Conference calling is a poorly implemented feature on most telephone systems (do you even know how to set up a conference call on your PBX? if not, join the club). “Meet Me” conferencing systems and services make this much easier to do.

In “Meet Me” conferences, you give participants a telephone number and extension to dial. This rings into a virtual conference room that allows up to several dozen people to participate in a two-way conversation. This is the easiest way to deal with conference calls because it is analogous to walking in or out of a real conference room. People simply call 800-nnn-xxxx extension xyz at the appointed time, and can come and go as they please.

The problem is that many telephone systems make setting a conference call up difficult at best. The conference host, or secretary, must often call out to people and manually add them to a conference. The results can be frustrating to say the least, especially if participants are on cellular phones.

If your telephone system doesn’t have built-in meet me conferencing, there are a couple of ways you can do this. One is to subscribe to outsourced conferencing services such as Webex, FreeConference.Com, and others (most long distance companies offer some type of teleconferencing service. There’s no equipment to buy. You just tell participants what 800 number and extension to dial at an appointed time.

However, if you conduct a lot of conference calls, the toll charges can add up, in which case you might want to buy your own conference bridge. Off the shelf conference bridges are expensive beasts, costing several hundred dollars to a thousand dollars per port (phone line). A system big enough to handle 100 callers can cost a pretty penny.

If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, you can build an El Cheapo conference bridge using the Asterisk open source PBX package combined with inexpensive telephone network interface cards from Digium (Asterisk’s corporate sponsor). Asterisk supports meet me conferencing out of the box.

To configure this feature in Asterisk, edit the meetme.conf file to map one or more extension numbers to conference rooms (as shown in the example below, which creates three conference rooms numbered 9000, 9001 and 9002).


;
; Configuration file for MeetMe simple conference rooms
; for Asterisk of course.
;
[rooms]
;
; Usage is conf => confno,pincode,adminpin
;
conf => 9000
conf => 9002,123456
conf => 9003,123456,654321


The conference bridge can be accessed in one of several ways depending on the type of telephone system you have, whether it supports voice over IP, and how easily it can be expanded:

• Internal T1/PRI - here you connect an internal T1 or ISDN Primary Rate circuit from the PBX directly to the conference bridge. This is a good option if your PBX is expandable, but does not support VoIP. This way you don’t have to order a local loop T1 from the local phone company, which will cost you several hundred dollars per month.
• Connect direct to public telephone network - order one or more local loop T1/PRI circuits from your phone company, connect them directly to the conference bridge. This is a good option if your PBX is not expandable. The downside is you have to pay for more local telephone service.
• Connect to PBX via Voice over IP. If your PBX or local telephone provider supports SIP, H.323 or IAX voice over IP service, you can route calls to Asterisk via your LAN/WAN. This is the best option if it’s available as you can eliminate the need for T1 interface cards in the Asterisk box, as well as expansion cards for your PBX.

Diagram - Conference Bridge Connected to PBX

Diagram - Conference Bridge Attached to Public Telephone Network

NOTE: installing and configuring an Asterisk PBX is not trivial, and involves telephone network interface configuration, extension numbering and dial plans, which is beyond the scope of this short recipe.

How much does an Asterisk conferencing bridge cost. If you’ll be using digital telephone service (T1 or ISDN Primary Rate), you’ll need:

• A fast Linux box with plenty of memory (~$700)
• A Digium T1 interface card (~$700 for a single T1, ~$1500 for a quad T1 card)
• Asterisk PBX software (FREE)
• One or more T1 or ISDN PRI circuits (23 or 24 simultaneous callers per circuit), connected from the Asterisk box to your PBX or directly to the public telephone network

Compare this to a conventional conference bridge, which will typically set you back $10,000 to $20,000 just for an entry level model. Granted, Asterisk is freeware, and experimental compared to telephone systems that have been in use for well over a decade. However it is so much less expensive, it’s worth playing around with just to learn what you can do with it.

Do you know of other teleconferencing services that support meet me conferencing, post your comments and references here…

Broadband telephone service enables you to consolidate all of your voice and data service to run over a single fast Internet connection. The problem is that home telephone wiring was not designed with broadband in mind. Here’s how you can fix this.

