“Oh, just get me the CDR’s and I’ll take it from there” – how many times have I heard these words before? I can’t even imagine the number of times in the past 15 years of IT/Telecom’s work that I’ve done and in the last 8 years of Asterisk in particular – when it comes to billing and fraud management, it would appear that the CDR’s are the Rosetta Stone of the industry.

Over the past 6 months, several of my friends and I had been asking ourselves this question: “Is there more to billing, fraud management and profit leakage? does it really all begins and ends with the CDRs?” – so, here we were, a group of 3 engineers dealing with telecom system and billing systems – we knew that the answer is a definite YES, however, how come most companies and system aren’t even aware of this, in such a way that causes them to leak telecom profits and waste their hard earned profit margins on simple accidental mis-interpretation of CDR records.

So, we’ve decided to sit down and start analyzing calls in real-time, trying to evaluate not only the CDR record that is received upon the completion of the call – but also understand the traversal path of the call, analyzing it in real time and evaluating it profit leakage potential. At the mean time, we’re concentrating our work on Asterisk, as it is the simplest for us to implement – however, we’re not focusing it only on that – we’ll looking at adding it to FreeSwitch, Yate, OpenSer/Kamailio, OpenSIPS and the various varients.

So, what have we done so far? well, one thing we never really had with any of the existing systems was a clear view of what’s going on “right-now” on our systems, so we said: “it would really be great if we could know how many call hits we’ve received during the past 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes” – so here is what we made:

The above image shows our top 10 inbound DID numbers, as you can see these are in the 972 and 447 country codes (yes, we work mainly in Israel and the UK). At the backend, our servers are analyzing the data in real time, generating an active alert in the case a DID number’s statistics change in a somewhat drastic change, thus, establish a traffic anomaly. Another thing that interested us was our usage across multiple servers, which we are exhibiting in the below graph:

Now, as you can see, the top graph shows a discrete anomaly:

This anomaly indicates something went wrong on all our servers between 00:45 and 1:15, which gives us a fairly discrete period of time to seek for a problem in the system. What happened was that one of the guys updated a portion of the data traversal API – basically deleting it [we resumed full work after about 40 minutes].

So, where is it all going to? well simple, a new Open Source based service that we’ll be launching within a few months from now. Our intention is to provide a means for simple, straight forward, highly reliable, call analytics, fraud management and profit leakage analysis service. A service which is based upon a simple to use API on one hand and Open Source based data gathering agents. Our belief is that by analyzing large amounts of data, from multiple sources around the world, we’ll be able to ascertain the fingerprint of a telecom bound attack – being able to alert the respective users of the service and maybe in the later future, also provide a means to block the attack as it advances across the world.

I’ll be updating about our advancement as we go along, but for the time being, this is something I felt would interest you.

When most of us think about PBX systems, we usually associate these with cumbersome usage, confusing dialing codes and in most cases – a PBX system is automatically associated with the annoying task of transferring a call from one handset to another. Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about how people use PBX systems, is this really the only way to use a PBX system? is there something else to the mix? can we really enrich one of the oldest operational paradigms in the world? – and for that matter, can the public be re-educated to assimilate a new breed of PBX systems or services?

As to answering the question of re-educating the public, I guess I’ll have to leave that question to the head shrinks. As to answering the latter, enriching the PBX experience is both achievable and advisable. When I say enriching, I mainly talk about your ability to bring to the IP phone functionality usually not associated with it. Imagine to have the ability to receive a stock exchange RSS feed to your phones idle screen, notice that you stock is either rising or falling, and by the flick of a button – either sell or buy. We’ve all come accustomed to IP phones that look like the one of the right. A whole bunch of buttons, that in most cases have no direct use when our phone is utilized using a single account. However, these buttons can be externally re-assigned and re-programmed to achieve greater functionality – surpassing the normal behavior of just making phone calls.

The technology involved exists on almost every high-end IP phone on the market (well, at least those made by SNOM, Aastra, Cisco and Polycom – most of the Chinese makers don’t have this) – it’s called a Mini Browsers. Mini Browsers are exactly what they are called, these are simplified versions of your typical Internet browser. Some vendors had produced their own XML based Mini browser markup language (SNOM, Cisco, Aastra) while others had decided to provide a sub-set of XHTML (Polycom). The variations between the vendors are at the neck deep of the problems of using Mini Browsers, and that is that the formats are considerably different. Sure, SNOM had more or less adopted Cisco’s general structure, however, it still varies.

