hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1109.txt

Episode: 1109
Title: HPR1109: Astricon 2012 - Virtues of the Open Source Telephony Platform
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1109/hpr1109.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:07:39

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Yes, I'd like to welcome everybody. This is my third contribution for HackerPublic Radio.
We are here at Astrakon 2012 in ATL. And with me, I have Randy from the VUC.
Hello everybody. Vuc.me on the web. Come and find us every Friday, 12 noon, Eastern time.
And of course, I'm Sons of Man. And with me, also, I have the voice of Astorix. And that is Alison Smith.
I'm actually losing my voice.
And we've got other people here too. Around the table, we have Eric.
Austin Burke. And he's way on the other end. He's going to have to yell. And he's going to be here, over here. So I'm going to yell.
All right. And then we've got Kevin Bushong.
Yes. Nice job.
There are several people here at Astrakon to learn about Astorix PBX.
And most of the listeners of HackerPublic Radio know about Astorix. But for those that are unaware, Astorix is a free PBX
communication framework. I like to call it. Maybe I shouldn't say just PBX. It's a framework. There's so much more you can do with it.
And it's designed. It's very disruptive in the space of Telafini, obviously, allows you to do many, many different things with the platform built on top of planets, of course.
It'll run on BSD and things of that nature. And it enables a lot of different long-tail types of applications or long-tail benefits that have yet to be discovered.
So without further ado, I just want to kind of bring Randy in to talk a little bit about the VUC and its value to Astorix and to the Hoyt community as a whole. So Randy, go ahead, please.
No one has ever had any difficulty making me speak. But let me say this about that. We're all very pleased to have Astrakon as a place to meet other people that we like to talk to, have conversations and contact over the years.
The lovely Allison, of course, whose voice we heard saying, give me a little echo test. How does echo you already forgot?
You have successfully completed the echo test.
There we go. How's that for a sample? So approximately 5.473 years ago, we decided to do the Astorisk users group, the biggest group in the world, because it was all over the world on a platform called Talkshoe.
You may remember that, Kevin. Well, Talkshoe is still alive, barely, but we have moved to a platform called Zip DX. And the reason we use Zip DX is because it has a codec by the name of...
She said 22. Exactly. We don't have the sound of the bling in the whole sound. She said 22 wide band, which is pretty close to FM radio sound. I told you the other day that I upload, we do a little music intro when we think our sponsors.
And most of the time, if the packet losses isn't too bad, I can leave the music that comes through from France, where I'm based, to previously, it actually goes all the way to San Jose from France, comes all the way back to me.
So the fact that we're able to converse with the lovely Allison, I have to mention it. And all the other people, the lovely Kevin also.
Anyway, did I promise to make a long story short, because that's one of my key phrases that is a lie. But anyway, you asked me about this, so I know you want to know about the basic thing happened about five years ago.
We changed it from asterisk to the VoIP users conference, because for one thing, asterisk is a trademark, and having known Digim and Mark Spencer for many years, we found out that they weren't that thrilled with that idea.
So we, in somebody's cloning around, so now I'm distracted. So we changed the name to VoIP users. Also, we cover other platforms like Freeze Something.
Yeah. I say Freeze Something, because it's PBX. I'm very confused. I may be the people listening to, because there are all these names between PBX and Switch become interchangeable.
So Free PBX is actually, did you? Is that right? Or... No, it's not Digim.
Well, but it's somebody based on Digim asterisk. But it's GUI based on asterisk.
See, so I'm confused, and I've been doing this for years, but Free Switch was originally a fork. Somebody tell me if I'm right or wrong.
Sort of... The guys who are running Free Switch fork asterisk, and I don't remember the name of the other fork, but Free Switch was from the ground on up.
It is now, or we wrote, totally different. It's completely different. It's completely different.
A lot of politics in there. A lot of politics in there.
But we don't care about the politics, so what we're going to do is just... I mentioned...
Yeah, it's different, and it's taken a totally different path. And it's worth mentioning, because we have Brian, BKW, also known as Next, from IRC.
And so there are other people, even at AstraCon, including Brian, and we'd like to talk about all that stuff.
Excellent. Well, I think it would be a perfect segue to kind of mention the enthusiasm and the effort around asterisk as a project.
Personally, my first introduction to asterisk essentially was through something called Tricksbox, which was a turnkey type of distribution, almost like an appliance.
You know, get yourself a beige box and take your CD as a life you need, or boot up for you, and basically set everything up.
It didn't lend itself to a lot of customization.
