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The disruptive influence of IP Telephony By Anton Raharja VoIP Rakyat – http://www.voiprakyat.or.id anton@itmn.co.id - 62 848 1001 82807. VoIP Rakyat. Topics. Making use of Open Standards to build a low-costs telecommunications service
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The disruptive influence of IP Telephony By Anton Raharja VoIP Rakyat – http://www.voiprakyat.or.id anton@itmn.co.id - 62 848 1001 82807 VoIP Rakyat
Topics Making use of Open Standards to build a low-costs telecommunications service Balancing customers expectations for successful customer retention Adding value to VoIP by leveraging an online community
Who We Are VoIP Rakyat Local VoIP Service Provider, but without ITKP (and ITSP license issued by Indonesian government) Online community talks and discuss various VoIP topics in Indonesia Powered by FOSS people, endorse by many Indonesia internet-based communities (ISP, RT/RW Net., ICT Centre, some government agency)
Behind the Scene People Anton Raharja (Founder and developer) Onno W. Purbo (IT Expert, wrote more than 40 IT books, published hundreds of IT articles in Indonesia) Sponsorship Acer Indonesia (not official, but they did provide VoIP Rakyat with Acer Altos G530, a Server with quad core Xeon 3 GHz, free to use) IDC Indonesia, a company served Data Center and hosts Indonesia Internet eXchange (IIX). We put our donated server on the fastest data center available from most Indonesian network
What We Do VoIP Rakyat provides: VoIP Service Provider Making telephone calls over the Internet possible or a PC-to-PC calling Local ENUM directory service, map local PSTN number into SIP addresses and create virtual E.164 number (connected with e164.or.id) Endorse VoIP Technology implementations by non-telco-operator in education, business and community environments trough continuous trainings, seminars and workshops.
Products VoIP Rakyat develops and maintains: PlayVoIP Free and Open Source Software for managing Asterisk (IP-PBX software) Can be used to create and maintain VoIP network URL: http://playvoip.sourceforge.net
Products (2) VoIP Rakyat Communicator Free and Open Source Software that enables voice, video and IM sessions based on open protocol such as: XMPP, SIP and IAX2 This application is a fork of Pandion, a great IM XMPP based software, and Spark, another great IM XMPP based FOSS
Product (3) Briker IP PBX Briker is a Linux Distribution that auto-magically convert computers into a powerful Private Branch eXchange machine with IP communication built-in http://www.briker.org Like TrixBox? AsteriskNow? Elastix?...
Services VoIP Rakyat provide VoIP services Free voice and video call, and conference. We did it pretty easy thanks to softphone available for free from CounterPath, X-Lite 3.0
Services (2) VoIP Rakyat served community by providing as much knowledge as possible Discussion forum and mailing list, open to everyone interested in VoIP. Served Indonesian, most topics are in Bahasa. A VoIP news portal. This service now suspended waiting for better news or portal engine to finish. Available for free VoIP user guides and manuals. All documents are in Bahasa, most of them intended for users, some for administrators. As of now, there are manuals for dozens of VoIP devices and applications ready to be published, waiting for the new portal engine to finish.
Services (3) VoIP Rakyat try to touch as many people as possible by serving an online community audioBlogs, is a voice recorder system. Users can record their voice and publish it on VoIP Rakyat website for listeners to comment, and also attached the voice on their own blogs or websites.
Services (4) videoBlogs. VoIP Rakyat provides a simple streaming-youtube-like feature, a place for registered users can upload their own video, and visitors to watch them and make comments.
Services (5) In order to get attention as much as possible from IT communities, VoIP Rakyat create and maintain another VoIP related service. A directory service that holds a map of E.164 phone numbers to SIP addresses, an ENUM service. As of now, there are thousands of phone number mapped ENUM service used for multilateral peering among companies, ISP and universities. Currently VoIP Rakyat holds records of not more than 20 institutions peered with, but will increase as more people understands VoIP.
Services (6) Another service which brought back attentions and highlights VoIP Rakyat, with the help of ICT Centre, conducts training on VoIP. Usualy to introduce new devices, devices on local market and basic knowledge on VoIP. A making-your-own style training. Onno W. Purbo is a respected IT experts, a speaker on many IT seminars and workshops. You can say that he’s having breakfast in different cities each day. With his help VoIP Rakyat gains a lot of highlights from media.
Media Highlights There were some talk shows about VoIP and VoIP Rakyat, and several other footages, including about VoIP Rakyat developers on MetroTV, one of the nation-wide TV Broadcasts. There were at least a dozen column about VoIP Rakyat in several local mainstream media like Kompas.
Why We Do It Historical event Founded sometime in year 2003, following the success of VoIP Merdeka (The Maverick VoIP Network, early project that brought nation-wide VoIP euphoria) But the success was no match to VoIP Merdeka. By the time VoIP Rakyat established the euphoria was still there but slowly diminished. Internet infrastructure was not good enough (really bad) for most Indonesian. VoIP Rakyat hibernated at 2004, only a year after. VoIP Rakyat reborn at late 2005 with more features and new sponsors. In 2006, VoIP Rakyat managed to served at least 100,000 minutes VoIP calls. As of now, already reaching 567,000 minutes and hopes to double-up current number at the end of this year. Small number compared to telco traffics, but big enough as an example of community VoIP service implementations in Indonesia.
