[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Sacrifice?

[BK [address only for mailing lists]]

Hi Kelly,

thanks a lot for your reply.

On Friday, July 4, 2003, at 09:40 PM, Kelly McDonald wrote:

> I'm a newbie myself, but I have at least got * working with a sip
> provider,

encouraging ;-)

> although the quality was not to my liking, I was hooking up
> with iconnecthere.

Sorry to hear that. I have setup a BudgeTone-100 to connect directly 
with Nikotel (without Asterisk involved) and I am truly amazed at the 
quality. For US and European destinations it is just like ISDN. For 
other destinations it is still significantly better than most low cost 
long-distance services.

I have been trying software based VoIP clients every once in a while for 
the last five years and always found that the technology was not yet 
ready for primetime, not even adequate for calling friends and family.

Even now, I find that Nikotel's softphone is a disgrace - I have nothing 
positive to say about it - entirely unacceptable. But what a difference 
when using a hardphone. I hope the lack of quality you are experiencing 
isn't because of Asterisk. Perhaps you want to try a different provider. 
Nikotel don't charge a monthly fee, it's essentially prepaid and the 
minimum is $15. My roundtrip time to the Nikotel server averages about 
170ms and I am on DSL. A friend of mine uses Vonage over the same 
distance with similar roundtrip times (but different DSL provider) and 
he is very pleased, too.

> Here's what I had
>
> in sip.conf:
>
> [iconnecthere]
> type=friend
> insecure=yes
> port=5060
> username=xyz
> secret=abc
> host=natrelay.deltathree.com
> dtmfmode=inband
> callerid=15408675512
> nat=yes
>
> in extensions.conf:
>
> exten => 8500,1,Dial(SIP/15405551212 at iconnecthere)

thanks, this looks very helpful, I am going to try this after breakfast 
(it's 5am over here and I just got up).

> This was just a test so I could dial 8500 and it would call my home
> phone.
>
> Probably have stuff wrong, but it seemed to work.
>
> For the rest, extensions.conf has enough stuff in it that you can go and
> make up your own stuff.

Indeed, I will.

thanks again
regards
bk