Aastra space bug bites me again!

Aastra has some nice phones and I needed to demo on of these for a client the other day.

I punched in some settings and copied others using copy and paste - big mistake!

With my copy and paste I had an extra character which was a space.

It looks like Aastra phones don't like the extra space in a field where they expect an ip address.

It took me about 30 minutes but I eventually found the extra space - removed and everything registered nicely. What bothers me is that this is the second time I've managed to make the same mistake. I am betting others are going through this exact same thing - hope it helps someone.

FreePBX Phonebook & Directory Confusion

In FreePBX there is a Directory and a Phonebook. Similar functions but a different way of implementing. The biggest confusion comes from the way FreePBX has named everything.

Directory - Is accessed from the IVR by Selecting "Enable Directory" checkbox

When a caller is in the IVR they can press # to access the names directory.

The directory is built from the information that was entered during the creation of the extension and voicemail. For basic look up of extension names this is all you need to enable.

The option to choose searching by first,last, or first and last name is configured from the General Settings under Company Directory

Phonebook or Asterisk Phonebook or Phonebook Directory is a completely different option. The confusion comes from the naming.

There are two install modules - Phonebook and Phonebook Directory

Phonebook appears in the Tools menu as "Asterisk Phonebook" once installed

This is where you can create your own phonebook entries

Phonebook Directory is found in Destination options of FreePBX once installed. In the IVR you can select Phonebook Directory to search for names that were entered in the "Asterisk Phonebook" under the FreePBX tools menu.

This can be used to dial other names besides extension names.

*Note: The Asterisk Phonebook can also be used as a source for Caller ID Lookup Sources Module

FreePBX default password

The default login and password for the FreePBX gui is admin admin

Note that if you are using a distro like trixbox, asterisknow, elastix, PIAF (PBX in a Flash) it is probably different.

Look in the /etc/amportal.conf

This is the default FreePBX config file - the passwords should be readable here.

Cisco SPA504G Paging & Intercom

One of the reasons I wanted to get a Cisco 504G was to test the FreePBX/Asterisk Paging & Intercom module. With every new phone release its always important to test the feature set before deploying to clients.

The paging and intercom work the same way as the SPA942 models. Just need to enable "Auto Answer Page" and remove any vertical service codes that might conflict with FreePBX paging/intercom codes.

There is a new multicast feature that enables paging directly from the phone - need to look into this more.

The New Cisco Cares About Asterisk!

It wasn't too long ago that there was no "official" documentation that would suggest that Cisco products worked with Open Source Asterisk.

Now with Small Business Pro there is a sense that Cisco has put some effort in documenting and being more open to their products working with Asterisk.

There is a great deal of documentation that is really useful - in fact more than any other vendor. Documents can be found at https://www.myciscocommunity.com

You can find the following Asterisk documentation:

Asterisk: Configuring Cisco SPA5xx phones with the Web-UI
Asterisk: Zero-Touch Configuring Cisco SPA5xx phones
Configuring the Cisco SPA8800 IP Telephony Gateway in an Asterisk Environment
Interoperability information for Asterisk(R)-based Phone Systems
Asterisk: Configuring the Cisco SPA500S Attendant Console

You don't see this level of documentation from any of the following vendors that benefit from Asterisk.

1. Polycom - very little official documentation - even though many of their products work well with Asterisk - if it wasn't for the great Asterisk community many of their products wouldn't even be used with Asterisk systems

2. Grandstream - Just enough to get things working - very little documentation - but at least they acknowledge Asterisk - guessing that most of the IP phones that Grandstream sells go directly for Asterisk deployments. Grandstream is the equivalent of Dlink in the voip world. They sell lots of shitty product at low prices and available everywhere.

3. Aastra - have done a great deal with their xml and auto provisioning toolkit for systems like trixbox and elastix. No enough documenting if you want to configure things manually.

4. Snom - the stuff works - well documented on their wiki for Asterisk - just wish the basic phones weren't so ugly and expensive. The new 800 series look great though!

Cisco SPA504G Review

Just got my hands on a Cisco SPA50G, this is the revised SPA942 (probably the most popular voip phone)

The SPA942 was a very nice voip phone - it offered extensive features at a very nice price. There were some things that needed improving. The SPA504 fixes most of the problems. The one problem I was hoping it would improve immensely was the speaker phone but I am out of luck here.