Why We Do It (2) Background VoIP is a new technology for most Indonesian. We think we can help to make it obsolete by promoting the use of VoIP for home and/or office daily life Internet in Indonesia are so depending on foreign services. We think we can help by creating another local content, as fun as online game as important as updated local news Telecommunication fee is expensive due to expensive investments (among other thing). We think we can help by building an alternative using relatively cheaper tools, which everyone can do it
Why We Do It (3) The real reasons We can do it easily. There are many applications can be use as VoIP server. VoIP Rakyat based on Asterisk. And some other Free and/or Open Source applications served as softphones. VoIP devices for end-users also available on local market with relatively cheap price tags. We can show it easily. Infrastructure aren’t that bad compared to year 2003-2004 when we first established. Wireless network has become a part of Indonesian IT-daily-life. In most big cities (and surrounds), you can find what we call RT/RW net, another community-based project, focus on wireless network deployment. Broadband providers may introduce expensive Internet access, but RT/RW net provides lower rate Internet access, by sharing small International bandwidth and wide IIX bandwidth. We really need other solutions (up until telco-operators and governments provides better) for communicating each other.
Usage Statistics Some raw statistics gathered on VoIP Rakyat activities Registered users around 77,770 users Active users (they are users with more than 5 minutes of VoIP calls) around 22,940 users Served calls around 320,000 calls Served minutes around 567,808 minutes Concurrent calls around 90 calls Average online phones (direct connect) around 500 users per day
Server Side Applications Available for free application servers for VoIP Asterisk Is an IP-PBX software. Provides PBX functions for IP-based network. Supports open protocol such as SIP, IAX2 and H.323. Very easy to configure, and stable for middle-sized VoIP network deployments. There are solutions to load-balanced it and high-availability. Provides transcoding, voicemail, conference and other interesting feature. Yate, Freeswitch, Callweaver Another rree IP-PBX software OpenSips and Kamailio Is a complete SIP proxy server. Handles hundred thousands of SIP concurrent calls. Axon Is an IP-PBX for Microsoft Windows users Very easy to install and configure
User Agents Available for free softphones (user agents) X-Lite 3.0 Featured with voice, video, IM and presence Supports full SIP protocol Supports three-way conference for voice and video Zoiper 2.0 Easy to install and configure Supports SIP and IAX protocol Ekiga For Linux users, very easy to configure Supports SIP and H.323 protocol
Other Tools Helper applications MediaProxy and stund MediaProxy Handles RTP traffic, making it possible to traverse NAT Stund provides STUN protocol, helps user agents to discover its public IP and the type of NAT Openfire Provides better IM and presence Provides multi-user text conference Supports XMPP Spark An XMPP client, works better with Openfire Source code in Java available licensed as LGPL (you can change it to whatever you need to) Supports XMPP extensions for P2P VoIP, Jingle protocol (this one endorsed and used by Google with their GoogleTalk) Multiplatform, supports Microsoft Windows, Linux and MAC Pandion An XMPP client Source code for customizations in HTML and Javascript Very easy to customize Have bunch of emoticons, end-users love it
Other Tools (2) Compact Solutions Trixbox, AsteriskNow, Briker, Elastix A set of tools for VoIP, includes Asterisk, merged into CentOS Linux Distributions Easy to use, has a lot of IP-PBX feature with a very nice GUI interface AstBill A set of tools including user and administrator interface. Has been used to manage clustered Asterisk handles thousands of users commercially A2Billing A set of tools to manage Calling Card service, can be used for billing application for Asterisk based solutions
Other Tools (3) Below are most used Open Source Content Management System. Those CMS has plugins to build your own Online Community website with audioBlogs, podcastings, videoBlogs, video streaming, online TV, forums and so on Drupal Joomla Mambo
How We Do It Current implementations on server side Linux SuSE distributions MySQL backend database Asterisk IP-PBX only. Some choose to have SER or OpenSER in front of Asterisk, but because our scale, we need only Asterisk PlayVoIP. Heavily customized, by adding it more plugins to support online community feature such as audioBlogs and videoBlogs Openfire. This one to handle the IM and presence service. Asterisk and Openfire looks-up the same database, thus leaving PlayVoIP easy tasks to handle just one entry for both server Stund. A STUN server to helps Asterisk and user agents traverse NAT. Most network are NATed
How We Do It (2) VoIP Rakyat recommends the following as user agents VoIP Rakyat Communicator Combining the IM and presence service from XMPP server based (Openfire) with IAX2 protocol server based (Asterisk) to get full sets of text-messaging features and easy to use VoIP protocol Other Softphones Zoiper 2.0 with IAX. First priority is to get users to use IAX-based softphone because IAX used only 1 port for both signalling and media, very easy to traverse NAT. And network administrator can go easy with it, either blocks it or allows it Next is to use X-Lite 3.0 as this softphone provides enhanced feature like video call and conference. IM and presence not recommended as it is based on SIMPLE which is not mature enough as messaging protocol (unless you want it the way they are now) Both softphone supports common codecs like ulaw, GSM and iLBC. For G.729 and G.723 we need to purchase license