Through the utilization of this technology, it is possible to create phone based browser applications, that seem native to the phone user, as the general interface resembles the native phone interface. It is now the developers job to make the web interface displayed to the user as seamless and as native as possible, keeping in mind that the developer must remain agnostic to the information retrieval layer. Most companies leave their phone systems and these tasks to their system administrators and infrastructure team, however, this task is far beyond their capabilities and skill set. Creating an agnostic IP phone minibrowser dislplay layer, capable of utilizing multiple vendors and models, is a question of content management and content rendering, very must similar to the content transcoding problem that is common to the mobile content world – in other words, a sys-admin will create an ad-hoc solution, a programmer will create a proper, well structured, well designed solution that carry the enterprise beyond its initial needs and requirements.

A short example of how these interfaces work can be found here – on my company blog.

If there is one thing I like doing is testing hardware, specifically, testing new hardware that is related to Asterisk. I was more than pleased when OpenVox had approached me, asking to review one of their products – specifically after I once announced that I really dislike cheap clone cards. So, I got OpenVox’s D210P card, which is a fairly similar clone to the TE205/TE210 of Digium, and I decided to take a it for a test drive.

So, first off, lets take a look at Digium’s TE205 card:

Digium TE205P Card

The card is based upon two specific chips, the Xilinx Spartan FPGA and an Inifineon based Quad E1/T1/J1 framer chip. Technically speaking, the entire brain of the outfit is located in the Xilinx FPGA (naturally), which on the TE205P now enables remote firmware upgrades and some additional features. Digium had been using Xilinx based boards for over 8 years now, and they’ve been doing the job more than well.

Now, let’s take a look at the OpenVox clone board:

OpenVox D210 Card

The Test Scenario and Comparison

All of the above tests were conducted according to the following scenario:

Testing Lab Server

In general, I’ve connected 3 different IP phones to the testing server: A Polycom 650, a SNOM 370 and a Grandstream GXP2000. All IP phones include the latest firmwares and updates and were all working flawlessly with another similar setup, so I assumed they were all bug and issue free for the testing lab. The main reason I’m using 64Bit CentOS is simply due to the fact that all my servers are 64Bit capable (mainly E5410 and E5405).

Test 1: Normal Telephony

Well, in general, the card does exactly what it should – provides a connection to an E1 circuit (we only have E1 circuits in Israel). I’ve conducted normal telephony functions from all the above mentioned phones. In general, I’ve conduct from each phone a total of 40 calls, and repeated the test once for the Digium TE205P card and once for the OpenVox D210P card. The results were fairly similar with a slight advantage for Digium. In general, the OpenVox card had slipped about 4% of the calls, mainly to an IRQ miss that occurred for some reason. With the Digium card, the IRQ misses were not exhibited, allowing for all 120 calls to traverse normally.

Conclusion: In a normal office telephony scenario, the D210P is a fair choice – however, not my preference for a Call Center or a service provider.

Test 2: 3G based transmission (64kbps bearer capability)

I’ve been playing around with IVVR and Asterisk, mainly using the Fontventa H264 packages for Asterisk (that’s why I used 1.4 branch). With this test, the D210P provided less then medium results, specifically when trying to stream large 3gpp based video streams, while the TE205P had showed no specific issue with the transmission. Main issues exhibited were related to choppy video streams, causing jumps in the stream. The Digium card was fully capable of stream the video without a hitch. Now, I won’t hold this again OpenVox, as this usage is fairly advanced and is required by a very small portion of the market, but I believe they still have some work to do there. As they are using the same framer as Digium, I would deduce that their firmware is either an older import from Digium (reverse engineer) or some other firmware related issue.

Conclusion: Not a pick for 3G transmission with Asterisk.

Test 3: Dropped calls during high loads

No matter what test I did, with OpenVox I’ve always received a dropped call ratio of around 3-4% – when at high loads that went up to around 7%. When I mean high loads, I mean generating 30 outbound calls from Asterisk to one circuit, then receiving them on the second port (yes, a back-loop). I’ve conducted 100 runs of this test, at various speeds. It would appear that when generating calls with a 100ms interval between one initiation to another on the circuit, the OpenVox will drop a call here and there – at sporadic intervals. This may be actually related to the IRQ misses exhibited in Test 1.

