Source geeks are starting to gain the industry recognition - Israel is finally starting to reach the state where the US and Europe are currently located at.

Digium announces availability of Support Services

This is not the first time Digium had tried doing this - first time was about 2.5 years ago. The current support services are based upon a signed service agreement, allowing the customer to receive phone based support services. According to the Digium website, the pricing model is as following:

                               SMB L1   SMB L2   Enterprise L3   Enterprise L4
Included Systems (Servers)        1         1          Up to 5         Up to 10
Included Cases (Incidents)        2         5             10           Unlimited
Additional Server Price           —         —          $495.00         $395.00
Named Contacts                    1         1             1                3
Price - 1 Year Subscriptions   $595.00  $1,995.00     $3,995.00        $7,995.00

Ok, not that I have a problem with that - I guess in the world people are willing to pay upto 300$ for a support incident - however, in Israel, that makes no sense. Judging from my experience supporting Asterisk, over 90% of the support calls can be resolved in less than 30 minutes. Charging an amazing price of 300$ for remote hands support, for an incident of 30 minutes - that is outragous. It’s true, I’m a Digium fan and I promote their products where ever I go, however, in Israel - this model will not cut it.

My company, started rendering Asterisk support services in Israel back in December 2008. Our support model is completely different - making it ideal for the Israeli market. Our support model is based upon a base line service agreement, indicating that you pay a total of 2,300 Israeli Shekels (around $500) for up to 10 hours of phone based and remote hands support services. These are rendered for a single server only - additional servers will cost you a couple hundrad more shekels, but the overall agreement in terms of time remains in tact. People in Israel know that support cases happen once every few months, so paying an identical price for getting 2 incidents handled simply doesn’t make any sense in the Israeli Market.

TDM400 Compatible GSM Module

A new product on the market introduces a GSM module to the ever popular Digium TDM400P card. The new module, available at http://www.asteriskgsmmodule.com/index.html is a plug-in for the TDM400P card, allowing it to accept a GSM SIM card - instead of the standard FXO module.

Finally, a plug-in for Asterisk that negates the need to work with a GSM converter. The bad thing is that it requires a patch to the wctdm.c Zaptel driver, and aparently, isn’t yet available for DAHDI at all - but I guess this will be fixed in the short future. I surely hope that these guys will contact Digium and maybe introduce the driver into the main stream driver distro, after all, Digium doesn’t make GSM modules - so it’s no competing with any Digium product.

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25 Mar 09 Why will proprietary software will eventually die?

Last night I met with a friend of mine, Mr. Doron Ofek. For those of you not familiar with the Open Source market in Israel, Doron is the one person most affiliated with RedHat in Israel, as Doron championed the adaptation of RedHat Linux servers in various enterprises and government offices in Israel. Doron is currently heavily involved in the OpenMoko project and its adaptation and promotion in Israel.

We spent a great deal of time last night, talking about the various aspects of Open Source training in Israel - as both us provide various training services to this market sector. While I’m mostly focused on Asterisk Training, Doron is focused on Linux and XEN training. Both of us have some our training routes knee deep in Israel’s computer/IT training companies, namely Matrix, Hi-Tech College and John Bryce. We both talked about our discontent with their inability to promote and market Open Source training courses, simply because they have no idea what these are.

For example, while Hi-Tech college were incapable of signing up a single person for an Asterisk Bootcamp course, I had signed up 10 people to a my first bootcamp - without any marketing or sales budget, simply by putting out the word in the right places. Now, Hi-Tech college has a list of over 5000 people who studied Linux and other Open Source and networking subjects in their college - should have they been able to gather up at least 10 people as well (less then 0.5% of their entire customer base)? the answer is a definite yes, why were they unable to do so? simply because they have no idea what Asterisk is, how it can be marketed, how it can sold and how the customer should be approached.

Doron had indicated a similar issue with both John Bryce and Matrix - however, due to other reasons. However, Doron had managed to sell quite a few training courses for Linux on his own - without any help from the big boys - how did that happen? how is it possible that Doron and I succeeded where the other colleges had failed? how can that be? - then we both realized why eventually, proprietary software will die and the Open Source movement, over the course of time, will simply negate the presence of proprietary software - simply because Open Source people provide for better marketing strategies and methodologies.

