For me SIP is the best option with most countries that I call being free and the UK being equal or cheaper than my current land line carrier. However my family in the UK has a better deal with Skype when the majority of the calls are national (1.4p per min and 4.5p per call). So if they have a stand alone Skype phone and I have SIP phones, should we not be able to call each other for free?

My options are:

1. PSGw requires an additional pc and single Skype account per pc
   
2. Skype Asterisk channel (chan_skype) Can only run on Asterisk but can run multiple instances of Skype through vnc

Not for me:

1. ‘Uplink Skype to SIP Adapter’ (windows required)
2. CooSIP, no idea about price and it’s not available yet
3. Skip2PBX, way too expensive
4. Pika Connect for Skype, way too expensive hardware & licenses [2009-01-07 no more references to Skype on their site]

chan_skype it will be…

Edit (23/05/2007): Well it’s end of May and I haven’t been able to spend more time on this yet, if you want to do this on Asterisk then no problem but on AsteriskNOW it’s not that easy.

Categories: VoIP
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Voipbuster is sporting free calls to quite a number of countries, sadly the UK isn’t one of them but at 1cpm I’m not complaining. However it’s good to realise one thing:

Voipbuster limits free call duration to one hour. After this hour the remote end get’s it’s call dropped while the local end is not notified. I presume this is to prevent automatic (re)dialing to these countries. One could circumvent this by static noise detection but that’s a little too advanced for most script kiddies.

Not an issue for me as I’ll just dial again when the remote end stops talking to me…

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After playing with the idea for a long time I decided it was time to implement a VoIP PBX. Reading up on the subject I found that I had 3 options which appealed to me: Asterisk (*) on Debian, AsteriskNOW (*NOW) or Trixbox. I opted for *NOW as it’s stripped bare and I hope I can add features as and when I need them. So far it’s gone well but I do have some additions I still need.

Installation of *NOW beta 4 (1.4.2) went fast on an Intel ISP2150 I had available, took about 30 minutes in total, including base config. Next I had to test it so I found a good free SIP soft-client in X-lite 3.0. And off I was phoning from laptop to laptop, surprisingly I had no issues with my WLAN.

The next move was to add two SIP accounts, Voipbuster and Xeloq. Both offer free national calls in NL additionally Voipbuster offers a range of free international calls while Xeloq has cheaper national mobile rates. Dialling from softphone to national landlines worked right away and the people I called didn’t even notice I wasn’t using my regular phone or line.

My server is now happily humming away in the datacenter and I have two 7960′s connected and registered across NAT, all is well so far. I’ve given some family members accounts and I’ve had a 2 hour conversation with my brother last weekend. We both have DSL and were quite happy with the quality of both the conversation and the connection.

Next my plan is to migrate my current landline number to a SIP carrier, not sure which one yet, and try to implement a SIP to Skype bridge. Further actions on my to do list are:

• Cancel my land line and save at least 18,50 Euro per month
• Get a (SIP) Siemens S450 IP dect phone to replace my current old Philips (pstn) dect
• Implement a phone book for the Cisco 7960 phones
• Implement some services for the Cisco 7960 phones
• Get a GSM SIP gateway and a mobile contract for backup/emergency calls and cost savings to national mobile numbers
• Implement a registry of calls (CDR?) so I can tell whether my bills will be correct
• Offer the SIP service to family members, using data from the previous point

Categories: VoIP
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