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It has finally happened and I couldn't be happier. When I first got my iPhone I couldn't wait for the time when I could make extension to extension VOIP calls via my iPhone. The iPhone has wifi access. All it needed was someone to put some SIP software on the phone and, combined with Junction Networks OnSIP hosted PBX, it would be ready to go.

That time has come. Over the weekend I downloaded fring and after just a little tweaking I got it to work. The device registered to Junction Networks and my first call was to extension 7008: Tim in Chicago. All I had to do was bring up the 'dialer' in fring and dial 7008 and hit the 'SIP' button and it dialed Tim's extension. Tim only saw a call from me, ext. 7001. As far as he knew I was at my desk. In reality I was 30 feet away on my iPhone speaking to him over the iPhone's wifi connection. Next, I told Tim to hang up and call me right back. He dialed extension 7001 and fring notified me on my iPhone that I had an inbound call.

The calls sounded great. There was no echo and no delay. No question the call was better than a normal cell-phone phone call. I shared my story with fring and received the following response from fring co-founder and Chief Technology Architect Boaz Zilberman “fring prides itself on being a best-of-breed mobile Internet communications and community application, offering its users the ability to talk, chat and interact with fellow fringsters and all their online buddies using their mobile Internet connection. Partnerships with forward-thinking companies such as Junction Networks offer a new level of openness and connectivity and provide a glimpse of the future in which mobile Internet and traditional telecoms converge to provide as rich and flexible a user experience as possible.”

The best part is that extension to extension calls are FREE. Junction Networks never charges for extension to extension calls, and since fring calls use the wifi network and not the cellular network, it does not take up cellular minutes.

The fring dial pad interface does not have buttons for actions like 'Hold', 'Transfer' and 'Conference' so those features do not work in the fring interface. DTMF (touch tone) is disabled during a call. It would also be useful to be able to put SIP addresses into contacts and dial a contact's SIP address as opposed to being limited to dialing only numbers. Even with those restrictions, fring is a great start.

AT&T just announced that they are offering free wifi to all iPhone subscribers at any AT&T wifi hotspot. This includes Starbucks. Customers can locate Wi-Fi spots through AT&T's online tool or can locate a Starbucks using this tool.

With Junction Networks, since we allow our users to be registered on up to 10 different devices, this is a free addition to our service offering. There are no additional charges to add a device to the system. (Nor do we charge per user, so you could add a new user and setup the fring device as a user separate from your normal user as well.) All of our users can now setup their iPhone (or other mobile device) to act as their extension on their company PBX. No more 'forwarding calls to your cell phone'. Now, your cell phone IS your extension!

Press/Blogs
Andy Ambramson
TMC

Junction Networks is the opposite of the companies mentioned in this MarketWatch article. Not only are we not imploding, but just this week we hired two new employees. You can look forward to speaking with Eric P. as he starts on the sales/technical support phones next week. Steve is a developer who was hired to help further increase the functionality of our product.

Since we are not VC funded, we are not living in fear that our VC will either pull their funding or not help us 'get to the next level.' Secondly, we are cash flow positive today and plan to stay that way. We did not start Junction Networks nearly five years ago to 'get rich quick' in any sort of dot.com or Internet 2.0 bubble. Our goal was to provide a real service with real value to real customers. We continue to strive to accomplish that every day. To our customers and staff who have helped to get us there, thank you.

--Mike

I agree with the article at "ZD Net about the current Money Crisis being good for Open Source. Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, stated that the current economic climate would cause more companies to consider open-source software as an option.

Whitehurst said that this was because open-source software provided a better economic model for creating software. We, at Junction Networks agree: OpenSource, in any economic climate, is a better economic model.

I've also seen it in my personal life. My daughter's friend was throwing out a PC because she couldn't upgrade it. My daughter, who did not have a personal computer, decided to pick it up to see if she could do something with it. She (with some help from me) put Debian on it and, aside from some WiFi issues,it is working great. I would think we'd see something similar in the work-place as well. Instead of upgrading the hardware and software, I would expect to see firms start to shun the bloatware and switch existing hardware to OpenSource alternatives to keep from having to make further capital expenditures. That's why we love OpenSource.

There is a great post over at Bradley Holt's blog about using Google Talk's XMPP service in conjunction with SIP from Junction Network's OnSIP Hosted PBX.

Here is my take on XMPP and SIP. XMPP is an XML-based open standard with, among other things, built-in protocols for subscribe and publish, e.g. subscribe to someone's presence information and publish your own presence. SIP, another open standard, is good for a bunch of rapid-fire, short messages back and forth. It's kind of like DNS on steroids. SIP is currently (and for the foreseeable future) the de facto standard for VOIP.

Internally we have been running an XMPP server for presence and instant messaging for a few months now at our domain: junctionnetworks.com. Additionally, using open XMPP servers like Google Talk, I can see the presence of my XMPP 'buddies' at other domains as well. If you are connected to an XMPP server, you can chat with me at mike-at-junctionnetworks.com. That address is my e-mail, SIP and XMPP address. That's what I call real unified communications. We are making these XMPP services available to all of our customers at either their current onsip.com domain or even (eventually) at their own domain. (This is something we offer today for SIP calling.)

XMPP and SIP are two great tastes that taste great together. We have written an SIP to XMPP gateway which allows us to gateway SIP information to an XMPP server. Once you have that, you can then receive instant messages and screen pops on inbound calls. Our current project is to wrap all of this up in an easy to use web-based interface for the end user. One interface will handle your presence, chats and phone calls. We'll be writing more about that in the coming weeks. The point is that we are excited to see our customers looking to use the same technology and standards that we are building toward. As always, we will keep with our corporate themes of no walled gardens, open source and open standards.

