Broadvoice experiences

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Just wondering what experiences others have had with the broadvoice byod service. I am new to asterisk, and therefore had many minor issues getting everything to work correctly. It was certainly a learning experience and so the time was far from wasted but some of the issues (detailed below) seem to be not so much technical but broadvoice specific.

1)On their website they instruct the user to record roundtrip times to the various available proxies and to use the closest one. I dutifully did this and chose a proxy in NYC. After attempting to register to this proxy unsuccessfully for several days with various different firewall settings, sip.conf settings, etc. DrWho suggested I try another proxy, the 2nd closest one, and I did so, which finally gave me an unauthorized error that led me to a typo in the sip.conf file. Fixing that and I was registered. With the correct file, I still could not register with NYC. Is this behaviour normal for a voip provider or something that is peculiar to Broadvoice?

2)So now I am happily registered but when I make a call, the person I called can hear me but I can’t hear them. Hmm, back to google, search this forum, and I find a solution, change my codec to g726 and this should fix my problem which is probably related to NAT. I try this, and now nothing works. I get caller unavailable error messages and codec unavailable messages in the log. Hmmm, verify that asterisk supports the codec, check. Check the broadvoice website, no mention (at least anywhere that I could find) about what codecs they support. Back to the internet again and I find a post from early 2004 about how broadvoice only supports certain codecs out of Chicago. Hmm, lets try that. Ah-ha! Now I can hear as well as speak! Moving right along! I found this to be strange that each proxy seems to only support certain codecs and that their doesn’t seem to be anywhere that details that.

3)The easiest thing to configure, it seems, was receiving calls. That worked right from the beginning. But strangely, once in awhile, and it doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason, broadvoice will send any incoming calls right to their voicemail and not even attempt to contact my asterisk server. No amount of trying or restarting of asterisk makes any difference. A “sip show registry” shows I am registered, but the calls are not routed to me. This seems to clear itself up after a relatively short while, but I’m also wondering if this is normal behaviour for a voip provider.

The point of my excercise (building the asterisk server, not this post) was to do a proof of concept of the asterisk software. I have a small computer consulting company and many of my clients (actually, all of them) are small businesses that would love to have a fully functional PBX but cannot afford it. I looked at asterisk as a way to possibly add a facet to my business. In terms of that, I think the excercise was a success, although I now realize I’ll have to a lot more research and testing before I deploy commercially.

So, in a long winded way, I guess I’m asking what types of experiences others have had with Broadvoice and other voip providers? what pitfalls do you foresee for someone breaking into a new market with asterisk?

Thanks and also thanks for those who responded to my pleas for help while getting this software up and running.

Craig Russell
AirDigitalNetwork.com

2

Broadvoice is one of my providers and thue service is excellent. There is no interruption except I disconnect on purpose due to work being performed on *. Before you start to route calls to your * server you first need to disable features like voicemail and call forwarding (if enabled) in your broadvoice account so that they don’t take the call when it comes in. I moved from NYC but still in the northeastern US so you can email me at packetizer@gmail.com to see how we can work together on voip deployment as we are currently doing.

3

1)On their website they instruct the user to record roundtrip times to the various available proxies and to use the closest one. I dutifully did this and chose a proxy in NYC. After attempting to register to this proxy unsuccessfully for several days with various different firewall settings, sip.conf settings, etc. DrWho suggested I try another proxy, the 2nd closest one, and I did so, which finally gave me an unauthorized error that led me to a typo in the sip.conf file. Fixing that and I was registered. With the correct file, I still could not register with NYC. Is this behaviour normal for a voip provider or something that is peculiar to Broadvoice?

We use several broadvoice accounts, and I have tried to register to several proxies for various reasons and in each instance I receive a service unavailiable response. However when I register directly to sip.broadvoice.com I find I am actually registered to one of the proxy ip addresses. I have spoken w/ them on the phone a few times, and their help desk cannot explain this behaviour to me. I would say forget the proxy and just register to sip.broadvoice.com as it registers to a proxy anyway, BTW, if anyone from Broavoice is reading this, how about actually working on your open tickets!

