What’s Up with Shared Line Appearance and Polycom Phones?

July 30, 2008 by Garrett Smith

Recently, VoIP Supply had a technical support case dealing with SLA or Shared Line Appearance functionality. More specifically, the case dealt with a Polycom Soundpoint IP Phone. When I first opened the case, I was aware that the “shared” line option was available on the Polycom phones. This option is “plain as day” on the Web GUI Line tabs. Simply select the “shared” radio button on the two Polycom phones you would like to share and voila, right?…wrong!!!! SLA is considered a “server side” or IP PBX function, the phones can support only what is being pushed to them.

Hmm, ok, let’s try SLA on a couple of platforms with a variety of phones. I’ll try trixbox CE, Switchvox SMB, and Elastix running Free PBX for platforms and Polycom, Grandstream, and Linksys phones for endpoints. Here are my findings per platform and endpoint, wait actually we can simplify this to one statement: Polycom SLA didn’t work on any of these platforms while Grandstream and Linksys worked flawlessly. Polycom phones would register and display the “shared” icon look on the phone display, but all I got was busy signal when attempting to make a call.

Here is what I don’t understand, what’s the trick to get these Polycom phones to share a line on any of these platforms? I even engaged Polycom tech support, (not bashing these guys, they do one heck of a job) but they claim their phones have been tested with SLA to work on BroadSoft and Sylantro systems. What if I’m not using these systems? Do I turn to the IP PBX manufacturer? Trixbox? Switchvox? Elastix? Will they modify their systems to get this to work? I know plenty of others are having the same issues, I’ve read about them on the forums out there. What needs to be done about this?

I’m not calling out Polycom, in my mind their phones are “top of the line,” but when I first took this case, I thought to myself “hmm this will be an easy one,” I’ll never think those thoughts again. What is portrayed to be an easy one-button click in reality is causing nightmares for users who would like to take advantage of this feature.

I’d first like to ask anyone who has read this post, to comment on whether or not they have performed this function, desiring to explore this functionality, or simply gave up because you couldn’t get it to work. Share your thoughts on the topic as well what system you are using, and what you have done to your Polycom phones to get this function to work.

Maybe something needs to be done? When I have a problem, I first dig myself deep into hands-on testing, and if I can’t solve it, then I turn to assistance from the manufacturer, but what happens when you don’t get an answer that solves the problem?

Please share your thoughts, feelings, and experience with this subject. It has been weighing on me for two weeks now. Phew.

iLocus Predicts Digium IPO

iLocus predicts an IPO or acquisition of Digum within 12 months.

Highlights from the article include:

Asterisk Open Source PBX currently downloaded an average of 3000 times per day.

Digium claims to have recently had their 26th consecutive profitable growth quarter.

Digium has shipped over 4 million gateway ports to date.

Digium sales are allocated approximately 52% North America, 25% EMEA, 23% APAC and CALA.

Nearly 45% of all Asterisk downloads these days come from Europe.

According to Digium, there are roughly 3.5 million to 4 million Asterisk servers deployed worldwide.

Digium estimates 110 million end points are connected to Asterisk systems.

Service providers who have built production services on Asterisk accounted for over 6 billion commercial VoIP minutes in 2007, and that volume is expected to double in 2008.

Digium claims 900k IP Phones were added to Asterisk based service provider systems in 2007, excluding the self-managed Asterisk networks of enterprise users.

Digium plans to address scalability issues in the short term.

The remainder of 2008 will certainly not be without drama in the OSS telephony industry. OpenSER, recently re-named Kamailio Project, and FreeSwitch both have aspirations to unseat Asterisk. OpenSER is more widely deployed in the service provider/carrier space, and accounts for more wholesale minute traffic according to iLocus. FreeSwitch have recently aligned themselves with Sangoma, a fierce competitor to Digium in the TDM hardware space.

No Surprise Cable Companies Continue to Lead Subscriber Race

July 29, 2008 by Garrett Smith

ISP Planet has a list of the top ten VoIP providers ranked by total number of subscribers, with data current through May 2008.

1 – Comcast – leads all providers with 5.2 Million subscribers.

2 – Time Warner Digital Phone – 3.18 Million subscribers.

3 – Vonage – 2.61 Million subscribers.

4 – Cox – 2.46 Million subscribers

5 – Cablevision – 1.685 Million subscribers.

6 – Charter – 1.085 Million subscribers.

7 – Insight Communications – 204,000 subscribers.

8 – Mediacom – 204,000 subscribers.

9 – Surewest – 54,000 subscribers.

10 – CBeyond – 36,000 subscribers.

As you can see, amongst providers reporting their current number of VoIP subscribers, the list is comprised almost completely of cable providers,with the exception of Vonage and CBeyond. For that matter, I’m not sure CBeyond really belongs on this list, since they do not offer residential VoIP services, but rather focus on delivering converged voice and data to businesses.