Although with recent firmware upgrades for the SPA942 the speaker phone became usable its still was not a "great" sounding speaker phone compared to Polycom phones. Seems that Cisco just can't figure out the speaker phone.

The SPA504G has the following improvements:

1) Support HD/g722 codec
2) Handset - heavier - more polished -sounds better - sounds deeper
3) Buttons - have more of tactile feel - don't feel cheap anymore
4) Speaker phone - louder (no improvement is sound quality)
5) Sidecar - all the SPA phones now support the new and old 32 button sidecar - you do not need a "receptionist" phone anymore - anyone of them can be turned into one - all have the AUX expansion
6) Configuration Interface is more polished - looks modern (same options though)
7) Line/nav buttons and MWI are smaller now
8) Unit is a little heavier - seems more solid

Overall a nice improvement - if you don't need g722 and louder speaker phone your better off getting an SPA942 while they are still available since there is such a huge price difference.

Echo with Cisco SPA942 SPA962

First - there are many causes for echo and it's usually what causes the most confusion on how to solve the problem.

One of the simplest causes of echo with Linksys/Cisco devices is that users increase the handset volume to the max with the SPA942 and SPA962. This causes more of a feedback issues but users like to call it echo.

This is a little bit hard to describe but its almost like hearing someone faintly spiting in the handset - if you can imagine that. You can tell your users to lower the volume but you will get a complaint that its too low and they can't hear the person - which is a good point.

If your environment is strictly VOIP you don't have many options for increasing the volume before it hits the handset. If you are using a gateway such as the Audiocodes MP 114/118 you can increase the volume from the PSTN side of things.

Please use at least version 5.6 of the firmware - previous versions actually increased the volume before doing echo cancellation - which in turn created more echo issues.

FreePBX & SPA942/962 Call Parking

1. Answer the call - talk to the person - say something like "Please hold on for a sec"
2. Press the Transfer (spa962) or Xfer (spa942) soft button
3. Enter 700 (default parking lot)
4. Listen to what number parking lot number the system has put the call in - it will be 701
5. Press Transfer/Xfer to complete the transfer to the parking lot
6. Locate the person who the call is for and tell them to dial 701 from any phone
7. If the call in the parking lot is not answered within the default time it will ring back to the extension that it was initially parked from

Cisco SPA8800 Video

This is just a small video of the SPA8800 configured with one analog phone and Asterisk. Notice the status lights on the Gateway. The silver box provides a number of ways to mount it - except no brackets - so no rackmount.

Its a very nice looking gateway with black plastic in the front. Testing with an Aastra 9116P - analog phone - although no benefit using "P" version as the gateway does not provide power using the 3,4 pair.

The MWI led works out of the box - you do not need to configure anything special. The speaker phone also works equally well. There is no auto answer option so receiving Intercom and Paging will not work with Asterisk. You can however initiate intercom and paging as there are many buttons that can be programmed for the feature codes. No BLF or any kind of line appearance. It is however a good "nortel" looking phone that a lot of clients expect phones to look like.

Linksys/Cisco SPA962 with SPA932 Sidecar

Here is a little video of the Cisco/Linksys SPA962 with SPA932 sidecar all lid up. Also with a Panasonic 3.5mm headphone. The sidecar left buttons have been programmed for speed dial, BLF, and call pickup. The right side buttons have been programmed for intercom for each extension.

The Truth About the Grandstream GXP2000

This phone is really great if you are learning Asterisk and want to test most of the features. It has many advanced features for a really low price. You can easily find the GXP2000 for around $85 at many online stores.

The first time I encountered this phone was at a clients site. The clients setup was done by someone who decided try their hand at VOIP. From my understanding they decided it was not worth the trouble and took a job in the Bahamas (idiots get all the breaks).

The client had numerous issues regarding dropped calls, echo, static/pop sounds, and general inconsistency with dialing certain numbers.

Many of the issues were to do with just sloppy configuring on the initial setup.

The only items that I could not fix were the static/pop sounds - I found it strange since all the phones were GXP2000 but only some of them were causing problems. A firmware update did not fix the problem phones.

