Telephony

A Telephone Number is NOT A URL!

Clickford, Steven M.

A couple years ago, I had clashed with a crude and disrespectful DSP; who was there for a quick buck but should’ve worked in another field instead. The individual was significantly younger than me; and involved the really grey matter of what is considered to be a private, one on one conversation in a congregated group that isn’t strangers. I’ve had people say it’s wrong to abut into conversations in open environments, and some seeing what I saw.

The person I won’t identify avoided a local restaurant because the joint didn’t have an app to order on a smartphone, and actually left to go to another place that did. I said

“you couldn’t use your phone by calling?”

She responded (again a DSP, who should hold higher standards said in a crudely sarcastic matter”)

“I don’t need your sass”

While I was being generally light-hearted.

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Why Elastix/Issabel for Alternative Telephony?

Clickford, Steven M.

I have p!ssed on Asterisk systems for a number of years, and for rightful reasons. To say it’s an M1 is BSing. A claim it’s a sexier G3si, is screwing with you. Hell, NEC makes a better system… you just have to fork cash.

Ironically, like all other open source projects, they come and go, and the moment you settle on them, they may not settle on you. For instance, Trixbox was cool, in terms of manipulating the Asterisk daemon without attempting to tweak .conf files without taking down a box, was great. Guess who did that, a company who developed FreePBX. But FreePBX was sold off to another company, whom in turn would later buy Digium, the publishers behind the original Asterisk code by the end of the 2010s.

Oh the full circle!

I had downloaded the Free PBX distro circa 2018, and to be blunt, I hated it. One of the biggest turnoffs was you had to register (using a disposable email address) and if you did a full blown register, you can then set it to a static IP LAN address and then it could work without an Internet connection. Wait, this code is supposed to be “free” but it has to yet “phone home” and yet this derivative doesn’t require licenses.

I frankly don’t care for Sagmona, or however the hell you’re supposed to spell it. Their blue colors, the horribly designed IP sets (FFS alive, Digium designed better SIP sets than when they were sold off!) I was like, “there has to be more than FreePBX” and Elastix was so cool for a clear alternative to anything else. Enter Issabel

I had recently downloaded Issabel, and why them?

  • Didn’t I say how much I hated the current version of FreePBX?
  • Trixbox is basically dead (best to use for Museum-grade VOIP sets… yup there’s an age for VOIP sets to die into a isolated LAN for non Internet exposed devices.)
  • Freeswitch could be set to a PBX, but that’s like telling a 5ESS switch to act like an on-prem System 75… and it’s not easy to compile, and there is no distro.
  • If you liked OS X Server’s email and calendar features, and since Apple has taken server features out of the “Server”, Issabel can fill that void*
  • I prefer the older/classic FreePBX GUI.
  • Other than a better HTML5 experience, and you can tweak the system to do things like SCCP (even if people encourage to stick with SIP), when I chose Asterisk 1.6 it came with the Unistim drivers for the Avaya Blue sets; and other little things.

* Actually, it’s believed that most of the OS X installs were under 50 users, and in fact the email and messaging systems were recommended to be more of a “relay” server than a straight up, email storage and forwarding system like in Domino or Exchange install (and be directly exposed to the internet at the server level. In the GUI Wizards, the example in OS X server, was showing the system against another email server, and OS X instance was really just between the client and the bigger mail or calendar server.

Think of this as an always on desktop logged in as a user, times another 49 or so fetching the emails from either a cloud/corporate email. OS X Server would then be the one between the user, by simply forwarding it. Elastix/Issabel’s implementation of it’s email and messaging servers reminds me a lot like what was in the OS X Server  (in that “relay” mode) – including those “mail” servers found in Drobos and Synolgy based NAS; so I would recommend people to not have an Elastix email instance exposed directly to the Internet without some firewall in between to prevent it becoming a host of spam attacks.

In a future Installation Insensation; I’ll show you how the installs work and how they play well.

Elastix PBX Rundown

Clickford, Steven M.

 

I posted this as Vlog/Vlob post recently about this abandoned open source phone system. Elastix was a foreign made fork from Asterisk, that was a cheaper and free equivalent of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and it’s Exchange server, but unlike MS’ OCS, at least there is a few more telephony features.

While Elastix had Exchange-like features for groupware, it’s PBX functionality is nowhere near an Aura or Cisco UCM. Elastix was unable to survive and was sold to 3CX. 3CX has and probably will still be a joke. What the 3CX people did, was took the brand, and took the 3CX code originally for Windows (because their selling point was it was more user friendly to administer than Asterisk) and ported it to a Linux distro to give the appearance they weren’t missing out.

Not too long after the original Elastix code went end of life, another organization took it’s code and made a fork of it and it’s called Issabel. Similar idea, cheaper Exchange functionality, but more reliable in it’s telephony service.

