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Posted
16 days
ago
Expert Q&A Faxing Edition Don’t forget to join us at our next Q&A on Provisioning. Here’s the link: http://2600hzqa3.eventbrite.com/ We wrapped up an excellent Q&A this morning on the subject of faxing. Yes, the Darth Vader of VoIP
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has been slain. We broke down a ton of helpful information in our attached powerpoint and hopefully we were able to debunk a lot of myths.
If you missed the event, here are some great quotes:
Silence is the signaling protocol for Faxing
-Darren Schreiber, CEO, 2600hz
Fax machines were designed to deal with noise, not dropouts. IP is designed to deal with dropouts but not noise. The secret to doing faxing at scale is finding the happy medium.
-Joshua Goldbard, VP of Marketing, 2600hz
We also had some great “Pro Tips” for folks doing faxing at scale:
Turn up the Jitter Buffer
Turn off the adaptive buffer (Variable timing is death for faxing)
Turn off Echo Cancellation (Remember silence is the delimiter)
Reduce Confounding Factors (If it doesn’t help, eliminate it so it can’t break later)
Finally, one piece of the discussion I wanted to pull out was the talk on codec negotiation. Some carriers will ask folks to start calls as G729 and then change to T.38 midway through the call. The reason a carrier does this is because running calls over expensive gear is expensive. Ideally, a carrier will only run the calls that require expensive gear over the expensive gear and everything else should run over the cheap gear, but the one of the major features of the expensive gear is T.38 tolerance. What this means is that you have to first send a signal to your carrier to get onto the expensive switch (starting the call in G729) and then convert the call to T.38 afterwards.
THE REASON CALLS WITH NAKED T.38 FAIL is because many carriers are not setup to route T.38 media unless you tell them it goes on the expensive gear. Therefore, you have to signal G729 first to get on the expensive gear before you can begin a fax transmission. This is a huge pain, but it exists to lower the costs of carrier operations.
Last note: Asterisk and Freeswitch both use spandsp so if someone tells you it works better on one platform over the other, they’re probably commenting about the network and not the switch
Don’t forget our provisioning Q&A, two fridays from today. Here’s the link:
http://2600hzqa3.eventbrite.com/
Thanks and see you soon!
Faxing Q and A from Joshua Goldbard [Less]
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Posted
23 days
ago
Visualizing a Cyber Attack on a VoIP server. Really cool visualization!
The best part is that the honeypot (the server setup by the security researchers) is not even broadcast to the public internet as a VoIP server. Imagine the scale of attacks advertised servers receive.
http://vimeo.com/19997906
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Posted
about 1 month
ago
2600hz Virtualization Expert Q&A Recap 2600hz hosted a panel this morning on Virtualization in Communications applications. The panel featured expert commentary on OS timing, Lost Ticks, Virtualized hardware demands and best practices in the
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Telecom industry. The panelists were:
Darren Schreiber, Co-Founder, 2600hz
Adam Kalsey, Product Manager, VoxeoLabs
Chris Spearman, Big Data Systems Architect, PSSC Labs
Here are some of the highlights from the event:
Virtualization for virtualization’s sake is not the right approach. We don’t build database without reason, and even though it’s sexy to do cloud infrastructure, there has to be a business case driving adoption.
-Joshua Goldbard, Moderator, 2600hz
We see degraded performance on virtual hosts operating near capacity. In our experience, running virtual hosts at 25-30% of capacity will allow them to perform at a similar level to physical boxes.
-Adam Kalsey, Panelist, VoxeoLabs
For 2600hz, virtualization is about control. It’s impossible for me to provision physical boxes at a remote datacenter via API or with sufficient urgency, but the elasticity of the cloud means response times are consequently lower. Virtualized infrastructure can be much more responsive.
-Darren Schreiber, Panelist, 2600hz
VIRTUALIZE ALL THE THINGS!!
-Chris Spearman, Panelist, PSSC Labs
Honestly, I think virtualization makes a lot of sense. I run virtualization on everything because of the backup and retention benefits. Recovering a physical box is not a trivial task, but virtualized instances are easy to maintain and restore.
-Chris Spearman, Panelist, PSSC Labs
We had a sprited talk about Virtualization and I hope everyone had a blast. We’ll be doing this again in two weeks at our next Expert Q&A on Faxing.
Join us here: http://2600hzqa2.eventbrite.com/
Thanks to our awesome panelists and I look forward to talking to all of our attendees in the future.