I later purchased one of these phones for my own personal use and testing. I updated the firmware and used it for several months. To my surprise everything worked great. No pop or static sounds and even the speaker phone worked well.

My initial thought was that Grandstream fixed everything with a new firmware. At this point I thought this was is not a bad entry level phone for some clients looking to save some money. Even recommended the product when someone would ask.

Over time I figured out what the main problems were with the GXP2000:

1. Different versions of hardware - the more recent versions support an additional green LED instead of just a red LED for the line and speed dials buttons. The newer phones come with 2.5mm headset jack - the older ones come with bigger jack and 2.5mm adapter.
2. The speaker phone quality greatly varies from different batches. I have used versions which sounded great and other that were terrible
3. General quality is bad - over time these phones have a high failure rate. They will develop various problems. One issue is the static/pop sounds and the other is the "buzz" which comes and goes.
4. If the phone is configured to be a remote extension and at some point the phone is brought into the office and simply plugged into the local network it create all kinds of havoc on the call quality of the other phones. You need to do a "sip show peers "in asterisk command console. Look for any phones that have an IP address that points to the router (you need to fix those)

FreePBX Feature Codes & Cisco/Linksys SPA942 - SPA962

FreePBX provides many features but out of the box some of these will not work without some changes to the default Cisco/Lisksys SPA phones.

1. Your Dial plan should allow you to dial * plus at least 2 digits.
a) Can dial things like *97 or *98 for voicemail access
b) *100 to transfer calls to voicemail or dial directly into someone's voicemail without calling them

eg. (*xx.|xx.)


2. Your dial plan should also allow ** plus atl east 2 digits - this is used for Directed call pickup. Dialing **100 from a different extension will answer a ringing phone at extension 100.

eg. (*xx.|**xx.|xx.)

3. For Paging and Intercom to work you need to set "Auto Answer Page" to yes

4. Delete any vertical service codes that conflict with your assigned FreePBX feature codes

Asterisk SIP Channel Driver & DNS - it's broken!

One of the most frustrating things about Asterisk is that it can't handle simple problems. These are problems that you would think have been solved by now. I'm talking about DNS issues and the SIP channel driver.

You would think that if your internet connection went down that you would only lose your VOIP trunks or remote extensions. Well think again! When you lose the internet or better yet DNS access your Asterisk SIP Channel driver comes to a halt. That means that your local SIP extensions will also not work. In fact a lot of things just seem to halt until your internet or DNS is functioning again.

Why is this happening? Certain things should time out! My local SIP extensions and local SIP gateway should still work. I expect the internet to go down - I expect DNS resolution failures. I don't expect that after all this time the SIP channel driver is still broken.

I've looked in the Asterisk mailing list and this has been pointed out many times before - nobody wants to fix this.

I have developed ways around this that don't require code changes but this is something that should be fixed at the root cause.

Cisco/Linksys SPA942 & SPA962 Anonymous Caller ID issue

This may be a common problem across all SPA devices from Cisco/Linksys but I have only tested with the SPA942/962 IP phones. For most users this would not even be an issue.

The problem is the way that the SPA deals with anonymous calls. Instead of passing the actual "anonymous" caller id received from the carrier (or gateway) it transforms it to "Anonymous Caller" which may have been a nice touch by one of their engineers to give it a nice looking appearance but it truly messes things up in a scenario where a multi-tenant phone system is used.

In one of deployments we had configured FreePBX to handle three different companies. We didn't do anything special with FreePBX except change the Caller ID prefix for each companies incoming lines. eg. Company A would receive calls with the caller id "A:XYZ Comp <1234567890>"

All this worked great and the receptionist knew how to answer the calls for the different companies. This unfortunately didn't work with anonymous calls. So instead of displaying "A:anonymous" it displayed "Anonymous Caller" - and the receptionist had to no clue for which company the call was for.

To determine that this was truly was a problem with the SPA phones we tested using the following:

1. x-lite - showed the correct caller id for anonymous with the company prefix
2. snom phone - also worked
3. Even a GXP2000 from Grandstream worked - these phones have other issues but the caller id worked

Tried getting this resolved with Cisco - but didn't get far on their public community board.

I am not a Cisco partner so I can't submit a bug report

I did submit as much info to their myciscocommunity.com site as i had time for.

