The other day, the CEO of VoIPtel - mr Jan Bjørkhaug, visited my office to tell me about some exciting development from ATCOM. ATCOM is a producer of various VoIP equipment, and I am very found of their IP0x line of PBXes. VoIPtel is the European distributor of ATCOM products.

Last year I had the chance to talk directly to representatives from ATCOM and gave them my feedback on the lack of modularity in their IP0x-line.

What I heard the other day is nearly good news: Modularity - and a steel chassis. No more plastic, no more either-this-or-that regarding BRI, FXO or FXS. Actually - we still will have to make a choice - but it's much easier now.

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When I took the first look at Freesentral I immediately saw the fresh approach to Open Source PBX configuration. It's fresh due to not being bloated like a few other contenders out there.

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The picture on the left is an actual screen shot of the Skype start-up screen on my Nokia E71.

Pretty cool - is it not?

In December 2009, there was a posting on the Skype website announcing the first beta of Skype on the Symbian (read: Nokia E and N series) platform.

I have now taken the Skype client for a prolonged test-drive - this is a very good product.

Update after publishing this article:

What you read in this post is my experiences with the beta release of the Skype client - you can now download the release version from Skype For Symbian web page. The annoyances mentioned in this article is still present in the production version, and the main menu has a added feature. However, for all practical purposes, the behavior of the beta version mentioned in this article is the same as the released version.

One thing worth mentioning, is that Skype have added the ability to easily do Skype Out call from the main menu.

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I have never really bothered to dig into YATE. I have seen this project as a small niche product in the Open Source Telephony sphere. That said, YATE have quite a few nice features.

With the release of Freesentral I finally have a excellent reason for taking a look into YATE.

Even better, if you need a simple way to set up an IP based PBX I can really recommend the Freesentral GUI. The GUI is clear and simple - really uncluttered compared to other front ends.

Even if the project seems to be very young, the GUI is rock solid.

In my opinion, the only thing missing is a ready-to-play distribution.

If you are tired of FreePBX and it's cousins - and if you need something simple and easy to us, you should really check out Freesentral.

Back in August 2009 I did a guest appearance on the VoIP Users Conference speaking about VoIP clients for mobile telephones. I briefly touched on to a few offerings for the iPhone and iPod Touch (a.k.a. i-Devices). This inspired Randy a.k.a @voipusers to do a review of a few of the available offerings on i-Devices.

His article, along with my Fianceè buying herself an iPhone, prompted me to take a closer look at a few of the offerings available.

I have given SIP clients on the iPhone and iPod Touch a generic name: iVoIP Client(s). Likewise, an iDevice is a generic term for both the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

The following clients have been tested:

• iPico from MailVision Ltd
• iSIP from VNET Corporation
• WeePhone from Justin Bray
• Acrobits Softphone from Acrobits
• Media5-fone from Media5 Corporation

For completeness I have also taken a quick look at the SIP function in both Fring and Nimbuzz, two free (as in beer) offerings available for the iDevices.

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Some time ago I did a posting about VoIP Supply announcing that they would begin to sell a IAX phone. At the time of release, they had a contest where one could win one of these phones. Usually I am not very into contests, but when someone asked me nicely if I was willing to write a "Why is IAX {cooler,better,more suiteable} than SIP", and submit this to their contest, I did oblige.

Given that VoIP Supply is one of the few companies around that I consider myself to be a fan of, I had no problem doing this. VoIP Supply are very good, and if they did ship their hardware with Euro-type power adapters I would probably be buying most of my stuff from them. Unfortunately they do not.

Now back to the Citel C-4110 VoIP Supply sent me back in May 2009.

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My company, Azuralis, is expanding our business into the UK market. So far we have had used a international DID aggregator with a limited SIP trunk of only a few channels.

Now we need at least 30 channels for Q3 2009, and probably around 120 channels for Q1 2010. Really not a big number of channels - but given our technical background, we probably are a "dream customer" with no support and paying our bills on time.

When I started digging into the matter, I thought that this is probably a walk in the park; I know the language, I understand the technology, and - I know a thing or two about the UK numbering plan.

Oh, boy, how wrong I was.

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