Vonage VoIP Service - it works, it's cheap, it's just SIP

Being something of a VoIP geek, and not wanting to pay any more than necessary to the phone company, we installed Vonage about 3 months ago. At the time, we had Comcast for cable TV and Internet, but since then have switched to Verizon FIOS. Although it wasn't my intent, this is something of a scam where Verizon installs a pile of equipment for digital phone, and then we don't sign up for it and use Vonage over the FIOS instead.

There were two motivations for getting Vonage. First, it's hard to beat the price. We may get screwed if the company goes under, but we'll deal with that if it happens. Second, the quality of my analog POTS line was horrible despite several service calls and we figured that, if it worked at all, the digital phone would sound much better. We could have gone with Comcast digital phone service, but we were getting ready to ditch them too at the time.

You get a choice of several PSTN / VoIP gateways, all of which have various router, Ethernet, and wireless, depending on how much you want to pay. We went for the 4 port Motorola router which was free. It's a 10/100 4 port switch with 1 10/100 uplink port and 2 telephone connections (only one of which appears to be turned on). Setup is pretty much like any home router, except that you don't have any control over the software configuration. The router is a DHCP server for the 4 Ethernet switch ports on 192.168.15.0 / 24 and a DHCP client for the uplink. There is a web config interface, but it doesn't do much even if you have the default user name (user) and password (tivonpw). The only controls available are restoring the factory default and uploading the config file (22K bytes of useless binary). You can tell what the current software load is. The router can uplink directly to the modem, or can sit behind another router. I have not had any trouble running a VPN tunnel and the uplink port appears to be properly protected.

By far, the toughest part of the installation is the phone lines. In my house, all of the phone wires a wired in parallel to some brass lugs down in the basement. The phone jacks on the gateway are standard RJ11 and are meant to accept the phone wire right from your phone. Multiple phones require a splitter. I built a cable from the two brass lugs terminating with an RJ11 and that services all of the phones in the house. We don't have any old phones with real ringers, so I am not concerned about the ring current needed to drive our three cordless phones.

Curious about how it works, I hooked up the Wireshark network sniffer to the gateway uplink to see what sort of messages were flying around. As I suspected, the protocol is SIP. Looking at the SDP, it appears that G.711mu, G.711A, G.729, and G.729 are all supported. I was surprised to see that G.711mu was the default and what was used in an actual call. I expected one of the bandwidth saving vocoders to be the default choice (although I had not heard any coding artifacts). I quickly tried to configure a real SIP phone connected to one of the Ethernet ports, but found that encrypted authentication was being used in the INVITE - oh well. I tried a couple of obvious things like the MAC address of the gateway, but I didn't try too hard.

The sound quality is very good as one would expect from G.711. We do notice a bit more delay, especially when calling a cell phone, but you have to listen for it. The reliability is OK, although we have had to reboot the gateway a couple of times. This has not happened recently - perhaps the software has been updated (I'm not keeping track). We all have cell phones, so who cares?

Overall, we're satisfied with the value of the system. I'll post again if I can get Vonage to give me the authentication password so I can hook up a SIP phone.

Andover Youth Wrestling Pins 2nd Year

In only its second year, the Andover Youth Wrestling program continued to gain momentum as an upstart force to be reconed with by the established wrestling teams in the Merrimack Valley. In its final tournament of the season, the "Big East", the team turned in impressive performances across multiple weight divisions and classifications.

Head Coach Kevin writes:

"First I would like to congratulate everyone on making it through the 2nd year of AYS wrestling.

Big congrats to those guys who showed up on Sunday [for the Big East finals], they put forth one heck of an effort. Paul won the silver division in overtime on an awesome throw!! James battled to second in the bronze division, also winning a tough overtime decision. And out of the dark, Thomas won First Place (4-0) in the Copper division. Nick won two hard fought matches. Jesse fought well for second.

To my guys in the silver who had a tough day, Brett and John----you are first year wrestlers, keep your head up, you will dominate in the up coming years. You need to lose to learn before you can win, that's part of your first year. Set goals for yourself for next year and the years to come. Life is hard and you will have to work through it. That’s one lesson wrestling will teach you. Caleb, you had your shot to win, you are almost there. I can’t explain how close you are. At this level, those slight mistakes will cost you. But that comes with experience, stay with it and you will have a successful high school career, I guarantee it.