Thanks!!
-2600hz Training Team
Do you run a VoIP Company? Did you enjoy the training? We’d love to hear your feedback about the event! Email training@2600hz.com with your questions or comments. If you’re interested in speaking on an upcoming panel drop us a line! Once again just email training@2600hz.com and we’ll get you sorted. [Less]
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Posted
about 1 month
ago
Ivar walked into our office on February 22nd, 2012 and I’ll remember the meeting for a long time. I was sitting there with Patrick and Ivar was telling us about his plans and all of the different things he was going to enable. I have to admit I was
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skeptical, as many companies have tried to enter the space OnRelay plays in and most of them have failed miserably. Mobile phone communications is really hard and I think everyone has seen a company fail in the past. But then, Ivar took out his phone and showed me the product.
From that day on, I knew we were going to become partners and I’m tremendously happy to announce the introduction of the OnRelay Mobile Office Phone System, powered by 2600hz. Starting at $9.99 per user per month, OnRelay is offering a robust communications platform that’s truly mobile.
It’s an exciting time to work in communications and we’re honored to have been selected as one of OnRelay’s infrastructure partners. The Kazoo cloud infrastructure supports OnRelay’s business and provides the provisioning and communications technology that really reduced their time to market.
We look forward to watching OnRelay grow and we anticipate many great things from our partner. Keep an eye on this one, we think it’ll be one to watch in the coming years.
-Joshua Goldbard, VP of Marketing, 2600hz
PR: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/4/prweb10613423.htm [Less]
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Posted
about 1 month
ago
“Voice and Video are Dead. Here’s the future:” - We at 2600hz believe that the debate over voice and video has been going on for far too long. People have been dwelling in the past and are conditioned to believe that they
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have to use mediums like voice and video to communicate. Here at 2600hz we look towards the future. The time has come when desk phones, cell phones and Web RTC are no longer relevant. The time when people communicate how they were always supposed to is upon us and it is… TELEPATHY!
Telepathy (from the ancient Greek, tele meaning “distant” and pathe or patheia meaning “feeling, perception, passion, affliction, experience”) is the transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction.
2600hz has been putting in a lot of research into understanding how the brains can communicate via a direct connect. Some people call Telepathy the Bluetooth for your craniums and we couldn’t agree more. Our engineers have worked diligently to communicate with thoughts vs. words or gestures. We have made some huge strides with this technology and look forward to releasing it to the world. We call this project BrainRTC™.
We hope you join us on this adventure of truly revolutionizing communications. Welcome to 26000hz, the “Future of Cloud Telepathy!” [Less]
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Posted
2 months
ago
“Voice Isn’t Dying” - Voice isn’t Dying It seems like everywhere you look these days, someone is killing the voice network. ReadWriteWeb says “Microsoft’s Skype owns 1/3rd of a dying network” and Facebook has
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a mobile client that now does free phone calls, but all of these projects are missing the point. It is precisely this dogmatic approach to annihilating voice that assures the long life of telephony. How? Because the phone network has a few qualities that a company like Facebook will never offer.
One of the key features of the phone network is interoperability. If I pick up a phone in San Francisco and call a phone number in Zimbabwe, I know the phone in Zimbabwe will ring. I don’t care what equipment that network operator runs, we both don’t have to be logged into Facebook to connect, and I know that the call is routed over a secure connection that is regulated by the governments. Further, I know that the phone number will route because of the ubiquitous international directory we call the NANP (North American Numbering Plan) which most of the world has adopted, along with e164, both standards.
Let’s contrast this with any free voice application. In order to have free calls on a mobile phone, we both have to use the same app and the call is routed over the public internet with best-effort service. If the call drops, no one can be blamed, and if service is out, well, good luck. In fact, when we talk about the idea of interoperability, it is actually antithetical to Facebook’s business, and the business of most application-based telecom companies. What benefit does Facebook derive from interoperating with companies like Voxer? The answer is none and that’s why Voxer lost access to the Facebook API.
In reality, the phone network won’t die any time soon because of the ubiquitous address book we call phone numbers, the advantages of interoperability and because of the extremely low barrier to entry. While Facebook may have between 500M and 1B active users, the phone network is many times larger than that (with Cellular penetration exceeding 200% in places like Hong Kong). Facebook is massive, but the telephone network is more massive still.
