Sony Ericsson X10 gripes!

Finally got Android 2.1 update1 on my Sony Ericsson X10 - I was expecting great things - but have been hugely disapointed. Startup time is worse than 1.6, I got those anoying Vodafone shop icons on the home screen.

Touch screen responsiveness also still really bad - possibly even worse than before. Looks like I'm gonna be looking at an HTC device next time.

BT Infinity - More isn't necessarily more....

Another one of those moments - It just struck me when flicking through my inbox, BT is is rolling out Fibre to the Kerb across the UK, with slated speeds of 40Mbps down and upto 10Mbps up.

I had a good google around and couldn't find a clear indication of the contention ratio (down or up), or if there is QoS provision for example to offer Voice (over IP) services - interestingly the BT product includes a home hub, with internet voice, so I expect their to be QoS there.

VDSL based, so BT provide a VDSL modem with their service, and over WBC so other ISPs can wholesale provide the service.

Lets see how it works out. ... Alas I'm not on an enabled exchange - so I'm not going to find out for a while yet.

CIsco Dial-Peers and VAD - watchout for this one!

I've been using Cisco Gateways (2800s) for an Oracle Contact Centre PSTN connection. The agents started complaining of poor voice quality and clipping and missing words.

Silence suppression, I thought. But looking over the configuration (snippet below):

!
voice-port 0/0/0:15
 no vad
!
!
dial-peer voice 100 voip
 destination-pattern .T
 voice-class codec 1
 session protocol sipv2
 session target ipv4:172.16.0.220
 session transport udp
 dtmf-relay rtp-nte
 no vad
! 

All looked well with the world - VAD was turned off. ........... Well actually NO. I found out last night about the dreaded hidden default dial-peer which is used to match when other dial-peers don't - and guess what - this hidden, default dial-peer has vad enabled by default. The default dial-peer was being selected when Agent call legs and a outbound calls were being made from the IP side to the PSTN trunk.

 incoming called-number .

Added to the voip dial-peer above fixes this problem by catching all the VoIP to PSTN dialled numbers in the "." - Job done. Watch out for this little gem...

I also discovered that the CIsco 2811 operating as a PSTN gateway with VAD enabled stops sending RTP packets when I muted my handset, i.e. no RTP packets during silence. Now cool this saves bandwidth - but SUCKS!!! What's a dynamic (de-)jitter buffer going to make of that? Not to mention a NAT firewall?

The greening of telephony

I was having a slow weekend and had one of those contemplative moments.

Since the introduction of VoIP handset and the imminent rollout of Video Handsets, we must now be consuming more power to deliver telephone calls to every desk?

Is the amount of power consumed by a traditional TDM switch and analogue handsets less than the VoIP Equivalent? Thinking about the average power rating of a server used to provide an IP-PBX, plus the power consumed by media gateways then add the power to power the phones an the power required for the PoE switch (not including the phones), even with Moore's law driving down the power required for sufficient CPU to drive the IP-PBX this surely is more than the old TDM equivalent??

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This time with a FreedomPro Bluetooth Keyboard

Having struggled to use the touch screen keyboard to write the last post to the blog,I‘ve invested in a Bluetooth folding keyboard. Reading the various reviews the freedom pro seemed the most reliable for working with multiple OS, including Android. I looked at the appstore for Bluetooth drivers too, but discovered that the support website for the freedom pro keyboard has beta drivers for Android, and here we go, a post from my Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 sitting at the coffee table in the longe.

What a lot easier to work on than the touch screen. And even better I managed to pair the keyboard with my “old“ Nokia 5800, I always hated the touch experience on that device too.

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Android Sony Ericsson X10

This post comes from my new X10 handset. I toyed with the idea of the iPhone4 but came down on thrle linux OS phone.

I was seriously disappointed by the Nokia 5800. it crashed regularly and touch screen was not very responsive.

Maybe its my fat fingers but screen based keyboards are a real pain... time to find a bluetooth keyboard

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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.