To the FIRST EVER GOLD DIVISION wrestlers Tim and Mat, it takes guts to go out there as a first year wrestler and wrestle guys with 4 or more years experience than you. The fact that you walked on that mat and gave your hearts out there, that’s all I could ask for. You made me proud and represented AYS wrestling to the highest honor. Good job guys."

Wrapping up the season, all wrestlers had a great time at the end-of-year party, with massive amounts of pizza, trophies, speeches, and special recognition for outstanding leadership, results, and effort.

Expect a breakthrough season next year as those wrestlers who started with the program last year hit the ground running for their third season of competitive wrestling. Special thanks to coaches Doug, Chris, and Kevin (back row, from left), Andover Youth Services (especially director Bill), and those parents who made the extra effort to get this program off the ground.

Netmeeting Application Sharing - Retro tool still has legs

I have been using Netmeeting for about 7 years and have found it to be a very convenient way to create ad hoc data sharing sessions. It is reasonably reliable, supports multiple users, and does not require any sort of server (as long as you can figure out the IP addresses of the computers in the meeting).

Many Win2000 and WinXP users don't realize (or are too young to know :-) that Netmeeting is usually still available as part of the Windows OS. I have run into a few coworkers who have had to download it from the mother ship, but this is not a big deal. Microsoft doesn't advertise its availability in the Start / All Programs menu, probably because they would rather have you use a pay service like MS LiveMeeting.

To start up Netmeeting for the first time, go to Start / Run and enter conf. Follow the simple initial setup procedure and you will be off and running. Don't bother with directory servers or anything like that unless your enterprise actually has one and you know where it is on the network. To do anything useful, you need to have someone to call who also has Netmeeting running. If you want to create a shortcut, you will probably find conf.exe in C:\Program Files\NetMeeting. Be productive.

Verizon FIOS Installation - lots of free equipment

When the Verizon FIOS sales van stopped on my street and started spewing pushy sales reps like a VW beetle spewing clowns in the center ring, I knew it meant that the last mile fiber build out had reached my neighborhood. I'm a serious telecommuter needing serious high speed Internet and the idea of fiber was pretty appealing. But my wife was the real instigator - being sensitive to the price as she handles all of the family finances. Our former provider was Comcast and we paid almost $100 per month for high speed Internet (I was satisfied with their service), and a very basic cable TV package. The Verizon rep gave a compelling sales pitch, the punch line of which was about $70 per month for 15/2 high speed Internet, plus digital standard def TV.

Being frugal folks, we took the bait and signed up, thinking some guy in India would enter a few IOS commands into a router somewhere and we would be done - nothing could be farther from the truth. The two most feared words in the phone company lexicon are "Truck Roll". Installing FIOS takes two. First, a tech showed up in a bucket truck to run the fiber from the poll to our house. This part is transparent to the user, other than the truck sitting outside the house for an hour. My guess is that a bucket truck roll is something like $100 per hour, but I don't really know (comments?).

The bucket truck was the easy part. Next, a different tech showed up in a van to set up the system. How Verizon expects positive ROI on this, I have no idea, but they are a lot smarter than me. First, there is a box on the outside of the house that appears to be a bridge from the optical network to something running over coax (probably DOCSIS) - see picture 1. Next, there is a box on the inside of the house that appears to be strictly for digital phone (which we did not order) and appears to contain a battery backup - see picture 2. Then, a big-ass cable modem / wireless access point /router - see picture 3, and finally 2 x set top boxes - see picture 4 (under the XBOX).

The second tech was at our house for approximately 6 hours, fishing coax and Cat5 around the house and being baffled by our Vonage router (a story for another post). In spite of his confusion, the system worked more-or-less by the time he left, minus the Vonage and a setup program to be run on our PC.

The Digital TV quality is very good (although I currently only have standard def TVs). There are more channels than Comcast for less money, although those channels require rental of the set top box for each TV. I have a third set that is connected directly to the analog coax, and the channel selection there is much less than with Comcast, but I don't care. I was not impressed with the onsite tech, but the phone help was excellent. The hold time was very short and the problems were resolved quickly.

My actual download speed appears to be about 4.8Mbps using PC pitstop. This is suspiciously close to the 5Mbps option. This may be a limitation of the site, but I will have to look into it. I can't test the upload speed easily due to firewall issues, but I haven't made a serious attempt.

I don't have any real complaints, other than that I may be paying for 15M and getting only 5M. It would be nice to get a few more analog channels, but I'm still getting more for less, and happy to see the cable company monopoly crumbling at last.

Unified Communications - What Does That Mean?