Sister Company, IP Camera Supply, Launches Blog

Company Providing Information for the IP Camera and Security Industry

IPCameraSupply.com a division of Sayers Technology Holdings, sister company of VoIP Supply and a leading IP Surveillance solution provider, has launched a new blog aimed at educating and engaging customers in conversations.

“We are extremely excited to launch our blog,” said Garrett Smith, Director of Marketing and Business Development.

“With the relative youth of the IP surveillance industry, it is important for solution providers like IP Camera Supply to be proactive in educating customers to ensure that they can make informed decisions. In addition to educating our customers, the blog gives us the ability to create and engage in conversations with our customers, partners and other industry media outlets so that we stay in front of the latest trends in IP Surveillance and stay well positioned to meet the ever changing needs of the market.”

Written by the staff of IPCS, with the occasional guest post from leading industry experts, the blog will provide readers with product reviews, do-it-yourself instruction, IP Camera terminology, industry news, company news, promotion announcements, , and editorial commentary on how the technology and industry is growing and evolving.

Blogs in the technology sector spring up by the hundreds daily, but blogs in the IP Camera realm are just starting to emerge. The IP Camera industry itself is still young, yet starting to grow.

Ribbit Sells For $105 Million

I wrote two weeks ago about Ribbit, the next generation phone service provider getting purchased by BT for a reported $55 million, but it now looks as if the company received $105 million. The deal took a few weeks to finalize (not that it is indicative of anything) and when ti was officially announced, the total amount paid by BT had almost doubled. This isn’t just good news for telecommunications entrepreneurs, but in many ways it is “validation” that the voice 2.0/ teleco 2.0 era is upon us.

Many will debate the price paid for Ribbit and the fact that they do not have any revenues (yet), but to a company like BT $105 million is a drop in the bucket compared with the potential return that the Ribbit technology platform could bring them. It will be very interesting to see if BT will “close-up” the platform or keep it open; monetizing it by giving businesses the ability to easily create telephony applications.

Ask Mr. Andrews: Setting Up SIP Ports

Dear Mr Andrews:

Can you explain how to set SIP ports on modern popular hardware phones such as the medium priced (or are they entry level these days) Sipura/Linksys/Cisco line?

Why would you not use 5060? If you have several phones behind NAT on the same LAN, is there a logical way to set these? How does the other endpoint see this? Enquiring minds and all that… I shall wait here on ICE for a STUNning discussion in a future article.

Part of the problem with NAT is that there are several competing mechanisms for negotiating it, and the industry cannot seem to get behind a single, unified methodology. Until this happens, dealing with NAT will likely continue to be a pain in the butt.

STUN, ICE and TURN are three examples of solutions to issues inherent with SIP + NAT. STUN is not 100% reliable depending on the type of NAT you are dealing with. ICE builds upon STUN by allowing the device to use a range of ports and STUN techniques. However, ICE is not well supported. Media relay solutions like TURN can cause latency/QoS issues with VoIP, and are generally difficult to scale.

If you are behind NAT, you can set up port forwarding on your router/firewall to allow VoIP traffic to pass through. For SIP, use ports 5060 to 5070. For RTP audio, use port 8766 to 35000.

There are definitely some security concerns with port forwarding. Hacking tools such as SIPFlanker http://tinyurl.com/sipflanker are available as well as public posts detailing the default login credentials for many Sip devices http://tinyurl.com/sippasswords

When configuring Linksys devices behind NAT, there are a few things you want to be particular about. In the configuration UI, in the “SIP” Tab, make sure you have the following options set:
*******************************************************************
Substitute VIA Addr: yes
STUN Enable: yes
STUN Server:

In the “Ext 1” Tab, make sure you have the following options set:

NAT Mapping Enable: yes
*******************************************************************
Double check the NAT Keep Alive Interval setting on your Linksys phone and make sure it is set to a low value, ideally around 10-15 seconds. For more information on configuring Linksys phones for NAT, refer to (starting) page 59 of the phone administration guide here http://tinyurl.com/linksysspa.

Faxing and VoIP at a Near Flawless Success Rate

Well for those of you in the VoIP industry, and for those of you just starting to learn about it, you will hear many horror stories about VoIP and faxing. Often you will hear how unsuccessful it is, and some will hear more vulgar words in conjunction with it. But what if you had that magic wand to make it work? Would you trust it? Would you try it? To what extent would you try it before tossing it out the window? What if I told you that there is technology out there that can fix Faxing over VoIP that is notorious for not being successful and being the cause of many long days and even longer nights?

These are all questions that the great VoIP thinkers at Sangoma have put onto the drawing board and now have come up with a solution: The Sangoma Faxing Synch Cable. This was first introduced to us by Konrad Hammel, a Field Applications Engineer with Sangoma that visited VoIP Supply for Training on the newest PCI cards.

