[Asterisk-doc] Common VoIP Providers

[Randy Resnick]

Personal subjective note: I have been comparing 6 providers and ICH
has consistently provided the best quality connections from Europe to 
the USA. Voiptalk and sipgate are showing the best ping times here, for 
obvious reasons.

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Connecting Asterisk to Common VoIP Providers ->
  Commercial Service Providers ->
    IconnectHere (ICH) http://www.iconnecthere.com/

Description

iConnectHere is the consumer division of deltathree, Inc. ICH offers 
"pay-as-you-go" outgoing calling using their PCphone software or 
hardphones, but their service works fine with X-Lite and more 
interestingly, it works well with Asterisk.

Services

1. Outgoing calls from your asterisk box to anywhere in the world. You 
put a minimum (of $10?) in your account and you can begin to make calls.

2. For a monthly fee, you can have DID in many areas of the US and 800 
numbers. With incoming nulmber accounts there are many typical services 
such as distinctive ring, voicemail, etc. These have no real interest to 
Asterisk users, however.

What to Expect
ICH support is not fast and it is geared to the unclued home hardphone 
user, so you better get things working on your own. However, ICH 
connection quality and rates are good. ULAW is the only supported codec. 
The only protocol used is SIP.

Setup Examples

sip.conf (nnnnnnnn is your account number, pppp is your PIN)

register = nnnnnnnn:pppp@natrelay.deltathree.com

[iconnecthere]
type=peer
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
username=nnnnnnnn
secret=nnnn
host=natrelay.deltathree.com
canreinvite=no
; context is needed only if you have incoming (DID) service
; context=guest
; do NOT put a qualify= statement here
; because ICH will become unreachable!

extensions.conf
; Be sure to include the iconnecthere-outgoing context
; for users who are authorized to use it:
; [partners]
; include => iconnecthere-outgoing

; In the following example, ICH is set up for USA dialing only
; to call via ICH, dial 8, 1 area code and the 7-digit US number
[iconnecthere-outgoing]
exten => _81NXXNXXXXXX,1,SetCallerID(Your Name <yourdialinphonenumber>)
exten => _81NXXNXXXXXX,2,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN:1}@iconnecthere,50,rt)
exten => _81NXXNXXXXXX,3,Hangup