Conclusion: If you have high load anticipated – OpenVox is not the choice for you.

Test 4: CPU Load/Spikes

It is a well known fact that all card that are used with Asterisk introduce load spikes of a sporadic nature. In the past, the masters of low spikes were Sangoma, however, with the introduction of Digium’s VoiceBus, that balance had tipped and Digium took the upper hand. In order to evaluate the spikes, I’ve monitor the machines’ load while having 30 calls traverse from one port to the other. The calls were playing back a static file of 5 minutes, and after disconnecting the calls would generate and additional one and continue from there. Both cards exhibited slight spikes when multiple calls either originate or disconnect, however, the CPU spikes that the OpenVox card had exhibited were about 40% higher than the ones exhibited by Digium and there were more spikes than with Digium.

Conclusion: If your system isn’t as beefy as mine, and you need full capacity – OpenVox isn’t the choice for you

Overall Operational Conclusion

The OpenVox card promises to be a low-cost alternative to the Digium card, and it surely delivers. Over all, if you have an office PBX system or a low scale IVR environment, the OpenVox alternative can be evaluated, although it’s not my personal favorite. Sure, in many cases I can say: “OpenVox would do the job” – but hey, I would always rather go with the original and not the clone. I believe that OpenVox are far ahead of its clone competitors (Atcom, Yeastar, Varion, PhonicEQ, etc), simply because it does a better job at building and designing a better card – however, they still have some way to go in order to be completely in-lined with Digium and Sangoma.

Over the years I’ve seen many scams running on the net. Ranging from the ever annoying chain mails to the ever popular Nigerian Sting – Internet fraud is all around us. Lately, I’ve been hit by a new type of fraud attack, a domain registration fraud attack – mainly located in China and Hong-Kong.

As you may know, I’m the owner and CEO of a company called GreenfieldTech, dealing with Asterisk and VoIP application and platform development. Now, we operate world wide and render services to some of the world biggest brand in the telecom industry. So, we take our copyright and brand very seriously, when we receive an indication that someone is or may be infringing our copyright or brand, we take a stand for it.

So, today I’ve received this email:

Dear CEO, 

We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong,and in charge of the registeration in
Asia, We have something important need to confirm through your company. 

We received a formal application from a company called "Hempus International Holdings
Ltd" applying to register 

Internet keyword :     greenfieldtech 

Domain names :

 greenfieldtech.asia    
 greenfieldtech.cn    
 greenfieldtech.com.cn    
 greenfieldtech.hk    
 greenfieldtech.in    
 greenfieldtech.mobi    
 greenfieldtech.net.cn    
 greenfieldtech.tw

In China and also in Asia on January 21 2010. During our auditing procedure we find out
that the alleged "Hempus International Holdings Ltd" has no trade mark,Intellectual
property, nor patent even similar to that word. As authorized anti-cybersquatting
organization we hereby suspect the alleged "Hempus International Holdings Ltd" to be a 
domain grabber. Hence we need you confirmation for two things:

First of all, whether this alleged "Hempus International Holdings Ltd" is your business
partner or distributor in China.

Secondly, Whether do you need to protect the intellectual property right which should have
belonged to you?. (The alleged "Hempus International Holdings Ltd" will be entitled to obtain
a domain not needed by  original trademark owner.)
If you are not in charge of this please transfer this email to appropriate dept.in order to
deal with this issue better, please let someone who is  responsible for trademark or domain
name contact me as soon as possible.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
 Confidentiality Notice: This is a letter for confirmation. If the mentioned third party is
 your business partner or distributor in China please DO NOT reply.  We will automatically
 confirm application from your business partner after this audit procedure.we have to notify
 you,and our registration organization are  not responsible for any dispute questions about
 trade mark,intellectual property nor patent after they succeed in registration.hope you can
 understand.thank you.
 ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Sincerely,
  kaka.xu

Sponsoring Registrar:sk holdings company ltd 
 Web:www.sk-dns.org/www.asia-gov.com
 Tel:00852-95660489 / 00852-95660103 
 Fax:00852-30696940

