[CUWiN-Dev] Re: VoIP Test In Ghana

[William Waites]

On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 08:04:03AM +0000, John Atkinson wrote:
> 
> >2. Will users dial each other directly by IP address?
> 
> Yeah, that's the way it works.  I don't want it to be like that, but I 
> don't want traffic from VoIP using the already saturated Internet 
> connection.  I heard of a way to hack Skype around to work on a corporate 
> LAN, but I haven't tried anything.  I'm guessing that if we used something 
> like asterisk somewhere on the mesh then IP would be translated into Names 
> at a database there; so much more user friendly.  SJphone isn't horrible 
> though, it has a phonebook which can equate IP's to Names, and it has some 
> feature called "neighborhood" which tries to automatically detect other 
> SJphone hosts nearby.

You really want a local SIP proxy to mediate between the
users -- I personally would tend to use OpenSER rather than 
Asterisk for this task.

The problem with equating IPs to names is it assumes IPs
are stable, always the same. This is almost never true over
the life of a network -- in fact it's one of the reasons
for DNS existing.

I wouldn't waste time with Skype -- it's proprietary and
not designed to be hacked to do anything but send voice
packets through the NSA's servers ;) Much better to use
some of the excellent Free Software available that easily
replaces it.

If you need any help configuring this stuff, just send a note,
I'd be more than happy to help...

On a related note -- who do you get Internet access from
in Ghana? Is it a VSAT link? I'm  working on a project in
Chad that badly needs Internet access and I'm trying
to find a good carrier...

Cheers,
-w

--
William Waites
Okapi Consulting
http://www.okapi.cc