IPCortex Multi-tenant IP-PBX

I recently spent some time with the guys @ IPCortex in their offices in Bletchley's famous war time Bletchley park.

I've been searching for sometime for an Asterisk project that copes with Multi-tenancy in a clean and elegant way. The historic approach I had taken relies on hand crafted DialPlans and custom contexts for each tenant. Whilst this all works fine - the manual overhead was proving to be a pain.

There are two applications of this type of multi-tenancy IP-PBX:

1. Shared Office spaces, where a company sub-lets its office space and provides telecom services to their tenants and of course separate billing.
2. Hosted IP-PBX solutions where each tenant not only has overlapping extension number ranges, but also would like to manage their own service and clean way. This so far I have managed through the standard Asterisk front-ends such as FreePBX and VMWare for each tenant - which kind of works but is quite wastefull on resources (mainly separate IP addresses for each VM mainly).

The IPCortex solution to multi-tenancy and the general concept of the GUI are more intuative that the traditional approach of mapping phones to extensions. Per extension billing per tenant is also made simple with the ability to set rate cards for destinations.

IPCortex introduce the concept of a user, the user is the link between extensions and phones. This simple abstraction is what makes the IPCortex IP-PBX unique from a GUI and usability perspective.

The next magic is the addition of a per user web-based presence application - think Flash Operator Panel (FOP) on steroids and per user.

Finally auto provisioning of extensions across a wide range of IP-Phone manufactures: Cisco/Linksys, Snom, Polycom, Aastra and Yealink.

I'll be posting more about how the IP-PBX can be used in ways a traditional PIAF/Trixbox/AsteriskNOW/FreePBX solution can't.

Latest Official Warp firmware

Hurray the latest warp firmware also now includes FreePBX 2.7 and the GSM card drivers.

http://outgoingftp.pikatech.com/appliance/2.2/images_2.2.1.1.tgz

tar zxvf the file, copy the contents over to you clean 2G SD card (formatted to FAT32), place the SD card in your powered down warp, power up, make and drink a coffee.

Now you have a nice new clean warp with the latest and greatest.

Pop in you GSM SIM (no need to power cycle). On the Asterisk command line type gsm show status and you should see your mobile operator connection listed.

Good to Go!

PIKA Warp GSM Beta - finally built and integrated!

OK so Easter arrived and I managed to get both a Holiday and catch up on the installation of the GSM card in the Warp.

Since its a beta I kinda expected a little more work than usual, so I started with a clean build of my warp using the SD build (url here) to make sure all the basics worked.

Following the instructions from the Beta user guide you have to load the new firmware directly into the flash, for this the best approach is to make sure you have the serial cable that came with the warp. "Ah - now where did I put that ribbon cable - I know I put it in a safe place?"

OK - found it... Here's the picture of the Warp with the Serial Ribbon cable and the GSM card installed.

I use Putty as my favourite tool for ssh and serial connections - you can just about make out the putty terminal open on my Tosh Netbook screen. The observant reader might also spot the FXS card I have installed too.

The instructions suggest using the warploader to write the u-boot and fpga files to the flash memory. I went with the upload everything from ftp server route. So I put all the files from the pikatech site (freepbx version) to the root of the ftp server directory on my laptop. My favourite tftp/bootp/dhcp/sntp/ server is the tftpd32 (http://tftpd32.jounin.net/) program, I've found this to be the most reliable program to use across a large range of devices (Snom, Cisco/Linksys, Netgear, Aastra, Polycom, AudioCodes ....).

After uploading the firmware, boot files and persistent memory I reboot the Warp. Alas it failed to boot - phew - good job I found that ribbon cable - Checksum error on the boot loader. Over to the Warp wiki to find out why/what to do now.. 

Turn's out I missed a step:

setenv load_nand_kernel nand read.jffs2 0x02000000 0x00000000 0x00200000

This was in the user guide - but the user guide doesn't explain why you have to do it. That done, and I was off - around 20 - 30 mins later, I had a working system - well at least it was booting and I could add a GSM trunk.

OK so why after I installed the Pre-payed Vodafone SIM - couldn't I get it to recognise the Vodafone network? I restarted Asterisk (amportal restart) naada! OK so here goes a power cycle.......

That did the trick:
warp*CLI>
Port    Status          InUse   Provider        Home Zone       Signal Quality

1 (0)   REGISTERED      n       "vodafone"      y               -81dbm

Now to make a call... Hurray! I'm done. Hmm The latency on that call seemed loooooong.... 

OK using SJ-Phone under Windows 7 - with the embedded mike on my laptop - really bad one way latency on the voice. Time to fire up a hardware phone - Aastra 55i is nearby. Set that up as an extension - made the same call to my mobile - Ah much better.

More things to do than I have the time

The PIKA GSM card for my Warp arrived and this weekend I will get the chance to install and starting checking it out - got the PrePaid SIM to pop in there....


My CCA system is now patched to FP3, not yet managed to install the Sangoma/Paraxip dialer - if only I had more time...

I have at least started to reverse engineer the CCA web services interface using Wireshark and some hacked together PHP code. I can create a session, log an agent in and receive events from the the Web Server now. I just need to put a wrapper around the PHP to create some decent objects - then write some Javascript/AJAX calls to make a toolbar for incorporating in other web pages, thus eliminating the download of the CCA Java Desktop Interaction Manager. Then I can concentrate on some of the supervisor statistics and throw in some MemCache there to inprove the performance.....

Never a dull moment at the Aeonvista ranch.

I have just managed through the "day job" to get access to Cisco's new small business range of Access devices the SRP500 range looks pretty good the SRP527W - hot of the production line has WiFi (n), FXO/FXS and 4 port Ethernet Switch, ADSL 2+ Annex A, USB for 3G dongle and TR-069 capability - looks like a winner.

I've also just purchased a nice shiny new Fritz!Box WLAN 7270, and it has all of the above like the Cisco with added IP-PBX features.

Now just to get my OpenACS to talk to them both.

Hold the "mobile" phone - GSM HD Voice

In a previous post I was speculating/questioning who would be the first to launch HD Voice for mobile - Looks like (in the UK at least) that Orange have risen up....

http://www.telecoms.com/17212/orange-uk-to-launch-hd-voice

Happy Christmas and New Year

So Christmas is upon us and another year has rushed by. What's new for the New Year?

Well hopefully some more updates to the Blog. My PIKA Warp needs an update and the GSM cards are out so need to get a play in the lab with those.

Some new exciting products with Virtus-IT on the horizon, and Cloud Computing VoIP QoE solution to work on.

My Oracle CCA instance needs patching to 8.1.3 FP2, there a new cool Dialer functionality built in from the guys using the Sangoma/Paraxip Netborder Call Analyser, can't wait to get that working. I've got the trial version of the dialer downloaded from the helpful guys at Sangoma - thank Doug V! I've also been have a little tinker with the CTI integration using some PHP scripting to grab the Parameters passed by CCA in a screen Pop -works just sweet - now to have a play with the Webservice API - wow-er not so sweet!

Happy Holidays!

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.