Email:kaka.xu@skdns.org/

Address: 3A, Units 20/F, Far East Consortium Bldg, 121 Des Voeux Road, Central, Hong Kong

kaka.xu

2010.01.21

So, this is obviously a scam, as when I searched the alleged company, I couldn’t find anything. However, the term “International Holdings Ltd.” had produced many scam alerts and related information popped up everywhere. Now, bear in mind that this is the 10th time them past 2 months that I’m receiving such emails. So, I’ve formulated the following response to them, and you are welcome to use it:

Dear Kaka,

Thank you for contacting us in regards to this matter, to be completely frank with you,
we’ve received over the past 2 months a similar request/demand from various Asian registrars
in China/Hong-Kong. Through our contacts in the far-east, we’ve concluded that your
request/demand is fraudulent, and that the company you indicated doesn’t even exist.
Please note that your approach to us claiming that someone wants to infringe our copyright
and brand had been noted and passed to our legal department. In addition, we’ve forwarded your
email and general company information to various SPAM, Abuse and Security teams that are in
contact with us around the world (mainly, [Mention your really BIG business partners and
large customers here - also through in some ISPs in the far-east, specifically China). Should
your company register ANY of the below mentioned domain names or keywords, following this email,
we shall be forced to follow legal actions in accordance to the laws of the state of [Put your
country here] and other countries where our company has representatives or local business
engaged partners.

P.S.

[Always add a personal note - and refer to something in the mail they sent, for example]

On a personal note, when sending emails to anyone in Israel, I would suggest that you choose a
different name, other than Kaka. Kaka in Hebrew is directly related to the bodily function of
purging waste – also known as taking a dump in the toilet.

Recently, I had to install the CheckPoint SecureClient on my notebook, which is currently running Windows 7 (ok, a linux guys running Windows 7 is something completely different, but let’s talk about that later). In any case, I’ve gone into the CheckPoint website, looking for SecureClient, and got a really funny Seinfeld flash-back:

This kinda reminded me of this:

Today I got the chance to speak at a Polycom half-day convention, mainly to speak about Asterisk and HDvoice. Now, putting aside the part about HDvoice (I’m getting a post about that on its own), I gotten to the point where I believe that I’m currently perceived as being an eccentric.

So, why am I eccentric? very simple, I’ve reached a point where I can say things that may be perceived as rude – and write it off an being an eccentric quirk.

I’ve talked about Asterisk ability to support Video, while the current Polycom VVX1500 video phone isn’t yet supported at its fullest. One of the people in the crowd mentioned some sleezy,al-cheapo, SIP Video phone (to be more exact, he’s the local distributor) – and I claimed that I don’t count that phone as a comparison to Polycom or other VoIP Video phones, simply because in my view it’s not a worth while comparison. Comm’on, let’s be realistic, can you compare a Polycom VVX1500 (an HDvoice Video phone) with some shitty sub-VGA SIP Video phone from China? the mere comparison is simply insulting for Polycom.

Shortly after negating that phone, the person stood up and left the room. At the break, a friend said to me that I shouldn’t have said that, in order to come out the bigger man. Common, the guy is surely making a joke of himself. I commented: “I’ve said what I said, I stand by my opinion – besides, you know I’m eccentric – eccentric people say eccentric things” – he agreed that I’m eccentric, after all, you can’t be an Open Source evangelist without being an eccentric – now can you?

Ok, it’s day 1 (or actually day 2) for AstriCon 2009 – and here’s my report for the day.

Yesterday was kind’a of a hectic day for me, as I was teaching a full day track of Asterisk and Cloud Computing, specifically, implementing Asterisk systems with Amazon EC2. I started the day with a class filled with 20+ people, and ended the day with a similar number – so in general I’m very happy. Not many people tend to attend the pre-conference days, so having that number of people and their positive reactions through out the day were very reassuring to me.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from this experience, it is the following: If you give a full day track, don’t arrive at the hotel 24 hours prior to it – you need at least 48 hours! People didn’t really notice (I hope), but through out the day I was suffering from a splitting headache – one that would usually send me right into bed with a couple of Advil’s. But hey, that didn’t stop me and I powered through it, I’m fairly proud of myself for doing so – as at the end of the day I regained back my strength and was livelier.

