charlotte's blog

Please be advised that Junction Networks will be performing a scheduled maintenance on Sunday, February 14th from 12:00 A.M. EST - 04:00 A.M. EST. During this period, there will be brief outages that will affect all services.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

The Junction Networks lab is pleased to announce that we have reviewed the Stromberg Carlson Candlestick and have added it to our list of certified phones. Our configuration guide can be found here.

All around, this phone is pleasurable to use and has a competitive price to other mid-range phones. It has a very authentic ringtone that makes it ideal for VIPs. Unfortunately, the phone is not able to store speed dials or integrate with contact lists as other SIP phones can do, but the retro clicking dialing experience makes manually dialing the number a small sacrifice. Additionally, the rotary dial does not have letters printed on it, which may be a small setback for some.

The major problem with the Stromberg Carlson Candlestick is that it cannot pass DTMF tones, which provides some difficulty for dialing conference bridges and auto-attendants. All other features that we would expect of a fully-fledged enterprise phone operate appropriately. We worked around the DTMF issue by a liberal use of the transfer functionality. There are also currently no published future plans for the Candlestick to support high definition telephony.

Sound quality of the Candlestick is surprisingly good if the user follows the phone's usage guidelines and surpasses the quality of some other SIP phones that we've reviewed. For proper usage, the user should maintain a 3" distance from the transmitter (the "stick") and rest the elbow of the arm holding up the earpiece on a desk to resist fatigue. Deviation from the 3" distance can result in the user sounding faint to the other party, but the quality is still better than a call on the cellular network.

It is difficult to imagine a more durable phone than those produced by Stromberg Carlson. The craftsmanship far surpasses any other phone or PBX that we've seen in our labs. The etching of the company name on the back of the transmitter shows a real dedication to quality by the manufacturer that was readily apparent. Our inner geek also appreciates Stromberg Carlson's insistence on using bakelite, the world's first synthetic plastic.

Stromberg Carlson really ups the voice hardware game and provides a true challenge to other manufacturers. We look forward to seeing what results from this competition.

This is not specific to VoIP, but it is nonetheless really cool. The Technology Review reports that a zero-emissions city is being built in Abu Dhabi, partially just to see if it can be done.

"The city--which will include apartments and laboratories, but also factories, movie theaters, cafés, schools, fire stations, and so on--is intended to generate as much electricity as it uses. Its water will be recycled to save the energy costs of desalination. Vacuum tubes under the city will transport garbage to a central location, where it will be sorted, and as much as possible will be recycled. Trash that can't be recycled will be converted to energy through a gasification process and the leftovers incorporated into building materials. Sewage will be treated and some of it processed into a dry renewable fuel for generating electricity. The transportation system will include a light-rail line linking the development to downtown Abu Dhabi and the airport, as well as a personal rapid-transit (PRT) system with stations throughout the city. The PRT, a system of automated electric vehicles, will connect people to the rail line or deliver them to parking garages outside the city."

One wonders what their phone systems will be. Since VoIP doesn't require separate wiring from the data network, there's already a green advantage there. It can even be argued that it reduces travel (and therefore carbon emissions), since your phone number can follow you and video conferencing is much simpler. The flexibility and capacity of VoIP PBXes compared to traditional PBXes make the answer seem obvious to us...but what will the designers of Masdar City decide? We can't wait to find out.

Okay, not really, but Tina Gasperson is claiming at LinuxPlanet (with her tongue firmly in cheek) that Open Source software saves the lives of cows, since it can be developed at home. You see, you'll buy fewer shoes.

But is open source really greener? Gasperson makes her most serious argument in that open source tends to be developed to require less in hardware resources, while proprietary software frequently isn't. Some Linux distributions, like Knoppix, can be stored and run off a USB key fob. That is pretty cool, but I don't really hear a lot of people rushing to the store for computers without hard drives as a result. So, is it really greener?

One of the big problems I have with "greenness" is that it's such a vague concept, without a lot of concrete metrics. To be "green", a product just has to be more ecologically friendly than something else, but that doesn't have a lot of concrete definition. For software, some metrics should be power consumption, packaging (online downloads don't require any!) and documentation distribution, which open source does traditionally do better with than proprietary software.

And, like Gasperson suggests, open source does require fewer showers.

Yesterday, Wired carried a report of several prominent Twitter accounts getting hacked. The first problem with Twitter's security is that they weren't throttling invalid password attempts on their accounts, so it was just a matter of time and poor passwords before a malicious party got in. Unfortunately for Twitter, the hacked account was a staffer with the ability to change the password on every user account. Barack Obama, Britney Spears and Fox News were compromised, along with quite a few others. It was a classic and simple hack.