Did we learn how to do marketing on school? are we marketing people by nature? the answer is NO - we learned how to market our belief in the Open Source initiative over the course of time. We championed Open Source in various enterprises, events, public speakings and other places. We were the “soap box” speaker at Hide Park’s Speakers Corner, we were that crazy man on the street screaming: “The world is coming to an end, repent!” (well, you know what I mean) - but all in all, as time progressed we learned how to market the Open Source initiative and our belief - the large enterprises are stuck in their own belief and stagnant marketing strategies and plans. As time progressed, the various “champions” left the large enterprises, simply because they got fed up with the wrongful methodology of these and followed their own path - and doing so with moderate success.

In my belief, as time will progress, the large enterprises will surely migrate to the Open Source, and I won’t be surprised if within a period of 5-6 years Microsoft will be shipping out a version of Windows that is based on the Linux Kernel - or another Open Source distibution methodology. Call me crazy, call me chaotic, call me a dreamer - but mark my words - this will happen.

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Tags: Asterisk, Business, Cloud computing, digium, economy, GPL, GreenfieldTech, Linux, Mandriva, Microsoft, violations

22 Mar 09 Being a successful Asterisk Consultant (Part 2)

Last time, I’ve contemplated upon the various aspects of being an Asterisk consultant, mainly judging these from the Asterisk/Open Source point-of-view. Today, I’d like to contemplate upon a different approach of being a consultant, mainly, the various aspects that are usually not associated with Asterisk consultancy, however, can increase your overall perception by your prospective customer.

Be Targeted, Don’t be Limited

Most Asterisk consultant tend to restrict themselves to the Asterisk arena, at best, they will expand their knowledge into the realms of SIP and networks - but never beyond that point. It is true that telephony makes for over 80% of the Asterisk consultancy world, however, Asterisk isn’t limited to telephony only. More than 40% of the people using Asterisk are utilizing it for something completely different. Ranging from simple IVR to complex Micro Payment systems, Asterisk is there. Surely you can consult about Asterisk, but imagine the benefit your customer will gain if you are able to advise about other issues as well?

You are most probably saying: “I’m an Asterisk expert, I can’t be a **** expert as well!’ - you’re not being asked be one. You are being asked to expand your horizons beyond the Asterisk realm, being asked to be able to answer preliminary questions about various subjects. Over the course of my work I’ve been asked about subjects as: Google Adwords, Business Models, possible business partners, applicability of solutions and many more. Surely, there are people more qualified than myself to answer each of these, however, being able to answer my customer in a short time yielded something interesting, my customer became more at ease consulting with me about other matters as well - sometimes surpassing the realms of VoIP and Networking. When I was unable to answer I always replied with: “I’m not an expert about this, but I can check it out”. If I had an answer I would reply: “Per the information that I have, the answer is ………., however, I do suggest talking to someone more skillful than I on these matters”. This approach yielded an interesting response from my customers, mainly, their appreciation at me being able to supply a form of preliminary answer for a question - while on the other hand admitting at the same time that I’m not the best at this field.

Subjects that are fairly close to Asterisk include: GPL compliance, programmatic approach, platform design, billing considerations, scalability and redundancy and more. Again, always target your knowledge to Asterisk and VoIP, but don’t be limited to these.

Advocate for GPL compliance

As a consultant, you’ll be asked to perform various projects - some of these will most probably clash with the GPL spirit. If you encounter such a request, turn down this project immediately. There is no use or advancement by doing a project that violates the GPL code of conduct. No matter if you’re violating GPL v1, v2, v3 or any other of the Open Source license variants, at the end of the day, it will creep up behind you and bite you in the behind.

An Asterisk consultant who doesn’t advocate for GPL compliance is an outbound liar and a con-man. Consulting for the Asterisk market is prmoting the usage of GPL and Open Source software. Performing projects that violate both put you into the position of being perceived as a consultant without any code of conduct and no personal believes. You will be perceived as only being interested in money, thus, you will attract the type of customers you don’t want to attract.

Business Partners

The business partners you choose tell much about yourself. Sometimes, the big partners, which you really want to put their logo on your website as a partner is the wrong partner for you. Since the Q4 2008, my company had been approach by multiple companies wishing to become partners with my company - many have been declined. They were declined due to a simple reason - they were the wrong partners, even if they were companies generating over 25M$ of income per year. Does it make me sound stuck up and elitist, maybe, but there is no use partnering with a company that may clash with your own business model. Just like customers, partners tend to attract one another. Team up with the wrong partners, you’ll start attracting the wrong partners all over.