Connect A Cordless Phone System To The VoIP Adapter

This is the easiest thing to do. Find a good multi-handset cordless phone system. These systems allow multiple cordless handsets to share a single phone line, to transfer calls from handset to handset, and in general act like a small intercom system. You can buy these through numerous home electronics vendors, as well as telecom retailers such as Hello Direct.

Connect Ethernet Phones To Your Home Network

If your VoIP service directly supports third-party VoIP phones (some do, some don’t), you can directly connect compatible telephones to your household LAN wiring or to your wireless LAN. Most VoIP providers support the SIP (session initiation protocol) standard, which is supported by most VoIP telephone handsets.

NOTE: although SIP is the leading VoIP standard, some VoIP carriers do not interoperate with all SIP devices. Vonage, one of the best known broadband phone companies only supports Vonage branded terminal adapters. VoicePulse, on the other hand, advertises support for all SIP compliant devices. Generally speaking, I recommend carriers that support open standards, otherwise you get locked in with proprietary hardware.

You can find SIP phones through telecom retailers including Hello Direct and VoIP Supply. Be sure to verify that the equipment is compatible with your broadband provider. VoIP is still bleeding edge, and not everybody’s hardware plays nice with each other.

SIP phones generally provide better control over calls (e.g. access to better call transfer and conference calling features, message waiting indication, etc). This approach also eliminates the need to have a VoIP adapter in some cases, as the phones can be directly connected to your LAN/WLAN without any intermediate hardware.

The problem with SIP phones is that they are expensive. It’s not uncommon for good net phones to cost over $300, which is a bit much for household telephones, or even most office phones.

Rewire Line 2 To Your VoIP Adapter

NOTE: Only do this if you are not using DSL service on a separate telephone line, and know what you are doing with telephone/data wiring. If not, hire a contractor to do this for you. If not done correctly, you can damage your equipment.

Most homes are wired for two incoming telephone lines. Your telephone service enters the house through a single connection called a point of entry. This is a four wire terminal, two wires for each telephone line. There should be four color-coded wires (red and green for line 1, yellow and black for line two).

RJ14 (Two-Line) Telephone Wiring

What you need to do is to disconnect the yellow and black wires between the point of entry and your inside wiring so that line 2 (yellow+black) inside wiring is not connected to the public telephone network. Leave line 1 (red+green) connected as is.

IMPORTANT: you must be certain that you have disconnected line 2 inside wiring (yellow+black) from the outside telephone network, otherwise you can damage your equipment.

Next, you will connect the yellow and black leads that were connected to the telco point of entry to line 1 on the VoIP terminal adapter. The easiest way to do this is to buy a modular jack from a local electronics store. Wire the jack as follows:

inside wiring black –> green terminal on modular jack
inside wiring yellow –> red terminal on modular jack

Then connect a standard phone cord from the modular jack to the VoIP terminal adapter.

Wiring Diagram For VoIP On Line 2 House Wiring

Telephones connected to line 2 will now see the VoIP adapter as they would the public telephone network.

Potential Pitfalls

Wiring line 2 to your VoIP adapter will enable you to receive and place VoIP calls from any telephone, even old rotary dial telephones. This is cool, and enables you to use VoIP just like your regular primary line.

The main risk in rewiring your house is the potential whoops factor if you wire the system up wrong. It’s unlikely you’ll damage the telephone network (it’s designed to take a beating), but you can easily nuke delicate terminal equipment.

Another issue to be aware of is that older telephones with electromechanical ringers draw a lot of current to ring their bells. Terminal adapters are generally designed to be used with newer self-powered phones that do not use current from the telephone line to power the ringer. Don’t connect a lot of vintage rotary dial telephones to line 2, they’ll overwhelm the terminal adapter. At best this will cause the phones not to ring. At worst it could damage the terminal adapter.

Again, if you have any doubts about this, hire a local phone/LAN wiring guy to do this. It’ll take a half hour or less.

Further Reading

• RJ Jack Wiring Glossary
• RJ-11 Jack Wiring (Wikipedia)

Have suggestions, tips or links to vendors to add? Post them here…

One of the most expensive (and least upgradable) pieces of office equipment you’ll ever buy is a telephone system. I’ve spent countless hours advising clients who’ve regretted spending tens of thousands of dollars on a phone system, only to discover that it didn’t do what they wanted it to do.