I didn't have time to continue with the additional requests for more info.

At this point I think submitted enough info to reproduce the problem and we had already resolved the problem with an an Asterisk solution - we completely changed all the anonymous calls to "Unknown" before they hit SPA phones.

Just putting this out for anyone who may run into the same issue.

A Bunch of Gateway Reviews

One of hardest things to find in VoIP hardware is a good low cost FXO gateway. The FXS gateways and ATA’s are easy to locate. Finding an equivalent FXO has been a never ending task. I have tested Patton, Audiocodes, Linksys/Cisco, and Grandstream gateways.

The Patton products are just way too complicated – someone needs to go back and put an easy mode on these things. The price is just a bit high for every situation I have encountered in deploying them.

The Audiocodes are not as expensive as the Patton products but they also have their own strengths and weakness. It takes a lot of effort to fully utilize or understand the full routing potential of these products. Once you master the configuration you can do all sorts of cool stuff. I have been able to deploy these products in a number of locations. They can work very well with Asterisk if you can match up the right version numbers (for both the gateway and Asterisk.)

The Linksys/Cisco SPA400 has been a real price gem for me. For locations that need a couple of FXO ports and money is an issue you can’t go wrong this device. Note that I have specifically tested a certain firmware version for my deployments. This product is intended to work with the LVS9000 but can be configured to work with Asterisk. The sound quality is good – not great. Good enough for the low end installations.

The Grandstream FXO gateways are a piece of junk – not worth a single penny because they cannot be deployed anywhere. I have tested with the current firmware and they continue to break what was working or cannot fix the long list of outstanding bugs. How many tries does it take guys to fix the caller-id issues? You Grandstream owners should know that you are missing many calls – hope you are not using these devices for your business.

Finally the best for last – I have purchased a Welltech 3804A because this Taiwanese company said they supported Asterisk. The price was right, the features were good, and the sound quality was actually very good. The main problem with this gateway is that it can’t detect a dial tone. This kind of limits the use for this anywhere with multiple lines and hunt group configurations.

Welltech’s latest gateways do support dial tone – I just wished I knew about this little issue prior. What gets me though is not dial tone aspect but that I was able to brick this product with configuration changes. At some point all the FXO ports went amber, I reset the device to factory defaults and it never came back! So much for confidence in this companies products.

I am currently testing the Cisco SPA8800 which is a 4 port FXS and 4 port FXO. Everything looks good so far but I can’t make a recommendation if this product is ready for any clients yet.

FreePBX CallGroups, PickUpGroups, and Directed Call PickUp

The easiest feature is to use is Directed Call Pickup. If you hear a phone ringing and you know the the extension simply from any other phone dial **ext (where ext is the actual extension number)

The feature code can be changed to something other than ** or disabled completely. This feature code applies to all extensions. You cannot disable for some and enable for others. This has nothing to do with CallGroups and PickUpGroups. Configuration is separate.

More complicated is CallGroups and PickUpGroups. There are some general Rules:

1. Group Call Pickup feature code is *8 - can be changed and disabled/enabled in Feature Code Page. Refered to as Asterisk General Call Pickup
2. An extension can only belong to "one" CallGroup
3. An extension can belong to multiple PickUpGroups
4. CallGroups can range from 0 to 63
5. PickupGroups can be specified by placing the callgroup # they can pickup or multiple call group number separated by comma, eg, 1,2 - can pickup calls for groups 1 and 2 from their extension
6. CallGroups & PickupGroups are Controlled from the Extension Settings Page

FreePBX User Speed Dial Functions

1. These are Phone System enabled - they have nothing to do with actual SIP Phone Directories in the Phones themselves. These features work with any type of Phone.
2. The user has to use their Phone to set these speed dial functions.

To Set a speed dial number Dial *75 from your phone. Follow the instructions. Enter speed dial number 1 to 99 is good, followed by #. Enter the number to dial as though you were actually dialing. eg 4161234567
In some cases you may need to dial 9 or 8 to get an outside number, so enter 94161234567

Once the system stores your speed dial number you can use the following format to dial using speed dial:

*0X or *0XX (where X or XX is the speed dial number you had previously configured.
^zero

Speed dial feature codes can be changed in the Feature Code Page.