Gold medal VoIP savings
We elite athletes in the Savings Olympics know that gold medals are
not won purely by individual ability. Success requires the sustained
efforts of a team of dedicated experts and supporters.
That's particularly true for the David and Goliath event of our
Olympiad, which pits competitors against the might of
telecommunications giants like Telstra. We've won silver and bronze
medals in this event with the deployment of a Linksys SPA3102 analogue
telephone adapter, which we wrote about last year, and with a basic
installation of an Asterisk open source PBX solution at the Bleeding
Edge cave a few months ago.
But to have a chance at gold, we knew we'd have to install an Asterisk
system in the spouse's business, which handles many more calls on
several extensions and requires sophisticated facilities like
interactive voice response.
In the establishment phase of the business, we'd used a hosted PBX
plan offered by Melbourne-based Mytel, which is essentially an Asterisk
service hosted in a data centre. For a $49 set-up fee, and $12.95 per
month per extension, it allowed us to make cheaper VoIP calls over the
internet, with voice, mail, IVR and other facilities that are normally
available only to larger companies with much bigger budgets.
Our arrangements allowed us to trim our office and home phone bills
from $359 per month in mid-2007 to less than a third of that, despite a
dramatic increase in the number of calls. But while mobile calls over
Mytel are considerably cheaper than Telstra's rates, they were becoming
an ever-larger component of the bill.
As the business grew, we would also have to introduce some more
handsets. At $12.95 per month apiece, we knew it was time to have our
own Asterisk box on-site, despite the hardware costs and the prospect
of having to provide our own tech support if something went wrong. Even
with our reduced call costs, the savings would pay for the equipment in
less than a year, and it would be easier to add features like call
filtering and call monitoring.
For that we'd have to have an expert team that could navigate a system
that is beyond the capabilities of even quite experienced computer
users. We could have paid a couple of thousand dollars to a
professional team to do the job, but fortunately the world of Asterisk
seems to attract enthusiasts who are prepared to offer the benefit of
their experience, either for free, or for very competitive rates.
Our first indication of that was Ben Sharif, a retired systems analyst
who lives in Penrith, NSW, from where he has maintained an active
presence on the Whirlpool VoIP forum and more recently in elastixconnection.com.
A phone call to his home gives you an indication of the power of
Asterisk. The call is picked up by Asterisk's inbuilt IVR system. His
wife Rohani's recorded voice first informs the caller that they do not
accept calls from direct marketers or political parties, then allocates
numbers 1 to 5 to each member of the family. We pressed 1 for Ben.
If we'd called from a number without caller identification, we'd have
been met with another menu that requires identification and a brief
description of the purpose of the call. That gives the Sharifs the
option of rejecting the call, without the knowledge of the caller. The
IVR acts as an automated white lie generator, simply informing the
caller that "The party is not available". Somehow, we feel those
automatic counter measures should be available in every home, in an era
where companies are using advanced technology to pester prospective
customers.
Ben has entered the numbers of direct diallers into the Asterisk
filters, so the system automatically blocks a good proportion of
unwelcome callers.
He's written a series of free guides to Asterisk-based systems:
Trixbox Without Tears, Elastix without Tears and PiAF (PBX In A Flash)
Without Tears, which prospective Asterisk users can download as PDF
files. The detailed explanation contained in TrixBox 2 Without Tears
allowed us to get an understanding of the Asterisk distribution we
eventually decided on, and would have allowed us — albeit with a good
deal of tinkering — to put together our own box.
Fortunately, however, we had an even better source of assistance:
Nathan Pinskier, director of a company called Medi 7
(voip@medi7.com.au) which has five medical clinics in inner and
south-east Melbourne. The Asterisk servers rolled out by Nathan and his
19-year-old son Samuel — an aerospace engineering student who has
become an Asterisk expert — has trimmed the company's phone bill from
$5000 under Telstra in 2005, to around $2000, which includes the cost
of about 10 broadband services.
They guided us through the process of selecting all the components for
the PC that would run our Asterisk solution; pointed us towards a
couple of investments to avoid potential problems; helped up choose
handsets and VoIP providers and eventually packaged up the TrixBox
application. |
