*scottstuff*

I’d probably be more excited about this if I had to perform day-to-day support anymore, but it’s still cool: an interface between the Asterisk VoIP PBX and the Request Tracker trouble-ticket system. This would probably be a great way to handle support voicemail in a small tech company. It’d be interesting to see what it’d take to route all support calls through RT; it’s pretty typical to have support email recorded in RT, so why not “this message may be recorded to ensure quality service” calls?

So, my Asterisk-based home phone service is moving along nicely. I’m still waiting for my Cisco 7940 phone to ship (ebay has things going for it; speed isn’t one of them); I can’t finish all of the UI features that I want until I have the phone in hand. So, my mind’s been wandering, looking for other things to do.

I have a Sony-Ericsson T616 cell phone that I’m kind of ambivalent about. It’s a decent phone, but it’s really too small to talk on for any extended period of time, and the ringer on it is too quiet to hear in a noisy room. I’m prone to missing calls. Fortunately, it has bluetooth. I’ve been using it to sync address book entries with my Mac, but there’s no technical reason I couldn’t use it to tie the phone right into Asterisk, so incoming calls to the cell phone ring straight into our regular home phones whenever the phone’s in bluetooth range.

The opposite side of things–using the cell phone as a cordless phone for receiving calls made to our home phone–isn’t possible with any shipping phone. The phone would need to support the bluetooth “Cordless Telephony Profile,” which no phones currently support.

Grabbing cell calls and stuffing them into Asterisk, on the other hand, should be possible. The bluetooth Handsfree Profile includes all of the abilities needed, including audio, caller ID, call progress, and the ability to dial out. There’s even an open source bluetooth handsfree plugin for KDE. So, making it work with Asterisk would really just be a matter of writting a channel driver that ties Linux’s bluetooth code into Asterisk. Not trivial, but it’s not unexplored territory, either.

I’ve made quite a bit of progress with Asterisk over the past couple nights. At this point, it’s doing about 90% of what I want it to do:

• Sends local/toll free calls via our POTS phone line.
• Sends long distance calls via NuFone VoIP.
• Receives incoming calls on the POTS line.
• Receives incoming calls from NuFone via an 800 number.
• Receives faxes (but only from inside right now).
• Does voice mail (and then emails a copy to the owner).
• Talks to SIP softphones on various PCs and Macs around the house.
• Talks to traditonal analog phones in the house.
• Internal phones can call out by just dialing the number, no ‘9’ prefix required.
• Internal phones can call each other by dialing their extension.

A few things still remain:

• When the POTS line is busy, incoming calls should be forwarded to the 800 number.
• When the POTS line is busy, outgoing calls should go out via NuFone.
• Incoming calls that go to voicemail should have the option to leave messages specifically for various members of the household.
• There should also be a way to check messages over the phone from outside.
• Asterisk can tell when it answers a fax call; faxes from outside should be shunted to its fax-handling code.
• Asterisk’s fax code needs to email faxes when it receives them.
• International calling currently goes out via POTS, when NuFone is less then half the cost.

I also have a few wish-list items:

• RSS for voicemail and call log.
• Print-to-fax.
• vCard to Asterix caller-ID database mapping.

I should probably expand on NuFone–they’re a cheap VoIP provider that specializes in Asterisk. They don’t offer anything particularly fancy–they’re just cheap and they work. Like VoicePulse Connect, they only offer pre-paid pay-by-the-minute plans. You send them $10 or so, and then you’re good for around 5 hours of US calling. They charge $0.029/minute for calls to the continental US; Alaska and Hawaii are a bit more expensive. Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Singapore are a bit cheaper. So are Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Taipei. Most of Europe seems to be under $0.05/minute.

You can get incoming calls from them, but they only offer local numbers for part of Michigan. They *do* sell 800 numbers, though. Vanity numbers or number transfers are $25; random numbers are free. You just pay $0.029/minute for incoming calls.

The sound quality through NuFone over my slow Verizon DSL line is pretty good. If I had a better DSL line, it’d probably sound better. As it is, I’m using a low-bandwidth codec so I don’t overflow my 128k upstream, and Verizon still drops packets every now and then. It’s not enough to bother me, but it’s noticable if you go looking for it. If my cell phone is a ‘1’ and a good analog line was a ‘10’, then this is an 8 or 9. I’m pretty happy with it.

Now that the MPx200 review is out, I can move on to other phone stuff. I’ve been waiting for easy VoIP for years. I’ve watched free Linux server software like VOCAL and Asterisk develop, but I’ve never been able to get either to work (admittedly, it’s been a while). Similarly, I’ve never been able to get any of the free audio or video conferencing software to work well enough to actually be usable. Heck, even iChat usually has problems with my home firewall. I have high hopes for Vonage and the rest of their ilk, but they still only solve part of the problem. I don’t just want to replace my home POTS line with a VoIP converter box, I want to replace my nasty old phones with something more modern and workable. I want something that’ll sync with my address book. I want voice mail to show up in my email inbox. I want semi-integrated phone service, IM, and maybe even video conferencing, all using open, standard protocols. Killing the telcos is just step one.

I realized the other day that my little MPx200 cell phone is 95% of the way to being a perfect VoIP phone. I mean, it has a nice form-factor for a phone, a nice display, it already has all of my contact information, and so forth. The big issue is that it has poor network connectivity, but I could almost fix that with a 802.11 SD card (if Smartphone 2002 supported WiFi, and if there were drivers for the MPx200. And if I was willing to lose my SD slot and have an antenna sticking out of the side of my phone).

Bizarrely enough, Microsoft has been thinking the same thing. Microsoft Research is offering Portrait, a SIP client for PocketPC 2003 and Smartphone 2003 platforms. It looks like it’ll even do video conferencing. Of course, it’s not a real product–it’s a research tool–and while they claim that it’ll work with any SIP server, I doubt it’s ever been tested with non-Microsoft products. Still, it’s a nice start. If Motorola ever ships the rumored Smartphone 2003 upgrade for the MPx200, I’ll probably give it a try.

I doubt it’ll work, but they’ll get it right eventually. The first round of phones with 802.11 are supposed to show up this spring, so the hardware platform (and market!) will probably be ready by the end of 2004. I doubt that any of the US carriers will encourage this, so you’ll have two different numbers, one VoIP and one cellular, and you won’t be able to roam between the two, but you have to start somewhere.