However, you know, it was easy for someone new like myself. Then I met a guy later on named Fred Posner, who I probably should call Fred Reed now.
He's a baker out there in Florida, but he, with some other guys, kind of, you know, told me that there's a lot more that you can do with it.
If you decide to get into the command line, and that's kind of what I did, I actually went from one extreme to the next.
And that, you know, decided that if I really want to learn about asterisk, I should probably go ahead and put it on the command line, run it from the command line, get rid of all the gooey stuff, the free BBX and all that stuff, and take it from there.
So I end up getting a BSD box, open BSD, and install it on there, and then it's been running at home ever since.
And then it's kind of taught me a lot. It's still a lot more to learn.
So when I come around, guys, people like yourself, who have been messing around with Asterisk as long as you guys have, I can see where there's a lot more that I can learn, and there's a lot more that it's still underneath the layer, if you will.
But tell me a bit more about, you know, how you first began to utilize asterisk in your life, and everybody here can chime in on that.
And I'm interested in your particular story about Asterisk, and what it was that kind of attracted you to the platform to begin with.
So, Randy, much good to start with.
You know what? I talk a lot, and I've got a lot of other things to say about things that we discussed.
So, why don't we find out how Allison, before, well, everybody else be, but since we're going around this way, Allison, and I think it would be interesting to everybody to know how you got connected to all this, because you're not a hacker, you are the hoist.
I would call the hack.
Oh, please.
Yeah, I was approached, I think in 2003, by a couple of guys that worked for Digium, and they were kind of out of control, and kind of a young and hyperactive, and they had me record some really crazy prompts, and I didn't think too much about it.
I thought it was just sort of a one-off, and probably because I didn't overthink it, or, you know, project too much about it, it turned into this great, wonderful recurring thing where I get to come every year to Asterone, and meet an amazing community of people.
It's really taught me a lot about generosity, this old concept of open source, nobody's territorial, nobody's proprietary, everyone's exchanging ideas, and it's just, I don't know if that was something too sentimental, it really is kind of a life lesson about not being so guarded with stuff, and sharing, you know.
And you're not going to get into the orange dress and the orange shoes, I tell you.
That was the orange dress I was never where I came from.
It was a lovely gift from Mark Spencer, but a bit killed me every year.
Yeah.
No, they're not here.
We move over so that we can get Kevin in on this, tell us your life story.
Luckily, it's a short story.
You're not that young.
Well, my life story, as far as Astered goes, we are really an end user.
We had some offices running Cisco call manager, and we're spending a lot of money on maintenance and licensing fees, and we needed something else.
And so I started looking at the open source community and found Asterisk and build it, and completely replaced Cisco with that.
I've since then rolled it out to a couple other buildings, so now we use Eeks and Dundee to communicate between the three buildings now, so that we can all have four digit dialing them, and all the things that Astered will do for you.
Would you say that people who are listening know what SIP is?
Well, I think it'd be worthwhile to kind of explain, because we said a mouthful. You said Eeks.
Yeah, I was just going to want it to underline me for a while.
That's on my car.
The car.
The car.
We talked about something else.
Maybe it can expound a little bit.
Well, why don't I start with SIP, and not get real real technical into it.
But SIP is a very well known, probably the most popular voice over IP protocol.
It's pretty much a standard for anybody who wants to do voice over IP.
It's actually more than voice over IP.
It's a session initialization.
Actually, you're right.
Protocol.
Yes.
And it's designed for setting up media connections.
Yes.
Of course, it's perfect for the voice over IP thing.
Absolutely.
But it's absolutely set up.
It's videos.
It can do video, there's text, instant messaging, and so on.
So it's a full-featured protocol.
Eeks, on the other hand, or IAX.
Thank you, or some people who don't know.
Because it doesn't look like the way it's used to.
You say Eeks and people have no idea what you're talking about until they...
They see the PowerPoint, and then they see the presentation like,
Oh, that's what they were talking about.
But it is another protocol was actually written by Mark Interestress Exchange Protocol.
You are so back with the evidence.
Thank you.
But it simplifies some of the port requirements,
because the media runs over the same ports as the signal,
which makes it different from SIPP,
but also makes it really nice to interconnect Asterix boxes,
because they all understand Eeks.
You only can poke holes in your file either.
It makes yes, it makes it much, much simpler.
And I forgot the other acronym that I threw around with.
Dundee.
Dundee.
How do you do to me?
I never heard about it.
When Dundee is a discovery protocol that is used across SIPP or Eeks,
actually by default it uses Eeks, but it can use SIPP as well.