In this video, I had many of my Mitels I got from Jason via The Museum. Except for the 5207, all the others were capable of SIP. While the proprietary MiNet is preferred, I had decided, well instead of buying newer phones and collecting dust, to just repurpose them. I also noticed another Mitel phone system, the MX5000 (a rebadged InterTel system, after Mitel acquired them) that that phone system uses SIP for the VOIP phones, and while a couple of them I have are 5220s, if I were to get an MX5000 on the Interwebz down the road, it could theoretically work, then gain some Mitel/Intertel features.

This would be all for Media Services. Why?

My family has felt a phone system…

  • was part of the phone company’s “service” (Xfinity/Comcast Business.)
  • that each extension must be physical
  • if someone did a call pickup, bridged appearances, follow-me calling, family would not know where they are calling, and “loose track” of their adult child
  • Forget Do Not Disturb, they’ll think the network went down. (Not so much since March of 2020, where reliability was forced to go up given working from home requirements.)

Where does that leave any mobility? What if I want to park a call? So I decided that I’d use Elastix (and BTW there is no direct Internet exposure, since it’s on a non-routable LAN… and anyone who puts public IP or DNS on a SIP phone directly, is crazy, no matter what setup it is) for my media room and my bedroom. 1300 would be the “main number”, and do a dial-peer to SIP telephone number on the IP address of the Elastix box;  and the Cisco CallManager Express would calling another phone system as if it was an internal extension.

I have not been able to do outbound calling, but given the mandatory ten-digit calling in New Hampshire, this maybe easier. I’ve had issues even with the Avaya (see how I miss Key Phone Systems?)

Later in this video, I had discussed a potential migration to either Elastix and/or Isasbell and have the CME be the backup in case the server went down. In fact I would avoid SRST, and just use straight up CME; with the magic of using a Skinny Call Control Protocol driver. I do not have any spare SCCP sets laying around. This is preliminary and should be taken as speculation. 

 

TMOT: Analysis (The History of Telephony)

Clickford, Steven M.

As part of divesting content from The Museum of Telephony, anything identified by moi has been sent back to me as being the rights holder. 

Steven M. Clickford

As I am writing this history, it’s 2020, nearly a century after the Spanish Flu; and the midst of the growth of telephony that grew around that time. Also: our country is more divided, not just red and blue, not just Republican or Democrat, not Ford vs Chevy, not Nortel vs. AT&T or Avaya Red vs. Avaya Blue. We are up against a very divided country; and allegedly the U.S. is dealing with what could become the deadliest pandemic since 1918 known as COVID19 or the novel Coronavirus from China. In the technical sense of division; from the mind of an engineer, conflict brings innovation; but from a customer, division confuses them; from a business standpoint since the 1980s, it’s all about making money and being rewarded with cash… but what do they do with it? Sit on it!

What about the middle class? Why is my Cisco phone “Made in China”? What about the people who were proud to work at Ma Bell at the repair plants? What about the Boomers and people like my gram’s age who is very sensitive to reliable telephony?

We have forgotten what made the past so great that brought us the present. Too often Americans (by choice) want to have short attention spans. Americans do not care about “the past” they by choice “want to move forward”. Today many Gen Z (the youngest generation coming to age) want to spend money on “experiences” completely opposite to the Baby Boomers of yester-generation. But like the Boomers, they want things cheap and will laugh at the price of an iPhone; but yet will whine about the “monopoly”.

The so-called “monopoly” by the technologists today is far from what it used to be. AT&T would’ve been shamed if they were hoarding cash or gave a Western Electric exec stock options, since stock options wasn’t really a “financial instrument”. The Bell System was for sure corrupt, at some parts of the company. For whatever reason some other groups felt “secure” that their phones worked, that they had “service” that they “took care” of their customer. The ones who had a grudge was people who were fixated on price, the engineer who didn’t like using a telephone, and wanted to extend the Internet, etc.

AT&T would’ve been better of breaking up the communications equipment; go into their failed attempt in computing, and then keep the all local telephone service. The company was loosing margins on their Long Lines (or long distance services) from the 70s to the Divestiture.

What the 1984-implemented Divestiture caused

  1. allowed dog-eat-dog, cut throat competition.
  2. Shareholders came first; customers, employees came second (MCI was known for cheap long distance service; the amount of customers and cash coming in resulted in a high stock price, enabling “insiders” to use MCI as a private bank to leave the company, start it up, if it succeeded or failed, they’d return back.)
  3. Local telephone service was under siege by the Telecommunications Act of 1996; ElChea0 Telephone could by law co-locate with a Baby Bell central office, and the Baby Bell had to comply!
  4. With the Telecommunications Act, this forced Baby Bells to merge and consolidate, to grow their profit margins (remember shareholder-first)
  5. Lenient laws for “innovation” = new markets, but enabling sub-par standards (such as crappier audio quality)
  6. Lenient laws to “maximize shareholder profits”, taking skilled labor (whether you like unions or not) out of a job.
  7. “High tech” companies brought today’s new economy on zero regulation, with zero corporate governance, and zero accountability, forcing customers to “trust” these “digital companies” that reinvent (err rewriting) standards/policies/goal posts to throw smaller people out of business (Baby Bells, etailers like Amazon and eBay)
  8. The consumer is more confused by whose the villain or the hero in the economy, when in reality the populous views is far from accurate (the smaller “innovative” companies are profiting like crazy while the service providers are being sucked out of cash, even though they are pocketing customer’s money too.)