This morning I saw this excellent blog post by Garrett Smith which points out a few tips on making the transition to VoIP easier for SMB.

His main point is bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Although it seems obvious, adequate bandwidth is an absolute requirement for VoIP. VoIP is very sensitive to packet loss and latency, which results in quality of service issues (i.e., echo, dropped calls, etc.). Do all of your employees stream music while checking their e-mail and utilizing web applications? That's going to affect the quality of your phone calls if you don't have the bandwidth to be able to handle it.

Fortunately, in modern computing, bandwidth is one of the cheaper things that you can buy, so resolving this problem is potentially pretty easy. (Who remembers paying $1,500+/month for a 1.5 MB T1 a few years back? Good riddance to that!) But Smith's advice of doing a network analysis before buying into VoIP is super important - and easy to forget when you're excited about saving money and integrating your phone into your business life in a way that only IP telephony can do.

But it's not just the Internet bandwidth that matters - the speed of your LAN also counts. If you're using significantly older equipment, you may not have the throughput locally to handle additional traffic. If you have any equipment that is still 10baseT (and we've seen this), you probably already have speed issues with your existing data connections. Adding VoIP will be a disaster.

But there's good news here too - if you've built or upgraded your network in the last 5-8 years, it's pretty unlikely that that you're going to run into that problem. If you've signed your contract with your ISP within the last 5 years or so, you probably also have adequate bandwidth. But it certainly never hurts to get some numbers into your hand before you make the leap and add your telephony traffic to your data connection.

VoIP is excellent in many regards - but like any technology, it must be implemented correctly.

When we heard about an Open Source router at Junction Networks, we were naturally very intrigued. We love the Open Source movement and have invested heavily in it, so being able to recommend an open source router would have made us very happy.

Alas, we cannot. At least not an out-of-the-box Netgear WRG614L, which is the router touted on myopenrouter.com. We have a historic problem with Netgear routers in that they implement an ALG for SIP that cannot be turned off. (What's an ALG? Read about it here.) Unfortunately, out of the box, the WRG614L continues to have this problem, so it will not work successfully with the OnSIP Hosted PBX. We chose to test the Netgear of all the open source routers because we'd hope this had been fixed.

However, being open source, it's entirely possible for someone to change the WRG614L so that the SIP ALG can be turned off. Have you done it? We'd love to hear about it.

The Wall Street Journal has published an article today about the growth of VoIP in Africa. Research and Markets has a full study available for purchase, but the Wall Street Journal reported some highlights.

Most significantly, the growth of VoIP is stunning, with the study reporting over 100% growth in VoIP usage per year. VoIP makes a lot of sense in Africa, where affordable long distance telephony is a problem and much of the existing infrastructure is government owned and regulated. To wit, VoIP is illegal in 36 African countries, because it is driving down the prices for traditional phone calls over the existing PSTN. There are VoIP providers that operate completely illegally, which says a lot for the demand. The Global Technology Forum has an article detailing which countries had legalized VoIP as of March 2007.

Can VoIP change the world? It certainly seems so.

I'm afraid this post has nothing at all to do with VoIP. However, like the rest of the world, Junction Networks is deep in the grip of iPhone mania.

Yesterday, the Engineering department had a physical engineering problem to solve. We ordered a white board to put up in our conference room. We needed to put the white board on the wall. And, of course, we're unapologetic geeks, which means we're chronically unprepared for dealing with such mundane real world challenges.

We didn't have a tape measure. Or a hammer. But we did have several willing bodies and two iPhones with the Dual Level program, which uses the tilt functionality of the iPhone to tell you if your iPhone is level. So we stuck the iPhones in the tray of the white board and lifted it up. We made marks on the wall. We got a screwdriver and pounded some nails into the wall with the blunt end. Our white board is now being frantically scribbled on, which is a much more comfortable endeavor when it's on the wall and not sitting on the floor.

O iPhone, you are a simply brilliant device. Your possibilities seem endless.

As for my personal use, the only thing that I haven't been able to find is a Tasks program that rivals the task management on Palm OS or an Outlook/Blackberry solution. I, along with lots of other netizens who have posted about their frustration, would just love an app that synced with Apple's Mail and Calendar Tasks. Recurrence is a big missing feature in the many task programs that are out there.

But it's hard to actually want to look at things in a To Do list when there are so many other things the iPhone can do. I've been reading books with Stanza, playing games that I haven't seen since childhood, updating the social networking sites I'm involved in (which I rarely logged into before, but now update almost daily since I can do it while waiting for my train), giggling at the portable LOLcats and using aSleep as a white noise generator and meditation aid. I've spent about $10 in the App Store since I started using it, which feels like a steal for all the extra functionality I've added. And this is all in a device that's also a MP3 player and a phone.

The sheer creativity of the apps in the App Store have been really inspiring - I certainly never thought I'd be using a phone as an accurate level. I can't wait to see what else people think up to turn my phone into the best Swiss Army knife I've ever owned.

Although Cisco makes a nice line of phones, we don't recommend them for our customers because Cisco does not plan to continue to support SIP on them. They will continue developing SIP support on their Linksys branded phones, which we've tested out and really like.

However, as a courtesy for customers who already have Cisco phones, we published a Knowledge Base article on how to get them set up and configured for our OnSIP Hosted PBX, which you can find here.

Note: We were wrong. Cisco will continue to develop SIP for their Cisco line of phones. However, the Linksys phones are easier to configure and manage, so we still recommend avoiding the Cisco line if you have not already purchased your phones.

Junction Networks is a huge proponent of Opensource in general and OpenSource VOIP in particular. Recently I found an amazing resource for understanding the Opensource VOIP universe. I'd like to share it with everyone:

http://www.voipnow.org/2007/04/74_open_source_.html