But its purpose is when you have multiple buildings or multiple Asterix service servers
with users at each of these, all you have to do is set up your Dundee protocol.
And now I can dial the extension of a person on another server,
and Dundee does all the lookup information for me and simply connects the call.
He distributed universal number discovery protocol.
Thanks.
Thank you, because I did not know that one.
Dundee will advertise a group of numbers or names or extensions that are available
at a particular host, and as machines exchange information,
they kind of cash that for a short while.
So I want to know where this phone number is,
and maybe Steve knows the answer, but I talked to Bob.
This is the way Mark explained it a while ago.
I'm not going to do as good of a job at the,
the idea is that this information is shared amongst all the peers in Dundee.
So is it similar to say a by service, you know,
where it discovers what's on the network,
or is it a combination of active server or LDAP type of lookup?
Yeah, it's maybe sort of DNS, but without the hierarchy.
The idea was to remove the hierarchy.
Gotcha.
You know the acronym I've been curious about is Chan Dottie.
I presume they're talking about a Chinese father.
What the heck is that?
Jim Dixon started the Zipada telephony project.
He was a VSD developer who was doing IVR systems,
auto attendance and whatnot in the VSD platform.
He designed a hardware card that was relatively inexpensive.
Prior to that, it was, it was the manufacturer who charged like,
you know, $5,000 for a T1 interface.
Anyhow was insane.
So Jim, Jim powned away.
He's a hammering operator like myself,
and a bit of a hardware hacker as well as a developer in VSD.
He designed this interface card to make it very inexpensive
to connect these telephone lines.
Mark Spencer and Jim Dixon got together, you know,
Mark being a Linux kernel developer,
and they worked together to get this hardware card
that Jim had designed working in Mark's phone system project.
I guess that's the background for what the Zipada name was all about.
Sure.
So apparently there was a trademark conflict
with the ZipTell or Zipada.
And so a new name was required.
And I think there's an insight.
There's an insight joke within Digium.
Some day we'll hear another story as to what it really means.
But Dottie, I'm thinking about Dottie,
and it was probably some of the bad years.
There was always a Dottie, but it is Dottie, right?
Well, you know, Dottie is probably the way to keep lines
from jumping to dirty dogs.
Exactly.
So Eric.
Yep.
How did actress come into your life?
Well, I was an internet service provider.
I started in 1994, made it a real business in 1995.
Things really took off and had a growing business.
We were using analog phone lines for the longest time.
We had racks and racks and racks of analog modems and cords everywhere.
And finally, the CLX came into the business.
And they were able to provide incoming dial tone to us
for next to nothing.
They wanted the reciprocal compensation that was available
from the incumbent phone company to the head of the phone company
to take our phone traffic.
So we had this love relationship with the CLX.
They could give us phone lines for cheap, dirt cheap.
And it was a really simple T1 connection.
Digital was much faster and more reliable.
The technology was really evolving.
We loved the CLX.
But the integrated T1 came along.
And that was the idea that dial tone and internet
were going to be on the same pipe.
I think the hardware kind of caught up.
And that was easy to do with inexpensive devices.
Well, for years, we were referring all of our business clients
over to the CLX that were so kind to us.
It was great to move as much business away as we could
from the telephone company.
That was the one company everybody loved to hate.
Your power company, most people didn't complain.
Your telephone company.
That was, you know, the most evil vendor that ever
you put on the computer.
They were always doing something wrong.
So anyhow, we loved the CLX until they started stealing all
of our customers.
And we thought, OK, we've got to combat this problem.
And we started developing voiceover IP solutions.
Back then, developing voiceover IP solutions meant applying
for an SBA loan and figuring out how much it was going to cost,
how much Cisco was going to own you for using their product.
So we were getting started with Cisco stuff.
We found a good deal on some intertell IP phones
to go with the phone system that we had for our call center.
I don't remember which project I saw first.
I think it was this about a tough new project
and the gym was a ham radio operator.
And I learned about asterisk and I thought,
this looks pretty interesting.
We could probably spare one of our PR eyelines.
We could afford one of these very expensive
genetics and some pilot cards.
And we installed it.
And I thought, not this.
It's just incredibly cool.
We were dropping more and more of our telephone lines
because we didn't have people using dial-up anymore.
It was all DSL or other ISP connections.
And so I had T1s coming on everywhere to play with.
But as I ditched them, I found that asterisk was working
to route both our voice calls and our data calls.
And my expenses were getting lower and lower.
And finally IP phones started to come down in price.
And I thought, OK, this is definitely the future.
