I’ve been working a new project with a customer and I’ve transitioned to a early (5:30am) wakeup and pre-7:00am arrival. I’m reminded that it’s actually kind of nice and how much you can knock out before lunch. I may actually change to a 6:00am arrival so I can bust out early to tend to other customers in the PM.

My partners and I often find ourselves using our laptops at customer sites and always seem to end up having 2+ laptops and 1 Ethernet port available. I decided to start looking for a USB or battery powered hub or switch. I’ve found a couple of options:

3 port 10baseT USB powered Ethernet Hub

4 port 10/100baseT USB powered Ethernet Switch

Well, my Sipura SPA-841’s finally arrived last week and I spent a couple of days testing on my local gentoo box before I rolled to our colo’ed server. The phones work wonderfully, but I’m not sure it’s really that the phones are that nice, but the the Asterisk PBX and IAX2 infrastructure is so well implemented. I did run into one serious problem that I attributed to NAT, but turned out to be a simple error on my part where I had an invalid Caller ID string. It took me 2 days to figure it out and in the end I was kicking myself. I finally found it when I broke out Ethereal out and looked at the packets and saw that my packets were getting across the Firewall + NAT. This ment that the issue had to be at the device, so I started poking around and it was indeed something simple.

We have our DID lines through IAX.cc/SixTel and our outgoing via VOIPJet. We setup one incoming toll-free for $0.02/min, one local Houston DID for $0.0143/min and our outbound for $0.013/min.

I’ve delivered one of the phones to one of my partners in Houston and we now have real office extension, conference rooms, multi-line, transfers in our homes…VERY cool stuff.

I’ve taken the plunge and ordered two hardphones for a VOIP test with Asterisk OSS PBX. I’ve ordered two Sipura SPA-841’s from Atacomm after extensive conversations with folks on the Asterisk IRC channel. The phones won’t be in for a week or so as they have just been released, but initial information is very encouraging.

I also put down $5.00 with VoipJet as a IAX termination service (PBX speak for outbound provider). The $5.00 gets us about 380minutes of US talktime, which should be enough for a good test.

Once I get the devices and have them configured, I’ll be sending them to my partners for testing and we’ll see how this VOIP/Virtual office is going to work for us.

I’ve read Asterisk before, but really didn’t see where it would play with my requirements. Well, now I do. With our small business and with our home offices it looks like Asterisk or IAX/SIP provider might be exactly what we need. The way I see it now, there are a couple of options that would work for us, after we each get a SIP phone:

• Go out and find a provider (Packet8) who will handle our current number and be able to add virtual numbers. This has a monthly rate attached to it in the rage of $20-$40/mo per line. They also charge for other features on a monthly basis. So we are looking at around $200/mo for 4 of us. That might or might not include long distance.
• Build a Asterisk machine myself and put a two port card (I think that’s a FXO) so we can have a single inbound line and a single outbound line for local calls. This would give us complete control of the the PBX, but we’d need an upstream provider to handle our long distance and to route ‘virtual numbers’ to us. I’m not sure how you go about doing that right now.
• Just do Vonage, they supply the Phone to SIP converter and all that jazz, not sure what price advantage or service advantage we would see from vonage.

I’ll keep looking and thinking on this subject, as it sure would be nice to have easy dialing between us, even with a soft SIP phone.

I’m looking at getting a couple of handsets for use with Skype for us to use as a inexpensive way of doing conference calls. Currently, I’m using a Logitech USB headset which works fairly well…but it’s still a headset and not a real phone. While that’s not an issue for me, I think that my partners would probably feel more comfortable with a honest to goodness phone handset. I’ve found several options. There is the Skype CyberPhone available directly from Skype. The other two vendors that have equipment that is of interest are PCPhoneLine and CUPhone. Another options that I haven’t really investigated fully is using something like a Bluetrek G2 (onsale) with a BT dongle. This would be nice since it would also work with the Treo 650 that we are all going to be using fairly soon.

Links of interest:

PC Phone Line

CU Phone

Skype accessories

VOIP Info.org

Tom Keating’s VOIP Blog

MediaWiki is the Wiki that runs wikipedia. I’ve just downloaded it and started looking around as I would like to setup a personal Wiki and possibly a business one. MediaWiki looks like Plone, but it isn’t. It’s PHP based and they probably just borrowed the icons and the like. I’ve also grabbed ZWiki, which integrates with Plone and could be a better choice for GCG as we are already Plone based for out CMS.

I’ve reworked the website for our company, please take a look and give me some feedback. I’ve done a fairly extensive amount of work to customize the Plone CMS to fit out needs. We use our site for almost everything, knowledge base, issue tracker, marketing, DAV…you name it, it’s there.