The process of selecting a telephone system, much less buying and installing one, is confusing, frustrating, and more often than not, a real drain on the wallet. If you’re a Fortune 500 company, you’ve factored this into your staffing and budget for decades. If you’re a small business, you probably just assumed telephone systems were as inexpensive as desktop computers, and developed a bad case of sticker shock when you were told a 20 person intercom system would cost you ten or twenty grand.

Hosted Telephony Services

If you have 20 or fewer people in your office, and especially if you have a mobile or decentralized workforce, you should take a close look at hosted telephony services. These services provide nearly all of the features that a permanently installed telephone system does, with nearly zero capital expenditure except for telephone handsets.

These services come in two basic flavors: circuit-switched services (delivered via existing telephone lines) and VoIP based services (delivered via your broadband connection). Each has strengths and weaknesses.

Circuit Switched HTS

Circuit switched services, such as Virtual PBX and AccessLine, provide a full range of features found on conventional office phone systems, including:

• Extension based dialing
• Call transfer
• Automated Call Distribution (e.g. for queueing calls to customer service agents)
• Voice mail/unified messaging
• Smart call forwarding (the systems hunts for you at several phone numbers, e.g. office line, then home office, then cell phone)
• Music/message on hold
• Web based system and user administration

These services answer all incoming calls to your organization via a toll-free (800/888/877) number or via a local telephone number in one or more geographical areas, and then reroute calls back out to your employees via the public telephone network. No on-site equipment is required. No special telephone service is required. All you need to receive calls are plain old telephones on plain old telephone lines. These services are a great fit for businesses that are not especially high-tech, an accounting firm for example.

The only rub is that they typically charge for incoming calls on a per minute basis (usually 10 cents/minute or less). If your employees spend a lot of time answering incoming calls, such as in a customer support call center, these charges can add up quickly. If you don’t spend a lot of time on incoming calls, these services are generally cost effective.

VoIP Based HTS

Broadband phone companies such as Lingo, Vonage, and others are beginning to offer small business packages that provide similar features, except that telephone calls are delivered to the user via a broadband TCP/IP connection.

To use these services, the user must install special customer premise equipment, either a terminal adapter (which makes the TCP/IP network look like an analog telephone line to an attached telephone handset), or a VoIP telephone handset that connects directly to the TCP/IP network via Ethernet or 802.11b (WiFi).

VoIP is attractive because VoIP networks provide more features, such as the ability to ring many handsets concurrently (forking), and because of lower call transport costs (toll charges). However, these benefits and savings are offset by the fact that VoIP is still somewhat of a bleeding edge technology. If you know what you’re doing with TCP/IP networks and devices, VoIP is definitely the way to go. If you have a lot of non-technical employees, the circuit switched services are easier to deal with since they ride on the tried and tested public telephone network. Most of these companies are migrating to VoIP, and if they are not already offering VoIP service, will soon offer it as an option.

Centrex

You can also order Centrex service from your local telephone company. Centrex has been around for a long time, and if all you need is a really basic service that allows you to transfer calls between extensions, basic voice mail, etc, it might also be a good fit. Be warned, local telcos generally overcharge for Centrex, and it is very hard to find salespeople who know anything about it. You’ll generally be better off to go to a company that specializes in providing small business telephony services.

Try Before You Buy

There are many advantages to outsourcing your business telephone system. One of the main advantages is the ability to test drive a high end system without making a substantial investment in hardware. If you don’t like the service, you can always cancel it and go back to your basic phone service, or if you want to bring it in house, you can invest in on-site equipment later on. Either way, your upfront risk is minimal.

Another advantage is that these services are automatically upgraded whenever the vendor adds new features. With customer premise equipment this typically involves expensive hardware and software upgrades, whereas many upgrades with an outsourced telephony service are automatic. You’ll just log in to check voice mail one morning and discover that they’ve upgraded the web interface for example. This alone is a good reason to seriously consider outsourced telephony services as your system will be evolving with the industry rather than frozen in time at the moment you bought it.