The second problem Twitter had is the same problem that every network administrator deals with -- the users. It is so important for all users of a system, but particularly those with administrative access, to follow good password procedures. Here are some good guidelines to remember:

• The longer your password is, the more computation is required in cracking it. Passwords should be at least 8 characters.
• Passwords should use a mix of characters - numbers, upper and lower case letters and special characters if the system allows for it. L33tsp3@k 1s v3ry us3ful h3r3.
• Passwords should not be dictionary words and certainly should not be named after a person or a pet, even if you tack on some numbers at the end. "Fluffy12" is not nearly as good of a password as "il1k3d0gs!".
• Passwords should not be shared, unless completely unavoidable. If several people at a company are sharing a password for a company account, it should be changed immediately if one of those people leaves the company.
• Passwords should be changed on a regular basis, but not so frequently that the user has to write down the changed password on post-it notes to remember it. Naturally, written down passwords should be avoided - if a user has too many passwords to remember, invest in encrypted password storage software. It's worth it.

For those of you that are administering Junction Networks accounts, this security is really important. Can you imagine the damage that a malicious user could do to your company if your account was compromised? Our interface gives the ability to route your company's phone numbers, set up your auto-attendant and manage users - so a malevolent user could easily delete all of those things (or worse, reroute them to something really inappropriate).

Without security, any system becomes unusable. We cannot stress it enough. To change your administrative user password with Junction Networks, log into OnSIP, then click on "Account" and click "Change admin password".

I was over on Freeswitch's website this morning and noticed a link to a list of 104 Cisco and Avaya alternatives for IP PBXes. I thought it was an interesting list. Even though it does not seek to evaluate the IP PBXes, it is pretty astounding to note just how many options are out there. The Asterisk team should be particularly proud, given how many names on the list are Asterisk derivatives.

Although there were zero doubts in this corner, the sheer number of choices out there is a testament to the importance of VoIP for the future of communication.

We've been so busy lately here in the engineering department that it's difficult not to feel a little bit like an elf, what with the holiday lights and snow outside. We have some exciting new projects that we're hard at work on that will make being a Junction Networks customer even better, but nothing that's ready to announce quite yet.

In the meantime, we were mentioned in Voip News, in a nice article that covers the A to Zs of getting involved with a hosted VoIP provider. It's an excellent checklist for anyone considering the jump to a hosted VoIP PBX, like our OnSIP Hosted PBX.

Junction Networks is pleased to announce that we've been nominated as a finalist for Small Business Computing's Excellence in Technology Award in the VoIP category. The focus of the Excellence in Technology Award is to acknowledge companies that have assisted small business owners in running their own business more productively. If you'd like to vote for us (and we hope you do), you can do so by visiting Small Business Computing and clicking on the Choose the Winners link.

There are a number of products to vote on, with categories in hardware, software, security and e-commerce. I personally can't wait to see the results!

Andy Abramson just posted an article discussing SIP vs the calling card. I found it particularly apropos, as I've just returned from a two week vacation in Europe. It's been a few years since I've been in Europe, but what I've always done in the past is get myself to a local newspaper store and purchase a calling card in order to call home and tell my friends what an awesome time I'm having without them. I tried to do this on this vacation, except that I discovered that calling cards seem to have become obsolete, at least in the stores of Aberdeen, Scotland.

However, what I did discover in the local chain supermarket was that I could buy a pay as you go (practically) disposable cell phone. In the supermarket! I could also buy minutes to charge my phone with, for not too much more (including the phone) than I would have previously have spent on a calling card. I was thrilled at the convenience.

Why wasn't OnSIP Hosted PBX the right answer in this scenario? This vacation happened to involve a lot of travel to farms and other remote locations where cell signal was spotty and an Internet connection was out of the question. So one of the downsides to buying a U.K. cell phone was that I had to pay international rates when I called home, which I wouldn't have had to do if I were using a SIP phone and my OnSIP account, but on the other hand, the pay as you go cell worked where there was no Internet connection available.

Had I been on a vacation where I had a steady Internet connection, OnSIP would have been perfect (and far less expensive than pay-as-you-go international rates, which became really ridiculous once I left the U.K.). Touring the farm country of Scotland, Wales and the Netherlands just didn't fit into that profile...at least, not in 2008. The years to come will no doubt bring a different story.

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.