One of the most requested functionality prior to Asterisk 1.2 was shared line appearance.  It finally appeared in 1.2 but it’s take-up has been somewhat muted.  Part of the reason for this is that it uses conferencing and while it works as expected with Line appearance, you can’t use the transfer buttons on the phones.  In this article, Nik Middleton explores an alternative approach..

Click through to the full blog post if you want to find out how to deploy SLA on Asterisk PBX’s.

Sticking tens of SIP endpoints on your network should be a painless exercise. If you’ve planned your network properly then 100 Mb/s is more than adequate to carry the resulting VoIP traffic. But if you start talking about hundreds of endpoints instead of tens, whilst remaining with a single Asterisk PBX, then you may find that on a regular basis your network is briefly flooded with traffic (a ‘packet storm’). You may also discover that some endpoints are disconnecting from time to time. Why is this happening? You have enough bandwidth, but still you have problems.

Click through to the full blog post if you want to find out how to avoid a packet storm on Asterisk PBX’s.

Let’s face it, there’s some 400+  million registered Skype users out there, now I’m not going to start calling these Skype users from my Asterisk phone system, But…. Something I’ve always liked on websites was the “Skype me/Call me” button.  (yes it really does work)  A great way to drive up business.

Installation of the new channel driver was a snap, and litterally within minutes, inbound Skype calls were comming through to our Asterisk based office phone system.  The cost of this marvel?  $66 per channel.  Not too bad, if you figure that just one sale will probably cover the cost.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the VoIP market, or Google, or Apple/iPhone, then you have almost certainly seen the kerfuffle over the release of a Google Voice iPhone app and it’s subsequent removal from the iPhone AppStore. If not then the web is full of this week’s hot story, and a quick seach will find you more than you ever want to know.

I have no intention of adding to the mountain of opinion already out there on this particular story. My interest, though, has been piqued by the almost universal assumption in every article that Google Voice is a groundbreaking new service. I must mention one of the people I follow on twitter, @GarrettSmith, as a notable exception to this view. To quote a recent, pithy, tweet of his

I can’t believe Google Voice is a trending topic. It’s a virtual number service…

Quite right, Garrett. It’s a virtual number service that has two things going for it:

1. It’s Google’s service…so you can be pretty sure it’s going to be around a while.
2. It’s free.

The much lauded features of Google Voice are available elsewhere (Ureach springs to mind), albeit at a price as no-one else has the cash in the bank to offer a free service from scratch. Alternatively, using a provider like Voiptalk, a kludgier and more manual version of GV can be implemented for the cost of a phone number. And if you already have an Asterisk server, then you can do everything GV can do, and more.

Will it succeed? To be honest, it already seems to be doing quite well in it’s US-only stage. Expanding beyond that, particularly into Europe, will raise interesting questions about such topics as the storage of data (i.e.voicemail) outside the EU. Something that Spinvox has fallen foul of recently.

GV also fills out the Google communications offering, and will no doubt integrate more and more with the other aspects incluing Google Apps, of which I am a big fan. I just wish that everyone didn’t buy into the hype quite so much.