The fact is, that after the breakup, the very same thing the market wanted would actually be the beginning of the end of telephony, or standardized telecommunications, the end of customer social norms, and the inmates controlling the asylum (the shareholders and corporate executives.)

I was born 3 years after Divestiture. I didn’t follow much of AT&T’s past, until a few years before the first carnation of The Museum of Telephony. The old AT&T’s reputation was tainted by popular opinions that was probably conflated facts. The Divestiture confused a bunch of customers. Post Diveisture, customers were confused. Like some techies, some looked up to IBM even if they had skeletons in their closet, mine was literally AT&T (the competitive company of course.) I literally saw Ma Bell literally fall to her death. I remember they spun off NCR when 5 years before they bought them out as National Cash Register, the same year IBM divested ROLM. I remember AT&T’s buyout of TCI, then Media One, to then sell them off to Comcast. To then see AT&T basically sell themselves out to SBC, the Baby Bell of the West Coast and Connecticut.

The AT&T after 2005 was basically a Baby Bell inheriting their mother’s name, but still operating in that dirty corporate culture that America so wanted so badly in the 1980s; that they are bitching about today.

Lastly, because of the “cutting edge”, progressive, anti “antiquated” tech mindset, the 1 year refresh cycle (remember the 3 year cycles in the Wintel/Cisco world?); as technology has evolved, there is rarely something, that is a thing, an object that unifies us. Most Millennials can’t tell a story of a item that others shared, except if you’re like me a deep techie. But for the older, non techies, that infamous plastic clad, 500-type rotary dial telephone, brings older generations with stories or “remember-that”?

For the human side of technology, the best unity was before PCs, clearly before mobile phones, and anything that was made prior to 1987, let’s just end that the year I was born was the end of unified technology that multi-generations can relate to.

For many of my audience, I’m an old heart, and don’t subscribe to IT-group-think nor do I care for today’s consumer tech. This narrative was written out of respect of the technology that long came before my existence, because I knew there was a world before I came onto this planet too!

Are VOIP Phones other than SIP Worth It on Asterisk Systems?

Clickford, Steven M.

I’ve played with Asterisk over the years, and it’s somewhat to write home about (you know the phone system-like snapin to any Unix or Linux operating systems?)

One of the things that caught my attention from almost the early days was it’s “support” for some proprietary IP phone drivers and protocols. Particularly Cisco’s SCCP and Nortel’s UniSTIM. Session Initiation Protocol or SIP is an “open” standard, meaning that the way the phone communicates to the phone system (that’s now a server) is supposed to use a uniform specifications outlined in Request for Comment in the Holy Grail of Internet Standards. That RFC is rather interesting, because while these phones could work on any system that supports SIP, basically, it’s almost like having a house phone with an IP stack instead.

I have focused on SIP in other posts, and I don’t really support this idea on phones, because it’s almost like having a landline just that it communicates over the Internet. I personally feel that SIP is way too religious in the way a vendor must follow. In fact, there is a movement to obsolete that with WebRTC. With that aside, SIP is going to be withheld for the rest of this story.

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Vocal Minority Against Kari’s Law: Editorial

Clickford, Steven M.

Freelanced for Techicenter where the FCC is regulating in businesses they wouldn’t touched before. Published in April 2018. The last post, that happened to be on the subject of Kari’s Law, has had some unusual activity in the last couple of weeks with no way to capture where that audience from.

A MONTH INTO KARI’S LAW – GOVERNMENT OVERREACH OR KILLING PHONE SYSTEM VENDORS?

A phone system killed a mother, not the actual man behind it or bad admin who misconfigured it. Or says the media.

In 2013, a Texas mother named Kari Hunt died from being murdered by her estranged husband in a motel. The daughter tried to call “9-1-1” but the number didn’t work because it was tied to a Multi Line Telephone System, where one has to dial a trunk access code to get to the outside world. MLTS can be a private branch exchange or a key telephone system (PBX and KTS respectively.) The mainstream media immediately jumped on the bandwagon that the PBX killed the mother, not some grossly incompetent PBX administrator, and not the murderer.

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Session Initiation Protocol – The Secrets

Clickford, Steven M.1 Comment

For multimedia communications, a standard has been around called the Session Initiation Protocol or SIP. My sister platform, The Museum of Telephony, has explained this in a way that it’s an app-driven telephony like interface.

Originally for the fusion instant messaging or IM, video and voice calls, SIP became an international standard for basic telephony extensions (or “stacks”) for such technologies to work over the Internet.  SIP is an open standard, in “theory”. As you read along, it’s going to become a cliche pretty quickly.

This isn’t telephony per se, and it gets extremely technical. And degrading men can act like fanboys of this technology too. Trigger warning! Link contains non-laymen content from an apparent misongyst!

I digress. Just bare with me.

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