For a while now, I had not being using FreeSWITCH for my VoIP, but just logging into PennyTel directly with my Nokia E65. It worked OK, but the voice quality wasn’t as good as going through FreeSWITCH.

A month ago my old ADSL router died, so I bought a Billion 5200N to replace it. Since then, I’d been having weird problems with VoIP not working, and the Wifi to LAN bridging stopping dead whenever there was a bit of traffic over it.

It took me a while to sort out all the peculiarities of the Billion.

1. A change of ethernet ports on the router fixed the bridge locking up problem. It took a lot of time and weird theories before I fixed that.
2. When setting up the router from factory defaults, I have to save the wireless interface twice when I change the SSID before it will allow my wireless devices to authenticate.
3. UPnP was interfering with FreeSWITCH, and probably my Nokia. Turning that off on the router fixed FreeSWITCH.
4. Selecting some settings on the router made the routers wireless interface disappear, and the only way to get it back was a factory reset.

So, FreeSWITCH is a breeze to set up for PennyTel now. It takes editing two files.
conf/vars.xml and conf/dialplan/default/000pennytel.xml.

In conf/vars.xml I changed the following

<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_password=whateveryouwant"/>

That password is used for phones authenticating to FreeSWITCH, it has nothing to do with PennyTel.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="domain=switch.gruntnet"/>


What the phones use as their realm, it should be in the DNS with the ip pointing to FreeSWITCH.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_username=61281955555"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_password=55555/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_from_domain=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<!-- true or false -->
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_register=true"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_contact=1000"/>


All the PennyTel setting goes above, I use 1000 to receive incoming calls, my only phone on the network.

Then in conf/dialplan/default/000penntel.xml


<extension name="pennytel">
<condition field="destination_number" expression="^(.*)$">
<action application="set" data="effective_caller_id_number=61281955555"/>
<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/sip.pennytel.com/$1"/>
</condition>
</extension>


I thought I’d document my current phone setup, probably look back in 10 years time and think how primitive it was. The brains of it are handled by freeswitch, I luurv freeswitch ;), running on a little VM with 128M of memory, and a few gigs of disk.

My internet provider is iinet, I get 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. My VOIP provider is pennytel, chosen for their price. $5/month, includes $4 of free calls, it’s 8c a call untimed for Australia and about 20 other countries. Mobiles are 10.5c/minute billed by the second. They have a fax to email service for another $5/month, but no email to fax. So I can’t throw away the fax machine just yet. There’s a few other handy services they offer that I use, they come with the plan.

I was willing to pay extra and go with iinet’s VOIP for the reason of being closer network wise, and unshaped if I exceed my monthly download limit. But iinet only lets you use their VOIP from the iinet network, not sure why that would be, but I ruled them out based on that. Pennytel has the disadvantage of being further away network wise, and affected by shaping, so my phone doesn’t work from home if I get shaped. But it works wherever I am on the planet, assuming I can get a fairly consistent trip time. (I could be in America, and take and make calls from my Australian VOIP number)

My VOIP phone is a nokia E65 with WiFi and SIP. Dial a number, and it goes via SIP if it’s available, otherwise it uses the mobile network. Wifi drains the battery, but I’ve gotten used to charging it every other day, or whatever it is.

The only thing I haven’t tested much is QoS, I’ve recently adjusted it on my ADSL router, but there’s no real way of seeing if it works, other than experimenting. I’m considering putting the router in bridge mode, and using tc on linux. That’s going to require another network card, though.

I still have a landline, my fax machine is connected to it.