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Tags: Asterisk, Consultant, digium, GreenfieldTech, JaJah, Partners, yahoo

09 Mar 09 Being a successful Asterisk Consultant

A while back, John Todd from Digium, had posted an entry on the Digium blog web site, regarding how to be a successfull Asterisk consultant. While I completely agree with John’s views on the matter, from obtaining a dCAP certificate to the involvement with the community - there are a few points missing from that post, at least in my view. I will try to add some additional information here, in the hopes that it may help you build your business.

Point 1 - Stay Focused

Most of us Asterisk consultants come from diversified areas of expertise. Most of us are plain old IP sysadmins or network managers who got thrown into the Asterisk world due to a requirement - got hooked on it and simply continued onwards. Some of us are developers, some web oriented, some core oriented, but developers yet. The diversity of most Asterisk consultants skill set can easily side track them.

When I say side track, I don’t meant that they don’t know what they are doing, I mean - it’s easy to try and swallow more than they can chew at one time. For example, example a sysadmin turning into an Asterisk consultant, after installing over 200 Asterisk systems. Now, a customer comes to him and says: “Well, I’m gonna give you the work, but I want you to also take over the various IT management aspects of the system.” - If at this point you will say: “YES” you are more of less dooming your business. You are an Asterisk consultant, no matter how a talented IT sysadmin you are, going about and taking both roles on your self would render you in a situation where you, at some point, will be in a situation where you are handling an extreme IT condition at that customer, rendering completely incapable of rendering services to your other customers. Remember, stay focused on what you do, you won’t run into a situation where you will be forced to hurt a customer.

Point 2 - Earning more is sometimes loosing money

This point relates directly to the previous one. Let us imagine that I’m an Asterisk developer with a background of Web development. When confronted with a project that may include both Asterisk and Web Development - the most logical answer would be “YES” - however, web developers tend to forget that they are working autonomously. Most web developers are backed up by teams of graphic artists, database developers, database managers and IT managers. Thus, a web application is much more than the web logic involved with it. Are you an all encompassing developer, capable of cater to all aspects of a web development project and an Asterisk project? if you have your own in house DBA and other resources, you should be fine, however, if you don’t - at some point in the project - you will be forced to outsource the work to a 3rd party - thus, lowering your net income on the project. So, by taking such a project you believe you will be earning more money, while in fact, at the end of the project you may end up in debt to 3rd party sub-contractors you hired.

Point 3 - Be true with yourself

Always be true and honest with yourself and always ask yourself: “is this really a deal that will advance me? or may it actually set me back?” - failing to answer these two questions for every project you are about to take on will end up with some disappointment. Remember, you can fool all people some of the time, you can fool a few people all the time - can you can’t fool yourself! You are your own worse judge, jury and executioner. If you end up doing a project that doesn’t feel right for you, or something with the various aspects of the project troubles your no a moral ground, at some point in time, it will creep up on you and bite you back in the ass.

Point 4 - Use it, don’t abuse it

We all deal with various aspects of the Asterisk project, an Open Source project at its core. It’s very easy to become side tracked by large sums of money, in order to either violate a GPL code or doing something which is completely negated to the Open Source spirit or the Asterisk community. Sure, you will abuse Asterisk and/or other Open Source Asterisk related projects, however, at some point, it will be discovered and your name will be smudged. For example, if you integrate ViciDial to a customer, tell them it’s ViciDial and don’t change its logo to something else. Same applies to FreePBX, A2Billing or other Asterisk related packages - at some point your customer will find out you integrated Open Source - and you will be branded a cheat.

For example, 2 weeks ago I was at a call center, where one of Israel’s leading Asterisk integrator had built a dialer platform for the call center. The call center manager told me that they paid a sum of about 120,000 Israeli Shekels (approx 30,000$) for that dialer. I was really interested to see the product, while the only thing I saw was a “logo” modified “ViciDial” with a couple of hooks into FreePBX (that also had its logo changed to the company logo). The customer was sure he was getting a personalised job, while actually, the entire amount of work done can be amounted to about 12-16 hours of work. Ok, so the hardware costs about 8000USD - still, 22,000$ for installing and modifying two pages on ViciDial - you can’t say that is right - is it?

Conclusion

Always be true to yourself, to your customers and to the community - you’ll never loose.

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Tags: Asterisk, Consultant, digium, FreePBX, John Todd, vicidial

04 Mar 09 Cloud Computing negates IP Centrex Services

Today I sat down with a friend, a telecom consultant like myself. The main difference between the two of us is that, while I’m purely focused on Open Source technologies, he’s focused on proprietary technologies. Well, I can’t really blame him, after all, he used to be the CTO of a Tier-1 long-distance carrier in Israel and his track record of building large scale systems can’t be negated or dispersed at ease.