Today was the first official day of the conference – I gave the opening talk for the Cloud Computing track of the day. My talk was about how to build “IP Centrex” like services, without building an “IP Centrex”. I guess that I didn’t really introduce a brand new concept, but actually talked about something that many are thinking about, but are not inclined to try it on their own and burn some cash on. I guess my talk helped them out saying: “Hey, we’re not talking out of our asses here, this guy makes some sense and what we thought of isn’t that far fetched”.

Previous to that, Digium announced the 2009 Digium innovation award winners, where my company won an award in the pioneer category. This is the second year in a row my company had won the award, and I’m really happy with being acknowledged for this specific work. Having being a part of the community for over 7 years now, this award, at least to me personally, says a lot – it’s basically saying: “Look, you’ve done good, you’ve done some work that really helps out the project and the community in general – here’s a beer and a toast to you – hip hip” – well, that’s kind’a of a mouth full, but you get what I mean. I think that this is actually the place to mention that the award was for developing a high-powered Dialer/IVR platform, used in the Israeli elections and the work was contracted for a company called Shtrudel.

The all conference party is tonight – so I better rest up and be ready for it – should be fun. I guess beer and food are always a good mix when a bunch geeks are getting together

Well, as some of you know, I’ll be speaking at this week’s AstriCon convention, being held in Glendale, AZ. I guess that in normal days I wouldn’t be starting to write about it prior to the actual convention, however, this time I decided to write about it earlier. I guess the title of this post can be changed to: Tosche Mark Spencer.

In order to understand what I’m talking about, we need to take a trip down memory lane, to be more exact – 2.5 years back memory lane.

Date: January 2007, Location: Tel-Aviv, Israel. Mark Spencer along side with Schuyler Deerman of Digium are on their way for their first time visit to Israel. Both of them are flying to Israel together after spending their Christmas holidays in the Middle East, mainly Egypt. Back at that time, I used to work for a company called Atelis – we were the Digium Israeli distributor. To make a long story short, Mark and Schuyler got held up at the airport for almost 4 hours, by Israeli security. The only thing that helped was for me to call my brother in-law, back then at the NY Israeli consulate, to try and find out what happend to both of them. Aparently, they were held up for questioning – without notifying anybody on the outside – who were waiting for them – what is going on.

Fast forward…

Date: October 2009, Location: Philadelphia, USA. I’m being held for a seconday inspection and the immigration control at the US border. The funny thing is, this is not my first trip to the US this year – I was here last February. The immigration officer looks at me and decideds that I’m a candidate for an illegal worker for some reason. Maybe the fact that I came in on an e-Ticket and didn’t have my itenirary printed throw him off, maybe the fact that I looked somewhat young to him, or maybe the fact that I’m continuing to Phoenix flagged me – I don’t know, in any case,
I’m now being held in secondary inspection, while I have only 50 minutes to get to my connecting flight – talk about turning up the heat. So, here I am, infront of this immigration officer, who I had to admit does his best to be polite and correct about the way he does his job. I gotta hand it to these guys, I guess they come across some of the worst scums in the world, and yet, they are able to sustain a professional and polite manner at all times – brava. Any way, he starts questioning me about my travel to the US, who paid for it, where am I going, where do I work, etc, etc. So, I
start explaining to him what AstriCon is, giving the guy the 5 minute “Asterisk is” introduction, and for some reason, it doesn’t really cut it with him. So, I decide to pull out the ultimate weapon – The Internet. I ask him if he’s able to logon to www.astricon.net and see that my picture is on the website. He looks the site up and indeed my picture is on there. The guy is now convinced that I’m here to lecture and nothing more – thank god. I get my passport back, pick up my stuff and run like the wind to my connecting flight – getting to it right before they close the boarding doors.

So, although I didn’t get the same 4th degree Mark/Schuyler did, I understand what they must have felt like in there. I guess it could have been worse, another guy that was in there with me got deported back to where he came in from (don’t know where that was) – not a very pleasent scenario.

Points for travelers

1. You’re coming to the USA, have your itenirary printed and ready
2. Have you flight invoices printed and hotel reservations printed – it may be required
3. If you are staying with friends, not at a hotel – state that when asked, don’t hide it.
4. If you had memorized your answers, these guys will pick up on it really easy – they know their job.
5. If you are lecturing in a convention or tradeshow, make sure you can point the officer to an online mention of your talk – this helps smooth things faster.