Wondering how it works, and what you need for a near flawless success rate?

Well let’s start off with an IP PBX. The Phonebochs appliance, trixbox appliance, or a blank chassis using Plain Jane Asterisk will do to start.

From there, PCI cards. More Specifically Sangoma analog and digital PCI cards. Which ones you ask? Well you will need two of them. A digital PCI card, like the A101D, or A102D (T1 Digital PCI card), and then an Analog card to hook your fax machine up to. (A20100D (2 Port FXS), A20200D (4 Port FXS)) Cards are good, but you can go to a bigger FXS card if you wish. The only limit to the amount of ports is that of your IP PBX and its limitations; however I do recommend using echo cancelation on both cards, and trust me, it is well worth it.

FoIP

From here it doesn’t look like anything special–some of you may already have this and could possibly be drooling at this setup because it is easy. Well there is one more piece. And at this point you are probably thinking that it will be expensive and that now it’s not worth it to read on, but please keep reading, because what I am about to tell you will blow you away. The key to this is only $10. That’s right, for $10 you can have a near perfect success rate with LITTLE configuration of the cards and codecs. But how do you use it? Well this small cable will connect to a two prong section on the top of the Digital card, then the other end will hook up to a similar spot on the Analog card. From there, the cable will automatically start the synch and make it work. That’s it. Go figure. For decades this has been hindering businesses, and all it took was a small cable to fix it.

Sangoma and Open Source’s Double Edge Sword

July 28, 2008 by Garrett Smith

A Game of Open Source Cat and Mouse

As open source telephony continues to make its ascension as a legitimate threat to legacy systems vendors an interesting game of cat and mouse is developing between the various PSTN connectivity vendors.

Not a press release goes by without an eventual answer from a competing company and I doubt that the latest announcement from Sangoma that they will be powering FreeSWITCH, an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch, will go unanswered by their competitors. Now most consider hardware to be a bit of a yawn (and I tend to agree), however this announcement marks another notch in the belt for Sangoma. Sangoma, who just a few short years ago was a distant number two in the open source PCI card space to Digium, now finds themselves a gobbling up market share thanks in large part to partnerships with the various open source telephony platforms – all of which was created, thanks in large part to Digium.

(more…)

Partnership extends IP Camera Supply’s installation and support footprint

July 24, 2008 by Garrett Smith

IP Camera Supply has partnered with Celergy Networks, Inc. of Carlsbad, Calif.  The partnership will allow IP Camera Supply to extend its current regional installation footprint nationwide through Celergy’s network of over 4,000 installer partners, allowing IP Camera Supply to continue its rapid growth without geographic limitations.  In addition to installation services, Celergy will also enable IP Camera Supply to provide customers with comprehensive site surveys and solutions analysis.

“We are very excited about the partnership with Celergy,” said Cory Andrews, Director of New Business Initiatives. “After months of conducting research to find an installation partner with an established field engineering staff and efficient tools to manage the installation process, we decided Celergy’s offerings best fit the needs of IP Camera Supply customers.  Celergy’s core IP Video knowledge was also a huge plus for us.”

IP Camera Supply’s current process for installation includes a comprehensive site survey and analysis to determine optimal IP camera placement and will now include other site-specific details such as the mounting and configuration of IP cameras. These services will now be available for customers across the country with the assistance of Celergy. This means that any customer, regardless of geographic location, will be eligible to receive all of the physical installation services that IP Camera Supply provides regionally; making IP Camera Supply one of the few IP Surveillance solution providers that can effectively meet the needs of customers across the country.

Partnership extends IP Camera Supply’s installation and support footprint

IP Camera Supply has partnered with Celergy Networks, Inc. of Carlsbad, Calif.  The partnership will allow IP Camera Supply to extend its current regional installation footprint nationwide through Celergy’s network of over 4,000 installer partners, allowing IP Camera Supply to continue its rapid growth without geographic limitations.  In addition to installation services, Celergy will also enable IP Camera Supply to provide customers with comprehensive site surveys and solutions analysis.

“We are very excited about the partnership with Celergy,” said Cory Andrews, Director of New Business Initiatives. “After months of conducting research to find an installation partner with an established field engineering staff and efficient tools to manage the installation process, we decided Celergy’s offerings best fit the needs of IP Camera Supply customers.  Celergy’s core IP Video knowledge was also a huge plus for us.”

IP Camera Supply’s current process for installation includes a comprehensive site survey and analysis to determine optimal IP camera placement and will now include other site-specific details such as the mounting and configuration of IP cameras. These services will now be available for customers across the country with the assistance of Celergy. This means that any customer, regardless of geographic location, will be eligible to receive all of the physical installation services that IP Camera Supply provides regionally; making IP Camera Supply one of the few IP Surveillance solution providers that can effectively meet the needs of customers across the country.

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