I bought every employee a pair of telephones,
gave him an old PC, bought the old X100P,
analog phone line card,
and gave everybody a block of 10 telephone numbers
they could take home.
And we built this private network.
There was kind of a light bulb that went off
and some satisfaction when I made a telephone call
to an employee or coworker over a VPN connection,
on an IP network that I owned.
I was like, wow, I just made a phone call.
And not one red penny made its way to telecom.
But it's a phone network.
But it's not about the money.
I think it's safe to say.
I think the word is control and freedom.
Most people are free to control.
If you drive a car, I'm speaking for myself here.
I don't have a car anymore.
For all those years that I owned a car,
I don't know how to fix cars.
But wouldn't it be wonderful if you didn't have to find somebody
who's likely going to charge you a ridiculous amounts of money
because you don't know what you're doing?
So in the telephony space,
you're looking for a mechanic because it's run.
And by the way, largely, still is run.
Look at the mobile space.
Run by these huge AT&T-like companies.
So if you try it, if you look at the way mobile works,
we're not going to start up a new carrier anytime soon
while people do.
It's really hard to do that.
So you're talking about these huge powers
and how you can be them.
Somebody used to say that if you started here,
when you run asterisk, you're your own phone company.
That power, that idea of the control, the freedom, and the power.
Yeah, the money you're making free phone calls.
Really exciting stuff.
And it was when phone calls were hundreds of dollars
to call overseas.
Today, Google Voice,
who's kind of the lowest common denominator,
you can call anywhere in Europe for two cents a minute.
Now, if you go back 10 years from now,
two cents a minute didn't get you very far.
You couldn't even do local calls for two cents a minute, I think.
So now, the price is out of the trolley out of the equation.
But if you just, the whole plane with the dial plan
goes back to hand reading,
why are there so many hand operators in this business?
Sure.
Because it's another manifestation.
I never made the connection.
Yeah, well, we need to get you a license and get you going.
In our group, I think it's just like to talk to you.
Well, there is that.
And I think we're proving that pretty well.
So, at this point, we've been talking about how asterisk
is disruptive in its laugh in the space.
Now, let's go forward another 10 years,
another 5 years, baby.
Where else do you guys think that asterisk might be disruptive?
Where do you see it going?
Well, it was talked a little bit about today when Mark mentioned
that it was one of a class or something that he stopped by.
There were some folks from the FAA that we're talking about,
you know, replacing some of the communications equipment
with asterisk.
And, you know, Mark's first thought is,
oh, you're going to replace the telephones.
But Jim Dixon being a ham radio operator,
one of the first applications in asterisk
was actually a two-way radio interface.
Wow.
And so the thought that the FAA is considering replacing
their communications infrastructure with an open source product,
the ability to do telephone, do radio,
to really do anything.
I mean, asterisk has evolved to any form of media.
We can handle video, we can handle text, we can handle voice.
I don't know what else is there.
Am I being narrow-minded?
Facts, transmitters, you know, whatever you have,
it's kind of been adapted to support that.
And the interface is just keep evolving.
And today, there were two different guys,
both approaching the problem of interfacing
on the cellular network.
You know, St. Goma has a 600 other card.
It's a beautiful card with great capabilities
that $600 on it gives you, you know, with more connections.
Another guy here has a solution where you go on,
even if you buy a $35 USB Dungle.
You know, it's not 4G, it's not LTE, it's that old fat,
you know, it's all the way from last year.
Those things are 12 months old now.
I mean, we'll sell them for nothing.
And they're doing voice calls and SMS, you know,
all sorts of things with a simple USB interface.
If you've got $35, you've got a cell phone inside your asterisk box.
Wow.
There's also, I don't know where you actually place this,
because I don't do it, but there was a lot with Bluetooth
and coming home with your cell connected to asterisk
or is it a Chan Bluetooth or something?
Yep, Chan Bluetooth.
The, the, what, there were,
it's a hybrid solution.
It's a hybrid solution.
You're not out doing a carrier.
When I played with it, it was simply to detect presence.
My cell phone would look for the Bluetooth Dungle advice person
if they could see each other.
They would change the routing of my telephone calls.
Instead of my phone coming in to asterisk and being forwarded
to my cell phone, it would come in to asterisk and say,
Eric's home, and it would just, you know, ring the kitchen phone.
Now, now one of the things that I've been thinking about,
since I'm in the automotive industry,
I look at the center stack.
You know, when I'm talking about specifically,
as I'm talking about your, your, your IP,
your infotainment area that everybody's paying attention to these days.