Know of a good small business telephony service? Post your remarks and suggestions here…

Related link: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/04/20/pctv.html

According to the EFF countdown timer, we have 71 days and a tad less than five hours until the broadcast flag mandate takes effect. Hurry up and order your Linux tuner cards already!

I recently had a chance to speak with Jack Kelliher, the founder/CEO of pcHDTV, the leading vendor of high-definition tuners for Linux. In retrospect, what strikes me most about our conversation is that the company is not just a job or a business venture, but an outgrowth of his philosophy. Code is art, art is valuable, and artists deserve respect. Read the full interview here.

Most telephone companies (fixed line and wireless) provide a pretty basic (read: lame) voice mail interface that hasn’t changed much in over a decade.

You can easily replace your telco voice mail with a third party unified messaging service. UM services take voice mail a step further by providing enhanced features such as:

• Voicemail to Email Forwarding (incoming voice mail is sent to your email account as an audio file)
• Voice Email - send and reply to incoming email messages by voice, outgoing messages are sent via email as audio attachments
• Voice SMS - the voice mail system sends an SMS/text message that provides caller details and links back to the message for immediate playback
• Email Readback - although less necessary now that handheld devices can download text email, some UM services allow you to listen to your incoming email (and spam) by phone

Unified messaging service is available from a number of vendors, including: J2, uReach, and others. The service usually costs a few dollars per month, and includes a direct-dial local telephone number that caller’s dial to leave a message.

Once you have activated your UM account, simply configure your cellular phone’s busy/no answer/no service forwarding settings to route calls to this secondary phone number if your phone is busy, unanswered or out of the coverage area. This is especially easy to do on GSM phones, as this is a standard GSM setting. On other types of cellular networks, you may be able to set this from the telephone, or you may need to call the telephone company to request this change (this is often the case with fixed line telephone companies, and often involves an additional fee… beware of this, as it can be a ripoff).

Once this is set, calls will no longer go into your telco voice mail, and will instead go to the unified messaging number, where you’ll be able to retrieve incoming voice mail via telephone, via the web, or via email, whichever is easiest for you at the moment.

NOTE: your cellular company may charge you a metered rate for forwarded telephone calls. Read the fine print on your contract. If forwarded calls are simply deducted from your monthly airtime allotment, it shouldn’t make a big difference in your bill. If they charge you a retail per minute rate, 20-40 cents/minute, you can get dinged pretty badly on surplus airtime charges.

Do you use a unified messaging service with your fixed line or mobile phone? If so, share your tips and recommendations here.

Recording Telephone And Conference Calls On Demand

Recording telephone or conference calls is as easy as making a three-way call to a unified messaging service. No special handset or call recording software is required. When you need to record a call, simply make a three-way call to a voice mail service, which will quietly record whatever it hears on the line. This works any telephone (fixed-line, cellular or VoIP) with three-way calling capability.

You can use your cellular phone company’s voice mail service to do this, except that most voice mail services do not forward voice mail to email, and also limit the length of the recording to about a minute. You’ll be better off to use a unified messaging service such as uReach, or even better to use a service that is specifically optimized for call recording. Unified messaging services will email you a copy of the recording, usually as a WAV file (although many also cap the duration of the recording to several minutes at most).

Trekmail offers a free call recording service that allows recordings up to 20 minutes in length. To use it, you simply make a three-way call to a San Francisco area telephone number, it records whatever it hears on the line, and then emails you a compact MP3 audio recording of the conversation. (Disclosure: the author works for Trekmail).

Hosted Conference Calls

Many conference calling services offer call recording as an option, so if you are hosting a conference call, you can usually activate this option via the conferencing service’s web administrative interface. These services will typically enable you to access the recordings either via the web or email.

Of course, individual conference participants can use the technique mentioned above to make their own recordings independently of the conference host.

Recording Fixed Line Phone Calls

Recording calls from fixed line telephones is easier, because it is trivial to connect a telephone call recorder to the telephone line. This equipment has been around for years. The first systems recorded to cassette tapes. Newer devices record calls digitally and can export recordings to computers via USB, removable storage media, etc. Hello Direct, a telecom catalog retailer has a good selection of call recording appliances to choose from.

