Living and working in an always-on always-connected world

I recently (Jan) started a daily commute to Central London, from my Suburbian utopia of Henley On Thames, this involves around 45 minutes on the train and a further 45 minutes on the tube each way. The trip gives me a mixture of time to reflect on what the day holds and what the day has held...

This journey also involves the "catching-up" on emails from a number of different client personna from the various roles I perform for my customers. Mostly I spend this time reading through emails on my X10, but since having access to an Apple iPad, I have spent more of my time using this touch screen tablet computer, which combined with the bluetooth keyboard that I bought for my X10 is proving more and more that for a small business owner and having multiple customers and identities for these customers, being "Always-on", is proving both productive and compelling!

I have the time to read the books in the form of PDFs or write emails and keep in touch with friends and collegues. Social media in the form of: Facebook, linked-in, twitter and of course IM tools like Skype.

The conclusion from this is that being always connected helps me both professionally and personally when I could be in dead time travelling.

HD Voice taking off

I read this piece on VON with interest about Voxbone transcoding from G.722 to Sype's Silk codec, since a lot of IP phones are now shipping with G.722 codecs looks like we finally get to share in the HD voice revolution...

May be we'll start getting disappointed with GSM voice quality, it will be interesting to see as IMS networks are finally delivered over the next year or so with IP-Centrex service, if we'll see complaints for mobile call voice quality as people can more easily slide between their fixed office phones and mobile devices. Or will we see HD codecs creep into the mobile space as LTE kicks in. Who's gonna be the early carrier to adopt VoIP over HSPA QoS and wideband codecs, or are we gonna have to wait?

Or wait - "Hold the Phone" - Haven't we got VoIP enabled devices already with WiFi and yes - applications like Fring (I have to use fring 'cos my mobile operator broke the SIP stack on my Nokia 5800! - But actually Fring is pretty cool too! ;o)). Pitty Fring doesn't have HD voice codec yet.

Wowa Skype now offering SaaS Skype to SIP gateway

I just spotted this gem: Skype is adding SIP as a connectivity method for calls to the PBX, now a this is interesting as a number of SIP to IP-PBX implementation are already appearing outside of the "official" skype framework. In fact in previous posts I mentioned my SIP/Skype gateway I got running based on the VoiceGear Connect gateway, not to mention Skype's work already announced and in Beta with Digium for the Skype channel driver.

Let see what happens next, I guess the main advantage your own on Premise Skype gateway has is the advantage that the SIP trunk is local and under your control, whilst the Skype (encrypted) calls are passed through the perimeter, where as the Skype SaaS version just announced has to extend your SIP interface unsecured outside the enterprise.

Wowha what happened to the last 3 months?

So best laid plans and all.. I was going to spend sometime this new year building loads of cool VoIP and IM cost saving projects - but the day job kinda got in the way. So what's new and what's really been going on in my head around cost savings and VoIP for businesses in the economic downturn?

Well I have actually completed one project in my lab - A skype to SIP gateway is now up and running. Wey-hey! Actually really cool for quite a few reasons:

• My Asterisk PBX now talks Skype, so as a small business I'm now always online, well virtually anyway. My Aeonvista skype account can be connected to my PBX which customers, friends and family can now skype me for a VoIP call and my PBX can do all that clever find-me follow-me routing and even play and IVR message or leave a voicemail, which can be emailed to me anywhere.
• My Oracle Contact Centre Anywhere application can now call out and receive incoming calls from Skype, so I can do agent based routing and screen pop for calls coming in over skype.
• For Site to Site traffic I also have a cool NAT savy, encrypted, VoIP VPN.
• For travelling when I would have used my IAX softphone to get through those double NAT Hotel hotspots to phone home for free, I can now just use skype, call my family on the house phone without needing a PC at home turned on or them all crammed around the laptop.
• My OpenFire IM server which has and Asterisk plug - now has a Skype plug-in, without having a Skype plugin if you follow, at least for VoIP calls, no IM sessions. But its a start.

Been working closely with the CCA product for a couple of customers and been on a full time contract - so been a little strapped for time.

Also been tinkering around the edges of IPv6 on my Vyatta router. I now have a 16-bit subnet of IPv6 address space - Hmm not sure what I'm gonna do with that yet, but can at least play with some OSPF v3 and MP-BGP set-up to get my head around IPv6. Also I've not got the version 5 release of the Vyatta software to play with so lots more tinkering to do.

So the Office/Lab is in refurb mode, which was partly caused by a living room redecoration - I know but some how the living room refurb spread to the office. The good news is whilst the lab is down for a little while, I get to install one of these beauties from Kell Systems http://www.kellsystems.com, This means all my kit keeps cool and quiet.... That means the lab now really is a study which the family can use. Now for the wide screen Flat panel TV and AV set-up in there and we're getting there.

So at least one of the ideas for cost saving got off the ground - Skype to SIP gateway that seems to work pretty well and has some other side effects in my lab.

Finally my vision of a presence centre may well be realised

I've just been reading the announcement from Astricon from Skype and Digium on Fierce VoIP. I've been using Asterisk for sometime and even built an ISTP business on it and solutions such as Trixbox. And I have to admit to being a Skype user too, even with my own telco.

However back to the announcement - I can offer Skype presence to customers and even publish my "presence" state on my corporate website, that actually reflects the presence not of an individual, but of the ability to route a call from a web page through to my PBX, with it costing me a dime!




Here's my presence Icon, with the Asterisk/Skype Connector, this routes to my PBX, which can route this anywhere else including a Queue of customer support or sales representative.