You know, we know in Ford Motor Company they have the sink.
You know, GM has the, the, the satellite system
where they go out and you tell them,
they start, they go, thank you.
And so my thought is, I believe something like asterisk could be
in the center stack to where you could do things like predictive traffic.
You know, you could actually understand and see that real time.
Because right now, these, what they call virtual messaging systems
that you see, it tells you you have traffic backed up a half a mile.
Your delay is 35 minutes to your next interchange.
To me, that doesn't give me a whole lot of value.
I'd like to be able to get that information real time as traffic is changing.
Inside my vehicle, okay.
Then I can then share that information with my buddy,
who's maybe heading to work some miles behind me.
Maybe I can share that with him.
You know, because to me, the vehicle is nothing more than a note.
All right.
So if you, you know, if you recognize,
buddy, you said they're anyone have you,
it's all information that can be shared that with me.
I suspect that.
I would imagine that that's going to develop sort of independently.
You know, someone's going to come up with a green light yellow light red light
or something or it's going to display on their GPS.
But someone like yourself was going to say,
now, if only this thing could just call me before I left the house.
And it's what's going to happen.
Asterisk is going to be the Swiss Army and I connect those two components together.
And now they'll be this, you know, traffic infrastructure
that gets glued in the asterisk.
Because you know, they have, gee, some radios already in the vehicle.
And some of you.
And so they have it.
I mean, it's just the next, to me, that's just the next progression perhaps, you know.
So I thought it was because I'm sorry.
I've always called asterisk the Swiss Army knife of telephony.
Yes.
You can do anything.
And if you're not careful, you'll cut yourself open.
But it will do anything.
It'll pull off the spoon and the knife.
You know, there's a Swiss Army knife for everything, isn't there?
Yeah, isn't that the original subtitle of the first book of the asterisk book?
It may have been from day one.
At the first asterkan, I was walking around in Switzerland.
It's the Swiss Army knife.
I also called it the building.
It's the bricks.
Yeah, you can build a beautiful office building or you glue them all together.
And you'll have a great big mess.
You hope you can bury your something.
One of the most common uses of asterisk.
If you start with a fireplace, then you might work your way to an office building.
But be careful, you'll have something unique to that.
I think one of the most common uses of the base uses and how I get it into it was a small business.
When you rent your PBX, if you need a PBX, which basically could be thought of as a simple answering machine, you know, it's just another extension of that.
And in a small business with two or three people, there's nothing to it.
So if you look at the bottom line of your business and you look and you see that you're paying $50 or $60 a month, when you know that asterisk is basically free,
and even if you need a consultant to install it for you or even if you purchase the digi inversion, whatever it is that's not free, like the red hat equipped with.
The fact is that it pays for itself pretty quickly.
You don't need, especially today, you no longer need so much hardware because you don't necessarily need to have analog lines.
That's a concept worth going into real quick.
In the old days, you'd have a number of lines.
And remember from, for you guys, it'll be like from movies of the 40s or something, but multi-line phones were a big thing at one time.
I don't think, I mean, you can only find those on eBay now and they're antiques.
Nowadays, phones are digital, they're zip phones.
So asterisk can talk to any number of these phones and the nice polycoms that are worth like a couple of hundred dollars can do 16 lines.
You can have lines to your, now that you're small business, you save all this money.
Small business is now in Europe and Asia.
Well, you can have all these branches talking to each other for free on all of your zip trunks or all of the lines that you're renting,
which are very cheap or by the minute.
I give a great example of this, by the way, which is at here at the hotel.
We have a Wi-Fi that's kind of a typical hotel Wi-Fi.
It's actually on the higher end. It works well if you're high enough up then you're in the right place.
But I spoke to my wife, who's like 4,500 miles away.
We talked at three different occasions, three different times a day.
It was exactly the same as when we're in two different offices of our home.
There was no difference in we were able to interrupt each other and argue just like we do.
And that's not always the case because VoIP, if you look back to say the free world dial-up days,
where you were talking to somebody through a server that was like free and cheap.
And that routing, on the other hand, would be like, we can imitate it.
Hey, Eric, how are you doing?
I'm good. How are you?
Why?
Are you Eric? And then there's the...
Are you still there?
The nads, you know.
What's the call, wasn't we on you?
Yeah, what's the call?
I mean, I had this conversation today at two different times.
It was exactly like any, it was as good, better than cells, by the way.
The cell phone, the other expression is that the cell phone is the greatest thing to ever happen to VoIP.
Yes.
Because it's a totally lower integration.
But anyway, the small business can thrive on it.