2)So now I am happily registered but when I make a call, the person I called can hear me but I can’t hear them. Hmm, back to google, search this forum, and I find a solution, change my codec to g726 and this should fix my problem which is probably related to NAT. I try this, and now nothing works. I get caller unavailable error messages and codec unavailable messages in the log. Hmmm, verify that asterisk supports the codec, check. Check the broadvoice website, no mention (at least anywhere that I could find) about what codecs they support. Back to the internet again and I find a post from early 2004 about how broadvoice only supports certain codecs out of Chicago. Hmm, lets try that. Ah-ha! Now I can hear as well as speak! Moving right along! I found this to be strange that each proxy seems to only support certain codecs and that their doesn’t seem to be anywhere that details that.

I cannot speak to that as I have always used multiple codecs in my sip.conf file. I would suggest something like the following:

disallow=all ; First disallow all codecs
allow=ulaw ; Allow codecs in order of preference
allow=alaw ; Allow codecs in order of preference
allow=gsm ; Allow codecs in order of preference
allow=g729
allow=g723.1
allow=ilbc
allow=speex

works for me, and never had a problem.

3)The easiest thing to configure, it seems, was receiving calls. That worked right from the beginning. But strangely, once in awhile, and it doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason, broadvoice will send any incoming calls right to their voicemail and not even attempt to contact my asterisk server. No amount of trying or restarting of asterisk makes any difference. A “sip show registry” shows I am registered, but the calls are not routed to me. This seems to clear itself up after a relatively short while, but I’m also wondering if this is normal behaviour for a voip provider.

This is bad behavior for a GOOD VOIP provider, but this is BV we’re talking about here. I have experienced strange behavior from them, dropping my registration after hours, etc. BV has a habit of not taking a registration attempt w/in 60 seconds of your last attempt. You get failed attempts left and right. I added the following line to my sip.conf:

registertimeout=70 ; retry registration calls every 20 seconds (default)

and since then I have had very few/no instances of BV just not transferring the call. YMMV

The point of my excercise (building the asterisk server, not this post) was to do a proof of concept of the asterisk software. I have a small computer consulting company and many of my clients (actually, all of them) are small businesses that would love to have a fully functional PBX but cannot afford it. I looked at asterisk as a way to possibly add a facet to my business. In terms of that, I think the excercise was a success, although I now realize I’ll have to a lot more research and testing before I deploy commercially.

I’ve been working w/ Asterisk for several moths now, I learn something new every day, and just when I think I’m getting the hang of it, something else throws me for a loop. It’s an amazing piece of software, but you’ll ALWAYS be doing more research on it. Set it up several times w/ different configurations and find the bugs that will crop up, there are many gotchas for first time users.

So, in a long winded way, I guess I’m asking what types of experiences others have had with Broadvoice and other voip providers? what pitfalls do you foresee for someone breaking into a new market with asterisk?

Asterisk is an excellent way to provide a service to your customers, but I would not suggest using BV as your provider. They’re way too flaky for production support. check out the wiki for a listing of providers and folks opinions on them.

W/out knowing your market or the scale of what you want to accomplish it’s hard to tell, but my advice would be for small companies, find a few good clients and give them a DAMN good deal to be your test guinea pigs. Make sure you have a solution that if something breaks you can immediately revert to a working config and get them back up and runnig as soon as you get the call. And be prepared for long nights becuase you have a problem, can’t fix during business hours, and then your solution is infeasibile. Other than that, read the Wiki, read this board, Read the book, and get your hands dirty as much as possible w/ different setups NOTHING teaches as well as experience w/ Asterisk. Oh, You might try taking this class: edvina.net/training/bootcamp-details.shtm
I took it and after some experience found it VERY enlightening. OLLE: if he signs up, I want a percentage! :wink:

Thanks and also thanks for those who responded to my pleas for help while getting this software up and running.

Good luck w/ it!