UC is one of those vision buzz words, sort of like convergence, where the reality is not as close as those pushing the vision would like you to believe. My own employer is probably on the cutting edge when it comes to VoIP, Videoconferencing, and Data Sharing, but it is still an ad hoc process and the enabling technology of presence is still limited to manual call forwarding and out-of-office email responses.

But that's not what this is about. Zeus Kerravala, senior VP at Yankee Group, recently gave a web cast that gives as good a description of what and where UC is as any I've seen. Mr Kerravala gives his definition of UC, why it will become important, and the remaining barriers to it's widespread deployment.

He says it much better than I do, but here are some of my take-aways:

• UC is about anytime / anybody communications within the extended enterprise. By extended, he means suppliers, manufacturers, service providers, channels, and customers. These separate entities function best when they work together.


• The shift away from separate telecoms and data networks toward all IP is an enabling factor. It allows multiple heterogeneous communications products to work together seamlessly (potentially). VoIP is not the enabling technology, but most UC integrators are using VoIP as a foundation. VoIP is a step toward presence, or the ability of the system to locate users and connect to them using the available medium.


• One motivation is to increase productivity. The thesis is that if you can increase the productivity of 10000 individuals by 5%, the impact far outweighs a much larger percentage cost to IT and infrastructure.


• A lot of the pieces are here now, but the implementation is ad hoc and complex, limited to power users and techno geeks. The user must be aware of devices, transports, bandwidth, etc, and the experience is inconsistent and disappointing.

The Legend of Spyro, a New Beginning: XBOX Game Review

This review was provided by CheeseBallMania. I have made some minor edits...

I bought this game new at BestBuy for $49.99 right after Christmas 2006. The game shows origin of Spyro the dragon and his adventures with his dragonfly friend Sparx. The game is a third person game in the Action / Adventure genre and is rated E-10. There are some interesting cut scenes that pop in sort of randomly to tell the story.

I was a bit disappointed with this game because it was short. I finished the whole thing in about 6 hours of total play time. Killing enemies was tough, but there were just not enough levels. But the game play is good and I liked the storyline. Compared to the original, you also have more breath abilities such as fire breath, electric breath, ice breath, and earth breath.

Rating out of 5:

• Graphics 4


• Storyline 3.5


• Gameplay 4


• Overall-3.8

DoD Describes Novel Medical Applications of Military R&D

The Feb 07 issue of Defense Tech Briefs describes 3 high tech spinoffs of military R&D to medical diagnostics and treatment.

The first innovation out of the US Army Aeromedical Lab uses a portable ultrasound transducer to create a noise-immune stethoscope. A 2.3MHz ultrasound signal is transmitted into the patient's body and reflects off the moving tissues. The reflection is then demodulated into the audible range to create sounds that are sent to earbuds. Because the ultrasound signals are well outside the typical acoustic background, such a device can be used in high-noise environments, such as an evacuation helicopter where levels up to 120dB are possible.

The second application, developed by Celsion Canada, uses Adaptive Phased Array radar technology to focus heating microwaves for the treatment of breast cancer. Localized heating is believed to accelerate tumor cell death when combined with chemotherapy. The phased array allows the microwaves to be focused at points deep in the body without harming surrounding tissues.

Finally, NVE Corporation has developled nano-scale electron spin sensors that are used to tune pacemakers from outside the body. These sensors allow communications with the device using magnetic fields, enhancing the sensitivity and reliability compared to the reed switches that they are designed to replace.

AVGFree - Very good free anti-virus software

Unless you never connect your PC to a network (and since you are reading this, you do), anti-virus protection and removal is a constant concern. Using a combination of different tools periodically can give significantly better coverage than choosing a single tool.

While trying to clean up a particularly troublesome worm I was referred to AVGFree from Grisoft. Grisoft sells a swath of protection software for viruses, spam, malware, and spyware, but they also give away a very effective anti virus package called AVGFree. This free version comes without some of the bells and whistles of their commercial products, but as far as I can tell, the virus detection and cleaning is complete. They have some use restrictions (see the website), but nothing that would affect the average home PC user.

The software will self-update and self-scan based on time of day if you set it up that way, or allow manual control through a simple panel. It will also scan incoming and outgoing emails. Updates come out every day or two, download quickly, and usually don't require a reboot. I have been running it regularaly for about a month without any problems and it seems to happily coexist with Symantec AV and Spybot.

Just today, Grisoft had a press release announcing that they had

"earned Checkmark certification from West Coast Labs on Windows Vista Business
Edition"

so they will probably be around for a while. Whatever - it's Free!