And that's how a lot of this stuff grew.
And I think it's one of the biggest things.
Esther's eventually became building block in a lot of bigger projects.
But the first use that I know of that was important, besides hobby,
was the one or two person business to make it look like you were a lot bigger.
Oh, okay.
And certainly to get the calls, make it have...
Because your answering machine didn't probably...
Was not able to do closed day, open hours, closed hours, holidays.
And every little step you take, learning asterisk,
allows you to enter a calendar that knows when Thanksgiving is this year,
which is a pretty yesterday thing, because it's the last Thursday.
I mean, it requires actual population.
You're stuck the same day every year.
So stuff like that, those are the old days.
But today it's a lot more complicated.
For a small business, the idea of a direct dial telephone number was very difficult.
Even a beginning business would have to be really concerned about where they opened their first office
or where they installed the first phone line, because they're not going to move that phone line out of that neighborhood
that phone number was kind of fixed to that central office.
So you might have really large startup costs just to have a phone number that you can hang on to.
And the idea of a direct number wasn't practical, because you'd have to install a line for each person
who needed a telephone number.
And if they were on the phone, you know, now where's that call going to go?
If it rolls over to the other line, it could be interpreted to be someone else's phone call.
It was really quite a mess. People didn't have direct and we're dialing it all.
At the best case, you'd have to have our receptions, essentially, who would patch calls to extensions
or you had the cheesy IVR that on the old phone systems really sounded pretty cheesy.
And the receptionist app is a part of everybody's PVXC station.
By the way, you just sit on the opposite, the direct line, the opposite being the toll-free line.
10, 15 years ago, you were buying these toll-free lines. I don't know the details, but it was very expensive.
If you want the other number, plus they're running out of them and all that.
But today, anybody, I mean, I think I even, I think I have an 855, that's toll-free.
Yes.
So I have a, because it was recent, I got a vanity 855.
I mean, the point being that the small business, you know, if you're not general motors when there was only 800
and they were horribly expensive and metered, by the way, I think.
There was a big deal.
Now, if Allison, you may even have one. If Allison wants, you have a toll-free?
1855, IVR, IVR, zero.
Did you get that?
Say, well, what's up?
That's one.
Well, you have an 855.
855, IVR, IVR, zero.
All right.
But that was a whole other dimension.
So you suddenly, your business looks a lot more important because you've got an 800 number.
I actually have a problem.
So when the 855 telephone prefix became available, I went crazy.
I was on the phone with Aaron, actually.
And we picked out the cost to get these vanity numbers.
Almost nothing.
It was almost nothing.
So I went through and sort of ported telephone numbers.
They spell certain things, but I don't remember what they are.
So I have maybe 20 numbers that, again, they cost nothing to own it, but I don't remember what they spell.
They became, yeah.
In the days when 866, I think, was maybe one of the earlier second choices after 800 was ran out of 800 numbers.
You could get a free, you could get like 4, 866 numbers for free based on the 2 cent a minute rate,
which is nothing because nobody calls you your paying zero.
And there was a company that went out of business G, wonder why?
Because they offered these buckets of 866 numbers.
Then you publish them.
There's a trap there, of course, because you've got too many numbers and you can't remember them or you can't deal with them.
The other problem is that if the general public doesn't know, it's not obvious to them that 855, for example.
You have to say it's toll free because to some people 800, they maybe have gotten to the 866 by now knowing that that's toll free.
But there's a lot of people who don't know if I find this about two years old.
There's a couple of things that I wanted to kind of get into while we have time.
While we're still awake, you exactly right.
I was still awake.
The killer app that I like within Ashrx is Deezza.
I don't know if anyone has used that before.
But I'd like the direct inwards station access.
Or system access.
I like the idea of when I'm saying, for instance, I'm in Bermuda somewhere for the benefit of the listeners.
I'm in Bermuda at a hotel.
And I certainly don't want to pick up my cell phone and use orange, wrongly, right.
Because my care, my local care is T-Mobile.
So if I were to use orange, they would charge me up the union just for a phone call, right.
So I pick up my, maybe the hotel phone or maybe my cell.
And I make the first connection to the state side through my pvx box.
Get a line out.
And then I can make that local interstation.
And I think you guys probably would say this is one way better than to do it.
Right. And we can talk about that called maybe central maybe central.
I got one too.
We can talk about central.
How do I trumps that?
So I would do lots of previously.
You would do lots of international travel.
And T-Mobile would get $2 a minute plus for answering an incoming telephone call.
And a voice mail.
You know what?
Yeah.
