Yesterday I was reading how virtually worthless Vonage stock is now. Analysts question why anyone would want to get into the landline business now, with the assumption that VoIP is essentially landline service provided over broadband. I know at least two friends who have eschewed landlines completely, relying instead on their mobile phones for their service. It kind of makes sense: why have a number anchored to your house when you’re always on the go?

Then I had to reset my Asterisk box this morning as it had gotten hung somehow overnight. It too has a landline connecting it to Bellsouth. I began to think: what a waste! Why am I paying Bellsouth close to $40/month for service with half the features of my mobile phone service? Why am I paying two bills for two separate phone services?

Do you know what would make Bellsouth go positively ape-shit with fear? Someone selling adapters to connect your inside phone lines straight to your cellphone. No landline would be needed. Just like the cradles used to pipe your calls through an amplified speaker in your car, you would just plug a cable into your mobile phone and your inside telephones would magically make their calls through your mobile phone. No fussing with ‘talk’ and ‘end’ buttons: just use it like a regular phone.

Most mobile phone service providers have “family” plans which allow you to share minutes with phones in your family. You could hook up your home to the same number as your “mobile” mobile for something like $10/month extra and have the best of all worlds.

So the question I have about this is, would this provide any real benefit not already present in simply using a mobile phone in your home? Personally, I like the reduced RF exposure it would bring, as the caller wouldn’t be right next to the antenna during a call. Admittedly, though, only geeks like me worry about that kind of stuff. I would also like not having to hunt for my mobile phone when I need to make a call: wired phones tend not to walk off. Lastly, I would like not having to worry about whether my mobile was charged or not: a wired adapter would keep it always topped off.

Most importantly, though, I’d love to make Bellsouth go ape-shit with fear! The days of stodgy old phone service are long gone. Time to shake things up!

ISS discovered and announced two flaws in Asterisk which present security issues. The first is a simple denial of service attack. The other is an IAX denial of service amplification attack. Either attack could be used to shut down your server. The amplification attack could be used to flood other networks.

An upgrade to 1.2.10 is available from Digium on their FTP site.

The more Asterisk installations I do, the more I begin to realize how dumb it is to funnel each one’s calls out to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). As the number of VoIP phone systems grows, it makes sense to tie them together directly, rather than send them through the hundred-year-old technology which is the traditional telephone system. The glue that will bind all this together is called ENUM. ENUM is described in RFC-2916 as a way of including phone numbers in DNS records.

On a traditional PBX, the number an internal user dials is compared to a dialplan, parsed to determine if its a long-distance, local, or international call, and is then sent off appropriately. The call goes out through an expensive analog or digital T1 trunk to get where it is going, from originating PBX to the PSTN to the terminating PBX.

On an ENUM-enabled PBX, the dialplan first checks to see if the number can be looked up in DNS. If so, it uses the resulting IP address to send the call to the termination point over the Internet for free! The ENUM-enabled call goes from the originating PBX directly to the terminating PBX! No expensive trunks, no long-distance charges.

ENUM is not just for routing around expensive phone charges, however. It can be used to link a phone number to an email address, a website, instant messages. You name it! It opens the door to whole new ways of communication. Instead of dumbing down a sophisticated VoIP system to fit the creaky, century-old paradigm, ENUM sets it free.

I’m definitely going to learn more about this exciting new service.

I spent an hour or more hacking the Linksys PAP2 box that used to be used with Vonage. The box has been collecting dust in my office after being “pulled from service” months ago. So really I had nothing to lose if I broke it.

Popping the lid showed me a spot on the PC board where a reset switch was planned but never added. Shorting these leads caused the box to apparently reset itself (duh!). It still got me no closer to unlocking it, though. I’m not sure what a reset gets you.

I was able to locate new firmware for flashing, but no way to really flash it. I tried feeding it a custom XML config file but didn’t get too far with that, either. In spite of these obstacles, I do feel I’m getting closer to making this box useful again by getting it connected to Asterisk.