So if Voice isn’t dying, what is changing?
A lot of folks argue Voice is dying, but when you get down to the nitty gritty, most of the time what they’re actually arguing is that copper is dying. This very well might be true, especially in light of AT&T attempting to have the FCC relinquish its requirement that AT&T maintain the copper networks in the US. If that happens, the only copper networks that will remain active are those that are profitable, which is certainly not ubiquitous connectivity.
At the same time, we perceive fewer folks to be using voice as alternative non-synchronous methods of communication become more common place (SMS, email, etc.). That being said, Synchronous methods of communication, like Phone calls, will continue to exist so long as time sensitive activities are necessary. The market is changing, migrating away from copper, but voice is hardly dying. In fact, part of the perception of lower voice usage comes from the fact that IP communications are much harder to measure, due to the nature of IP.
Essentially, companies like Skype and Facebook and all of the other upstarts won’t kill Voice because Voice is a necessary evil. And, let’s be honest, just because the last mile of the connection is turning into wireless doesn’t mean all that core switching infrastructure is suddenly useless. In fact, quite the contrary; that core switching infrastructure becomes many times more important as the quantity of data, and the stochasticity, increases.
No, Voice isn’t dying; it is evolving.
If talking about Voice Networks and the evolving communications needs of society gets you hot under the collar, we’re hiring! Looking for Senior engineers and Sales folks to help scale out 2600hz, the Cloud telecom company. We’re building amazing Open-Source Telecom infrastructure and changing the world, one call at a time. Join us today!! [Less]
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Posted
4 months
ago
2013 is just getting started and so is 2600hz! We’re proud to announce that we’re the recipients of the Communications Technology ‘Innovator Award’ at DeveloperWeek! We’re also giving away 5 passes to DeveloperWeek starting in
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February! Here’s how you can win a free conference pass ($120 value):
TO WIN: Tweet a message with the hash tag #dev2600 and tell us how Technology makes your life better. We’ll pick the top 5 messages and send passes to Developer week!! [Less]
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Posted
4 months
ago
“Kazoo and International Numbers: How to play nice with E.164” - This post comes courtesy of one of our Open-Source community users: Kiste. Check out the article on his site here. How to play nice with E.164 in
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Kazoo
This post is based on the docs one can find under kazoo API, To add some numbers via the API and curl:
1) Generate an X-auth-token
curl -X PUT http://YOURURL:8000/v1/api_auth -d ‘{ “data” : { “api_key” : “YOUR_API_KEY_HERE” }}’
(You can find the api-key in your couchdb => accounts)
This will give something like : “auth_token”:”555555c8d6f213098729999999999999″
2) Let’s have a look which numbers are already assigned to the account
curl -X GET http://YOURURL:8000/v1/accounts/YOURACCOUNTID/phone_numbers
-H “X-auth-token:555555c8d6f213098729999999999999″
3) Let’s add a number to an account
curl -X PUT http://YOURURL:8000/v1/accounts/YOURACCOUNTID/phone_numbers/43112345678
-H “X-auth-token:555555c8d6f213098729999999999999″
4) Let’s activate the number
curl -X PUT http://YOURURL:8000/v1/accounts/YOURACCOUNTID/phone_numbers/43112345678/activate
-H “X-auth-token:555555c8d6f213098729999999999999″
That’s it! We’ve successfully added an International Number to Kazoo. If you’re still having trouble, see below.
Security Protip: Never post your Auth Token online or any secure information.
If one will gets the error:
“wh_number_manager:349 () create number prematurely ended: not_reconcilable”
When one tries to add an international number one needs to change inside the doc of the system_config => number_manager into something like:
from
“reconcile_regex”: “^\+?1?\d{10}$”
to
“reconcile_regex”: “^((\+49)?[2-9]{2,5}[1-9][0-9]{5,10})$”,
This will allow Full E.164 numbering into Kazoo. [Less]
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Posted
5 months
ago
Cisco Phones are completely compromised. More details soon. Check out the video above for the full presentation; if you don’t have an hour, check our blog next week for a piece on exactly what’s happening here.
Bottom line: Cisco Phones are eavesdropping devices and can be pwned remotely.
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Posted
5 months
ago
This is what Disaster Recovery looks like for the folks on the ground after Sandy. This is a problem we can fix. Disasters don’t have to mean reverting to 100+ year old technology. We can do better and we will.
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