You wanted to check your voice mail.
You were paying that and then some.
And it always seemed like there was a hiccup, you know, like they needed me to get two phone calls in.
Because $4 to get a voice mail because you didn't take the phone call trying to save $2.
But that was just wildly frustrating.
So in many countries, you can go to the local corner store and buy a.
Sim and put credit on it.
And in most developing countries,
not to knock your.
I was saying that you ask things are better than there.
How about that?
Where incoming calls are paid for.
Well, they're free for the cell user.
And maybe there's a cost for the person who's placing the call that might be a little higher.
But it's relatively cheap.
When I'm on my voice over IP network and make my call to Europe, it's it's sub of penny.
But maybe if I'm going to call the cell phone, it might cost me, you know,
all eight cents a minute or something, you know, but wildly crazy expensive, right?
So what I was doing when I would travel is I would go to the local store.
I would grab a sim.
I'd put the minimum credit, which, you know, in American dollars might be 50 cents or something for the price of a sim.
And a credit that would allow incoming telephone calls.
And I would enable international dialing and I would have an Aster's application built.
I have a DID number.
If I dialed the DID number, it would just answer recording.
The number is not in service.
But if the caller ID was recognized as the cell phone for the sim I just bought.
When I hang up the phone, Aster's is instantly calling me back without.
Oh, nice.
Good old US dial tone.
Like I've got at my house where I can call the guy that I'm working with, you know, at eight cents a minute.
Maybe 16 cents a minute because we're paying out for two technically incoming telephone calls.
Or another neat thing.
This is an Aster's capability.
I have a second home.
I've got a, my partner is staying at that house.
And we can call each other in the phones automatically answer.
So just like you might yell to someone in the other room.
I can pick up my cell phone dial the decent number.
You know, hey, what's going on over there?
Yeah.
You don't have to check the mail.
It's good to hear from me.
I get ready.
You know, whatever you have a conversation, they don't have to come to the phone.
Right.
Or I've got a cat who is addicted to my attention.
I can call and have a conversation with my cat.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
So we had a system speaking of, you know, being in a foreign country.
I had a system running.
There's an application called SMS.
I think it's called SMS or send SMS or something.
Because in Europe, in most of the world, there's an SMS service that works on landlines.
It works on fixed lines and not cells.
So it's a text, it's text messaging.
This never caught on in the US.
Or very little, if at all.
But in France, for example, you can call a number
and send an SMS to that fixed line.
And there are phones that will handle them.
But because Astros can handle it, you can send a command to Astros.
So you can, for the price of the SMS, which admittedly might be 50 cents actually.
But still.
But in Europe, if you send like 1000 Spain, I would call, have Astros call the phone booth, for example.
So you enjoy the return number.
It's basically the same thing, except that it's coded.
And eventually, I think we even had a thing for email.
So you would go to the hotel cyber corner, send Astros can email.
And it would dial.
This is all supposing that you have a better rate going to you than you're going to get.
Which, if you're traveling, you know, the hotel is where hotels must be the saddest people for void progress.
It's between void and cells.
No one uses phones hotel for a squad anymore, right?
I remember there was a time, though, when progressive hotels, you know, for an extra $7.00 a night or something,
do you want the unlimited communications packet?
I don't remember that.
I don't know the mobile call.
Yeah, they were around here.
I've done that, you know, just for the sake of being able to use the wire telephone.
But that was before I traveled with voice over IP phones.
And their phones are usually not very good.
They hotels usually use the really cheap IP phones for themselves for their inner shirt often.
If they're even IP, they're probably.
Or whatever that is.
I mean, this hotel I'm sure is analog.
Yep.
So yeah, but they're really cheap, teeny-sounding.
They're not good sounding phones either.
Yeah.
So if you want the decent.
So we talked about eeks earlier.
Has anybody ever used the eeks?
Oh, yeah.
Did you get a share?
Well, the early eeks had, was it a power supply problem or the actual unit that they needed?
I got it.
I got it.
I don't know.
I'm a warm side.
I've doors to eeks.
I've had the newer ones.
Mark mentioned here at the show when I recalled this distinctly.
He took an old analog 500 set.
So that's the old rotary dial telephone set that everyone knows from Stromba Carlson or Western Electric.
Took an old rotary dial telephone.
Took the cover off.
And then inserted inside there are a bunch of batteries, a wireless radio, access pointer, whatever, in plant mode.
And an eeksie, bundled it all up inside the rotary telephone.
And it looked like a normal phone, but there was just no cord anywhere.
And you could leave that phone anywhere.
