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Building a Personal VoIP System

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Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could have easily been calling eachother by our email (SIP URIs) addresses. It is a shame that instead we got a dozen walled gardens when it comes to making voice/video calls over the internet.

Can you share some resources explaining how this could be set up?

One way was SIP and SRV DNS records. Seemed like it had some of the problems email has except it’s a phone ringing instead of spam.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#22
I put in an asterix system 20 years ago, it still runs great, all I've done has been to replace a couple of dying (RAIDed) drives. I live in NZ used to live in the Bay Area, NZ trunks come in from a local SIP provider and use an Ooma box for our old US phone number, in home we had 5 FXSs and a sip phone in my office - everyone had a phone in their bedroom, and a couple on public spaces.

It's set up so that all incoming calls hit a voice prompt saying which 1-digit extension you should enter to get who (this stops 99% of phone spam) - everyone gets a voicemail on their extension which rings in their bedroom and rolls over to the common spaces - and everyone gets a unique ring cadence, my daughter who at one point got 80% of the phone calls got the 2 short rings.

The kids have gone, we've moved to a smaller house, only 2 extensions, but that same hardware soldiers on (and still stops 99% of the spam - I've had 1 call in the past year)

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#23
post #10

Does anyone have SIP setup on their domain? Are there many spam calls these days?

I've written about it elsewhere in this thread but I've found that a simple vopice menu that has a message (that might sound like a voicemail to a spammer's dial computer) and that requires people dialing in to press one key stops 99% of spammers

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#24
post #17
post #10

Does anyone have SIP setup on their domain? Are there many spam calls these days?

Other way around, there are bots testing if they can use your systems for placing spam calls.

Yep, if I set 'Allow Incoming SIP Messages from SIP Proxy Only' to 'no' (allows direct SIP-SIP calls) on my home VoIP service, I'll get a silent call from '500' about every minute or so.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#25
VoIP used to be standard on phones, even mobile smartphones. So I setup Asterisk so that family members could call each others as long as they where on WIfi. Unfortunately VoIP is no longer a built in standard so you need to download an app to use it. Before you could just dail 1 and my phone would ring, dail 2 and you would reach my wife.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#26
> Use a SIP Application Layer Gateway. This is a horrible feature offered by some routers. Basically, it deep-packet-inspects your SIP traffic, rewrites the headers, and creates port forwards on-the-fly to make sure the inbound audio stream makes its way to your device. SIP ALGs are a total hack and notoriously buggy.

Yes, these hacky ALG features also allowed internet users to access internal IPs on arbitrary services (!); named “remote arbitrary firewall pinhole control”. The attack was published in 2020 and named NAT slipstreaming [1].

[1] https://samy.pl/slipstream/

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#27
post #14

Has someone good experience with a VoIP-Provider (not OVH or Sipgate) in Europe?

I'm eagerly awaiting jmp.chat to branch out into Europe (they have plans, but no concrete timeline).

I'm curious why not sipgate, which I currently use, or Twilio which I half-use (it mostly forwarded to my own Asterisk server, which needs some attention).

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#29
You can install Acrobits Groundwire or Bria. Those support PUSH notification for incoming calls. Push is better than missing calls because the app got killed, or forcing the app to run 24/7 and severely shortening battery runtime. But the call quality will never be as good as the native phone app as that gets QCI prioritization.

Re: Building a Personal VoIP System

#30

my wife had a requirement: be able to have an intercom for the house and shed. We used to have a baby monitor, but that was one way, for one room. Now we need many more rooms to talk to each other. I looked at some intercoms on amazon/ebay, they are all RF and a bit shit. I saw some wifi ones, but nothing cheap enough to take a punt on. I did think about trying to make something with an ESP32, but that would be too h…

I actually run 7962g + FreePBX too, using sccp_manager and phone-integrated SSL-VPN. It took more hair pulling and shady patching than the SIP route, but now I can make intercom calls over the Internet! That way I don't need a direct L1/L2 link between "offices". Solves NAT problems too, because it's all in-band signaling and media transport over single TCP connection.
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