A Word Of Warning

IANAL. Check your local regulations to make sure its legal to record calls in your jurisdiction. Generally speaking this is OK if one party is aware the call is being recorded, although you may be required to notify the other parties as well. It is good business and social etiquette to let people know that you’re recording the conversation. I use this primarily to record telephonic board meetings, conference calls, and occasionally, verbal agreements with vendors (although I generally get everything in writing anyway so this is unnecessary).

Do you know of other utilities and services that can be used to record telephone and conference calls? Post your suggestions and links here…

I’ve been thinking about video conferencing (and video phones, and all such similar devices).

We’ve been promised video phones pretty much since the invention of the television, but somehow they’ve never taken off. The argument is that the technology just isn’t quite ready, but I don’t believe it for a minute.

Here’s what I think two of the biggest problems are:

Eye-to-eye contact

Have you ever spoken over the phone to someone who was in eyesight (in the same room, across the hall, sitting next to you on a park bench)?

Do you find it feels unnatural to actually look at each other?

It’s not natural for us to make eye contact when we’re on the phone, so even when we can make eye contact, we cannot.

With a videophone, however, we’re expected to make eye contact. That’s what it’s for, right?

Unfortunately, the focal point of the screen is not the focal point of the camera, and it is therefore impossible to both look at the person you are talking to, and see them as well. You either look at the screen, or the camera. This makes for a very unnatural conversation, because if you are looking at my face on your screen, your camera will capture you looking down, not at me. If you look at your camera, then I will see you looking at me, but you will not be able to see my face, because your eyes will not be on your screen.

Either scenario makes for a totally unnatural conversation, which leaves eye-to-eye videophones interesting to play with, but useless to really communicate with.

Anonymity and privacy

On the telephone, I can have an important business conversation in my underwear (or worse). If I do this with video, I’m into a whole new business ;-)

So, my conclusions go something like this:

1) Videoconferencing will never really takeoff until a videophone can be built where the focal point of the screen and camera are the same. When I look you in the eye, you’d better see me looking you in the eye. Perhaps something like the TelePromptR used in the broadcasting industry would work, or a tiny pinhole camera in the middle of the screen.

2) On some level, video will never completely replace the phone. People value their communications, but also their privacy.

Do you use video (such as a webcam) to communicate? In business? In the home? In your underwear?

Related link: http://www.ahanix.com/ahanix_product.asp?pid=26

Like many who care about their fair-use rights (not to mention the right to use the bathroom on my own schedule), I’m building a MythTV box in my (ha, ha) copious free time. Last month, I ordered the pcHDTV cards so I could get them ahead of the July 1 deadline. Yesterday, I decided to buy the parts for the rest of the system. After spending a lot of time checking out cases, I decided to go with an Ahanix MCE301, which is by far the best looking case available in the “mortals can afford this” price class. After placing orders for all the other equipment, I noticed that the Ahanix case only supports low-profile PCI cards. Many cards are available in a short form factor to fit in a low profile case, but not the pcHDTV cards. With regret, I cancelled all my orders and went back to the drawing board for a new set of equipment, and to find a new case that won’t look quite as good.

Oh, well. If I move to a distributed system in the future, I might still get use the MCE301 as an enclosure for a front-end box.

While wireless Internet access is becoming a standard feature on cellular phones and PDAs, few cellular networks provide true broadband access. Most websites, optimized for fixed-line users, have become bloated with graphics and scripts. How can you trim the fat off these websites so they’ll load quickly on your Treo?

Most websites have been optimized for viewing on desktop PCs with relatively fast Internet connections. However, a typical cellular Internet connection operates a speeds comparable to older dial-up connections, typically with substantial variability from moment to moment. Unless you’re paying extra for 3G service, such as Verizon’s EVDO, you’ll be lucky to see real-world download speeds greater than 100kbps.

Fortunately, most of the heft in today’s websites is superfluous, and actually gets in the way when viewing a site on a wireless device. Chances are that you’re primarily viewing text information, such as news, weather, email, and so forth.

Lo-Band

I recently discovered Lo Band (www.loband.org). This service strips graphics, scripts and other fat out of webpages, and delivers just basic HTML text and hyperlinks. While it was originally designed to optimize page delivery to developing countries where broadband is a rarity, it works equally well for wireless users.