As he said, you know, there was a glass elevator in the hotel that we were at the first year.
And move a little table in the elevator and just place the spreader to telephone.
It was particularly cool.
The eeksie was one of the few devices that handled the rotary dial.
Wow.
So most ATAs or analog telephone adapters are set up for touch home.
Here is Mr. trademark.
The eeksie did a pulse dial and DTMF.
But yeah, so it did pulse.
I, we were, there was an astronaut con and Madrid a few years ago.
And I had my eeksie with me because it's because it's easier for the firewall.
You had to find a phone.
So I think I may have brought a phone, a normal phone with me to plug into.
But I also used it.
That worked beautifully too.
It's another hotel story.
They had a really good internet connectivity in Madrid.
They had a fiber or something radically new at the time.
No, something there were 200 people just to fit.
There were 200 people with headsets in the lobby of that astronaut con.
And they were all talking on something on their laptops.
But I had up in my room.
Oh, they also they had the fixed, they had the ethernet connector in the room.
That's why the eeksie was the most.
So I just had that thing running.
And it was, it just gave me an extension to our office, we've yet.
So I was just sitting there.
I could receive calls in the hotel and make them.
Some listeners might realize this.
Others might not have thought about it.
What's really challenging for a conference like this when you get this many, you know, birds in one place.
Most networks are, you know, class C private networks.
192.168.1.
That's something.
So there's 250 something.
And addresses that are available.
You have a conference like this.
Well, guess what?
There's, you know, 600 of us.
And we've all brought our iPads and our main phone and our back at it.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
So I'm top.
And, you know, just this group needs thousands of IP addresses in order to make the internet work.
Of course, we'll pack up a leave.
Maybe, you know, 10 IP addresses is good enough for the next year.
Right.
That's a powerful thing.
Yeah.
So the EXE, again, uses the EX protocol or IAX protocol.
And what was nice about that protocol was that both the media and the control messaging for setting up a tearing down a call used the same network port.
And really all that matters is that there was a flow from this device to that device.
Whether the port changed by that or anything wasn't, you know, real important.
Again, as long as you had that flow.
And you could from the EXE make the connection to the Aster Spock.
And once that connection was made, that, you know, the flow continued and everything worked.
It was simple, not working wise.
But what SIP does is it's a messaging protocol that says, hey, you two devices.
Why don't you talk to each other?
I'll talk in this port and you talk on that port.
And you go through any kind of NAT.
And those ports don't manage up.
It doesn't, doesn't work.
You need some helper along the way to either rewrite those SIP messages to say, hey, we're using NAT.
Change all the, never mind what it said.
You know, use these other ports.
And that's where the one way out who comes from is that that doesn't always work.
Sometimes you get several devices that think they're smart.
And they don't mix well.
They get some really nasty things.
So, you know, the other thing we haven't talked about is the integration of Asterisk into Web Communications,
having webpages that have got the ability to dial.
And as I saw in a presentation today, it's not just the ability to go to a web page and dial a phone.
It's the ability in this one demo that I saw, the ability to place a call and get an IVR.
And instead of having this just read back, you press one for this, press two for this or whatever,
it can also be displayed on the screen at the same time.
So the user can now actually see the choices right in front of them,
have the ability to push a button or simply speak the choice that they want.
And all of that integration can all happen and still use Asterisk as a back end
to make those communications and make the calls actually complete to wherever it is you want them to go.
That is a problem, I mean, I haven't got a whole lot of web-based applications for that.
But I can see how people keep talking about, you know, as an example, adhesion.
And then there's, I guess, hosted solutions like Twilio and somebody others has probably known that from God.
True, true, true.
And so those provide you that either ease of access or in the case of adhesion,
you're building your own, you know, building material type stuff from the ground up and maybe work from a web perspective.
And I think that's another area where there's still some growth and what have you.
But as we are probably on the hour, I see everybody glass out here as we continue to assume vodka and copious amounts.
There's lots of that.
And there's lots of that.
I think we can help.
I think we probably ought to bring us to hope before we do.
I'd like to say that I'm honored once again to be with all these asterisks folks here.
And I'm glad that I'm able to provide a show for Hacker Public Radio.
And I encourage all of you here to consider providing a show, a contributing a show in Hacker Public Radio.
And very simple, you can either call it in, do an asterisk connection, of course.
Or you can do as we are here, record it live and then share it via their website or their server will have you in the community show.
So I thank you once again for listening this evening to our show live from ATL at AstraCon 2012.
And this is Sons of Man saying sign off and good night and good Hacker.
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