CentOS/SL Platform

A VPN for All Seasons: Introducing NeoRouter v2

A VPN for All Seasons: Introducing NeoRouter v2

Monday, August 21, 2017

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Today, we want to revisit our favorite client-server VPN, NeoRouter. It’s included with all versions of Incredible PBX® and eases the pain of setting up air-tight firewalls as well as High Availability (HA) redundant servers with VoIP. NeoRouter relies upon a central server and uses a star topology to connect remote nodes. The major difference between NeoRouter and PPTP VPNs is that only registered devices participate in the virtual private network so there is no direct access to other machines… Read More ›

Twofer Tuesday: $1.50 Cloud Bargains for VoIP Deployments

Twofer Tuesday: $1.50 Cloud Bargains for VoIP Deployments

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

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We’ve been big fans of $5/month VPS offerings of Digital Ocean and Vultr for many years. When Vultr reduced their lowest tier to $2.50/month, we were ecstatic. These weren’t ideal VoIP platforms because of their 512MB memory constraint, but they were perfectly suitable as a sandbox for experimentation. And then along came OVH with a 2GB VPS that was nearly perfect for VoIP at $3.49/month. As we all know, the Earth does not stand still, and WootHosting now has once… Read More ›

Finding the Perfect Phone Solution for Small Organizations

Finding the Perfect Phone Solution for Small Organizations

Monday, August 7, 2017

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Many of us wear several hats during our business careers. One of those invariably is managing a community organization of some flavor. We frequently are asked for advice on what the ideal telephony solution would be for such an organization. The reason for the inquiries typically is because the Bell Sisters have now jacked up the cost of a single, business phone line to well over $100 a month. And that gets you local calls only unless you sign up… Read More ›

Almost Free: Professional Grade TTS Comes to Issabel 4

Almost Free: Professional Grade TTS Comes to Issabel 4

Monday, July 31, 2017

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There’s no need to be chained to your TV for breaking news and weather forecasts when they can be as close as the nearest VoIP phone. Today we’re elevating text to speech with Issabel to commercial-quality. We’re wrapping up our month-long romance with Issabel 4 by introducing IBM’s Bluemix TTS service for Incredible PBX®. It’s surprisingly affordable. The first million characters of text-to-speech synthesis are FREE every month so, for most users, upgrading to commercial quality speech synthesis is a… Read More ›

The Perfect Pair: Flawless VoIP with Issabel 4 and 3CX

The Perfect Pair: Flawless VoIP with Issabel 4 and 3CX

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

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We continue our Issabel 4 adventure today with a VoIP match made in heaven. Today, we’ll take advantage of the Nerd Vittles free 3CX server offering and interconnect it with an Issabel 4 PBX to enjoy the best of both worlds. From Issabel extensions, you can call your 3CX Clients by dialing 4 digits. From 3CX Clients, you can call Issabel extensions as well as your Asterisk® applications in the same way with the added bonus of being able to… Read More ›

Leap Into Summer: Introducing Incredible PBX for Issabel

Leap Into Summer: Introducing Incredible PBX for Issabel

Monday, July 10, 2017

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NEWS FLASH: A new release of Incredible PBX for Issabel is now available. Tutorial is here. If you didn’t already know, we’ve always liked free. No strings, no gotchas, no demoware, and no legal shenanigans. That’s why our introduction of Issabel 4 last week was such a breath of fresh air. While there’s now an awesome free version of 3CX, the open source community has had a very long dry spell. So today we celebrate a decade of adding fun… Read More ›

Choosing the Best (free) PBX for SOHO Deployments

Choosing the Best (free) PBX for SOHO Deployments

Monday, May 8, 2017

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[iframe-popup id="6″] When it comes to choices in free PBXs, times have indeed changed. A decade ago your options went something like this. There was Asterisk@Home or Asterisk@Home. Then along came trixbox® and Elastix® and PBX in a Flash™ and AsteriskNOW®. What remained constant throughout this evolution was the underlying Asterisk® platform. With the exception of Digium’s offering, the remaining products all included the FreePBX® GUI. Then came a whole new way of looking at things with FreeSWITCH®. Another morphing… Read More ›

IBM's Speech Recognition Engine Comes to Asterisk

IBM’s Speech Recognition Engine Comes to Asterisk

Monday, March 20, 2017

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Eight years ago, we introduced transcription for Asterisk® voicemail messages. When the messages were delivered by email, you got both a recording and the transcribed text courtesy of Google. As with most things Google, the licensing terms changed regularly and voicemail transcription became more convoluted until it became next to worthless. Today we begin our new exploration of IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud. It offers a rich collection of services at unbelievably low price points. We’re kicking things off by introducing… Read More ›