In any case, we were discussing the financial validity of obtaining an IP centrex platform vs. building one of your own based on Asterisk. On one hand of the scale, we had companies such as Broadsoft and the like, proprietary technologies for building IP centrex environments. In addition, we’ve discussed the various FlatPlanetPhone type companies, rendering IP centrex type services via Asterisk, in a hosted model solution. It is obvious that if you are going into the “retail” business, then you simply sign up as a reseller of anyone that hosts their own platform and go on from there - however, this was not the case.

Our discussion was based on the following assumption: a projected customer wants to host IP centrex like services to a total of 15,000 business subscribers, each one consisting of anything from 5 users at the low end to 60 users at the high end. The average calculation was 33 users and multiplied that by 7500 (half of the project users case) - giving us a total 247,500 connected phones. Ok, a Broadsoft of that size is WAY WAY WAY more expensive than our projected budget, and building our own IP centrex platform based on Asterisk would take too much time.

Recently, advances on the implementation of Asterisk utilizing Amazon EC2 had resulted with the implementation of a full office PBX system can be implemented within an EC2 instance. While the PBX is based on Asterisk + FreePBX, it surely can provide any of the required IP Centrex type of services a normal PBX platform will provide - in addition to the hosting environment which is highly reliable.

Now, a normal office works anything between 9 to 11 hours per day. Doing some Amazon math shows that running a PBX system, 11 hours per day, 22 days a week, yields a total of 242 hours per month. Thus, based upon a medium C1 instance, we’re talking about 49$ per month for running your PBX. Bandwidth for a PBX that size would cost around the 5$ per month, and the elastic IP is another 3$, thus, a total of 57$ per month, cost to the operator. The IP centrex model dictates a price per phone, thus, an office of 5 people, with a minimum charge of 39$ per phone per month, leaves us 137$ of profit per month. Let’s imagine that you’re using phones like SNOM 300 as your base phone, these are 80$ value at large quantities. Thus, the customer ROI is around the 4-5 months, which is normal in the services world.

Now, the PBX system can go online and offline on a daily basis, while being offline having its inbound calls directed to a company voicemail. This will save all the off-hours messages people may leave on the system and will also lower operational costs on a per day basis. If a company requires to have it’s PBX system up and running at all times, simply charge a bit more, no big deal.

In other words, the utilization of Amazon EC2 instances with proper AWS management and control can introduce a new business model - the Clouded PBX service. No more need to own large portions of data center realestate, no need to maintain large teams of IT and network personnel - just setup you AWS account, build your management system - and start earning cash. Look out Broadsoft, Asterisk and Amazon are coming - and a hail storm follows them.

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26 Feb 09 Battling the GlobalCrossing CallerID blues

As a part of my job, I manage and maintain customer platform - usually operating in the Calling Cards and VoIP services market. Over the course of time, I’ve learned to rely on some providers in this world, knowing that they work 99.999% of the time.

For example, i like working with DID numbers provided by Level3, GlobalCrossing and Voxbone. I have a fair dislike for DIDX and the like, simply due to the fact that their reliability, not the DIDX platform, but the providers themselves is questionable - at best.

So, why is this post called: “Battliing the GlobalCrossing CallerID blues”? simple, because the list that appeared before is now missing GlobalCrossing. Over the course of time, I’ve learned to live with the various quirks of GlobalCrossing, mainly, their inability to provide a proper e164 number as a part of the SIP headers. Usually, I would receive headers from global crossing that look like this:

FROM HEADER: <sip:3054230103@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx>;tag=as54cf6928

Now, I new that in general, that didn’t post much of a problem, as long as it was consistent. However, starting today, some of the requests started looking like this:

FROM HEADER: <sip:13054230103@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx>;tag=as1213141

However, to make things weird, one INVITE request would carry the non-valid e164 numbering, while the second INVITE may carry the correct format. In other words, there is no way to know exactly if the number is provided in full e164 or not. So, I tried doing some header mangling using Asterisk and other tools, however, nothing helped. Surely the format changed along the way, however, when I changed one side of the system, another side of the system broke - simply because it relied on something else - in other words, a fuck’n mess.

At this point, the problem is not yet resolved and i’m working with my DID provider to remedy the situation - after investigating it, the DID provider is currently bashing the heads at GlobalCrossing to fix the issue on their side. I will report back once I have more information.

If you suffered similar problems with other DID providers, I’d love to hear about it.

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Tags: Asterisk, CALLERID, Carrier, DID, GlobalCrossing, Level3, SIP