Tomorrow’s update – AstriCon Cloud Computing class

For those of you who know personally, you probably already know that last month I became a father. I guess the transition is something that I was more or less ready for, at least on the technical terms of the transition. However, the thing that completely surprised me was the mental transition – which isn’t even related to the somewhat lack of sleep here and there.

So, here I am, about a month and half away into the final touches to our new home, spending the weekend deploying over 100 meters of CAT-5 cabling in the house – yes the house is network rigged to the teeth. I’m sitting in my daughters room, clamping away the wall sockets for the network, thinking to myself: “hmmmm…. will Nitzan need a single network connection? or should I put at least two for future usage? … hmmmm…. well, I guess time would tell”. In any case, so there I was, spending most of my weekend being my own geeky self, thinking about wiring, networking, wireless exposures, access points, etc. I then go back home, and suddenly, all that disappears the minute I put Nitzan on my shoulder to burp her. It’s really funny, but with her on my shoulder, I guess everything goes away for a few minutes. My brother-in-law informed the house that he caught me burping Nitzan, while sitting at my computer answering emails with the other hand – Ok, so I can’t stop being a geek all together.

In any case, here I am juggling the various aspects of being a father to a new born baby, attending to the various tasks required to final touches of the house (painters, cleaners, air cons, dry walls, etc) and of course, attending to my customers – some of which are completely ambivalent to the fact that I’m under a constant lack of sleep in the past month. Well, I guess in a couple of months Nitzan will start sleeping better, and would make life easier for both me and my wife; in the mean while, we take comfort with the sleep periods my wife gets during the day, so that I can work and cater to my customers, while she caters to Nitzan during the nights – and I have to be honest about this, when it comes to the baby, my wife is the closest thing to a Jedi Knight, her ability to stay focused and clam even when the Nitzan is screaming is amazing – I can’t always do it.

Ok, enough about the house and Nitzan, let’s go back to been geeks for a bit. As you can see on the right hand side of the blog, I’ll be speaking at the up-coming Astricon. I’ll be giving a talk about how to build “IP-Centrex” like installations, utilizing Asterisk and tools like VMWARE, XEN and OpenVZ. However, while my talk may be interesting to you (I hope), my pre-conference tutorial will be much more interesting. I’ll be giving a full day tutorial, teaching people how to install Asterisk in a clouded environment (cloud computing), mainly the Amazon EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. For those of you reading this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve developed a distinct interest in the Amazon EC2 cloud, which I’ve written about several times and also lectured about at Amoocon. While my Amoocon presentation was mainly informational, at Astricon I’ll be primarily teaching you how to do what I did. Well, I won’t be teaching you the inner workings of the GreenfieldTech IVR API framework, although, if you’re gonna ask questions I will answer (especially if you ask the question 3 times, I can’t stand it when people ask the same question 3 times – I just have to answer it – nudge nudge).

Ok, back to fatherhood and Nitzan stuff. The mental transition that I was referring to before is something that I felt last night in its most force. My wife and I decided to go to one of the malls, not far away from our house. So, we entrusted Nitzan with my in-laws and drove to the mall. The mall I’m referring to is called “The seven stars mall” and we like it. It’s not a big mall, but its got this shop called DOMO, that carries these high class cooking ware (my wife and I really like to cook – my chilli con-carne is well known). So, here we were walking the mall, after I ordered a pair of shoes that I needed. So, my wife comments: “You know something, let’s see if there is some sale at Super-Pharm.” – and then we ended up purchasing baby formula, pacifiers and baby wipes. I then asked my wife if she maybe wants to walk into DOMO, but we both didn’t really think about it – suddenly, something that was like a default prior to Nitzan is no longer a default – interesting isn’t it?

In any case, this is how my life looks like at this point in time – and I have to admit that I kind’a like it. Sure, I don’t get as much sleep as I got before, but hey, I’m happy with it – so I just keep on smiling and go on forward.

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.

OPTION GlobeSurfer II

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.

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

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!).

New blog – The GreenfieldTech Blog

Well, after working on my own, for a period of more or less 2 years time – I’ve finally expanded GreenfieldTech. GreenfieldTech now enjoys 2 distinct divisions: the telecom division and the web analytics division. To read more about it, you’re welcome to visit our new company blog at http://blog.greenfieldtech.net/

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.

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

ASTERISK 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.

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.