Markup

If you’re interested in rolling your own solution, check out Mark Up. Markup translates HTML into easily readable, editable text. While the goal of Markup was to make it easier to hand-code HTML pages, it serves equally well as a way of stripping the fat out of web pages for display on text oriented devices. Aaron Schwartz has a Python library (HTML2TEXT) that you can use to build your own web-to-wireless gateway scripts.

Know of other tools that make it easy to view websites on cellphones, PDAs and other handheld devices? Post your comments here…

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2005/01/01/authentication.html

This past week, I’ve been at the Interop Labs hot stage in Belmont, California. For a week, we get together to built the set of demonstrations that will appear in the iLabs booth on the Interop show floor. This year, I’m working with the Full Spectrum Security technology initiative, which has been a good way to indulge my interest in authentication systems.

Networks that are confined to a relatively small geographic area and under homogenous administration are fairly easy to build. The challenge comes when you have multiple political divisions and wide geographic scale. Universities are tackling the problem largely because departments are distinct political entities, though some state-wide systems may also need to deal with large geographic scales. I’ve also worked with quite a few multi-national companies that have grown through acquisition, and have not yet stitched together disparate IT systems.

The iLabs team is using the authentication system we built for the show to run a few experiments that are relevant to federated environments. One experiment is to assess the interoperability of different RADIUS servers in a proxy environment, and to determine how well new security services function in a proxy environment. The next step is to take the demonstration to the show floor at Interop in a month. We will be attaching the iLabs authentication system to Eduroam to see how well authentication works when sent through multiple levels of proxy. A test account will be set up at the University of Oslo in Norway. We will connect directly to Norway and assess the user experience. Eduroam is being extended to the United States, and we also plan to connect the iLabs to the United States root server at the University of Utah.

One of the coolest things about open-source telephony, I am finding, is the sense of community it is fostering between Network/IT geeks and telecom gurus.

Traditionally, these two groups have trouble getting along. The geeks can’t understand why the phone guys are so inflexible (it’s not their fault, honest), and the telecom gurus don’t get where the geeks are coming up with all these ideas about customization, database integration, standards-compliance, scripting and openness.

Now, there’s a product they both can love.

I hear many stories about IT and telecom departments–historically at odds with each other–gathered shoulder-to-shoulder around this open-source PBX called Asterisk.

I’m certain that this is culturally significant.

Have you had similar experiences with Asterisk?

Directory assistance is a billion dollar industry. The typical mobile phone user calls 411 a few times per year. Doesn’t sound like much, but multiply $1.25 by hundreds of millions of calls per year and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Why is directory assistance so expensive? (on a per minute basis, it’s more costly than phone sex). Because the cellular phone companies have determined that $1.00 to $1.50 per call is what the market will bear. They know that most people don’t read their phone bills that closely, and that a few dollars here or there won’t be missed.

Fortunately there are three ways you can reduce your directory assistance fees.

Use SMS instead

Google offers an SMS search service that is tuned to return phone numbers and addresses. You can also use it to find movie showtimes, weather, stock quotes and product prices.

To use it, send a text message formatted as follows to 46645:

[business name] [city] [state]

See Google’s SMS Site (sms.google.com) for more information.

COST: the usual cost to send an SMS, typically about 10 to 15 cents, free if you have SMS messaging bundled in your cellphone rate plan.

I use this method almost exclusively. SMS is especially useful because the information is persistent. No need to jot a number down or try to remember it as an operator reads it to me.

Use co-workers (great for driving directions)

Pretty much anybody in an office has access to the same information as a directory assistance operator, and they probably know a lot more about the local environs than an operator in the Phillipines does.

An obvious money saving trick is to call co-workers when you’re in a bind and need directions somewhere. The downside.. this can be annoying, and your co-workers may not always be around.

COST: nada, but don’t abuse the privilege.

Use a third-party information service

Several companies provide directory assistance independently of the telephone companies. They provide essentially the same service as 411, but because they cut the cellular company out of the loop, they can do so for 30-40% less per call. One company, Infone (www.infone.com), offers directory assistance, driving directions and other services for 89 cents per call.