How We Do It (3) Asterisk supports most codecs for voice and video, they are: For voice ulaw, GSM, iLBC, G.729, G.723, Speex For video H.261, H.263, H.263p and H.264 Some are pass-through only Since there are some users used devices (which is equipped with G.729 and G.723) VoIP Rakyat also supports both codecs, but using the free one from Intel
How We Do It (4) VoIP Rakyat recommends the use of iLBC or GSM codecs. Voice quality is not excellent but acceptable, and bandwidth around 32 kbps per call VoIP Rakyat does not recommend to choose ulaw due to most network in Indonesia have a very limited bandwidth, small enough to consider ulaw bandwidth (87 kbps per call) as ‘very big’ VoIP Rakyat also does not recommend to choose G.729 or G.723 (most users used free softphones which is not equipped with these codecs) thus Asterisk need to transcodes the channel, which is taking up more CPU
Bandwidth Considerations NEB, Nominal Ethernet Bandwidth, a calculations of bandwidth required after VoIP packets encoded and stream over ethernet network Some calculations http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk652/tk698/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094ae2.shtml
Facts We have only 1 server. Very good server specifications, but not enough for thousands of users We have limited bandwidth. IDC provides us only 256 kbps international, but 100 Mbps connected to IIX We do not have sophisticated softswitches
Facts (2) For most offices, Internet mainly used for browsing and emailing. For end-users, they also used it for online gaming We have users love to talk, but their partner mostly out of range (offnet). Availability comes first over call quality Need more than free telecommunications to bring more visitors on the website English is still a barrier to entry
Facts (3) Our target of users clearly internet-users from Indonesia, most of them are companies from big cities Even though we are connected to 100 Mbps IIX, most network have only 1 or 2 Mbps to IIX and shared into many terminals (PC or devices). End-users around 32 to 128 kbps to IIX That limited bandwidth used for browsing, emailing and online gaming too. There for we recommends iLBC codec instead of ulaw Call quality when using iLBC codec considered acceptable, and by using it end-users accommodates more channels
Facts (4) To replace expensive sophisticated softswitch, we use Open Source products. These days, Open Source products combined with good handle and care able to match-up with the commercial one For Asterisk, please use version 1.2 not the 1.4 For Openfire, you may use the latest version 3.3.x For Linux distributions, anything with kernel 2.6.x
Facts (5) There is nothing we can do up to now about offnet calls. Calls to PSTN or Mobile, terminate calls to local telco-operators, needs ITKP (an ITSP license). There are a lot of requirements to purchase it. 24 companies has the license Because of that, VoIP Rakyat playing on Internet domains only. A Close User Group (CUG) model, where companies or institutions already deploy internet implements VoIP between them. VoIP Rakyat works as a hub for CUGs Reported from some companies implements VoIP in CUG model, they are able to reduce the telecommunication budget up to 30%
Facts (6) VoIP Rakyat need to attract more visitors. More visitors means more attentions on VoIP VoIP Rakyat provides audioBlogs and videoBlogs to get new and maintain visitors Those features triple-up the pageviews and the number of visits (from unique and returning visitors)
Facts (7) In order to overcome the barrier to entry, user guides and manuals wrote in Bahasa. This process took up resources, but we have to do it Documents wrote in a step-by-step model, with lots of pictures and arrows
Opportunities Legal matters In Indonesia it is impossible to buy-and-sell minutes, unless you are a big company and able to purchase the license The law considered only taking care of outgoing calls, but not incoming calls. Incoming traffics are gray area, there are 2 major cases brought up by media about this
Opportunities (2) Internet Telephony does bring up a lot of attentions and highlights. But it doesn’t pay the bills. The server costs at least USD 3,000 one time The co-location at IDC costs at least USD 200 per month Internet calls expected to be free service
Opportunities (3) Fortunately ITSP nowadays can be managed by small team (of course the team scale up as the service leverages) VoIP Rakyat handled by 1 person Some other company (having ITSP license) handled by 1 to 4 persons A small ITSP with 500 customers in Thailand handled mainly by 1 person Online-community-enabled websites bring visitors. Turning them into cash is possible
Opportunities (4) Continuous training on VoIP, add-up some other technology training like Linux Training Seminars and workshops are also ways to gain more revenues. IT topics, especially VoIP, are hot subjects in Indonesia. Anton Raharja instructors for dozens of VoIP related training, workshops and seminars Onno W. Purbo done seminars and workshops all over Indonesia more than anyone. Several times overseas.
Opportunities (5) Pre-configured devices, bundled with VoIP Services is also another way to gain revenues Nowadays, there are a lot of companies need solutions to reduce their telecommunications budget for internal. This can be done in CUG model. Most cash comes from this type of project
Opportunities (6) Again, to build a low cost telecommunication solutions, you can always use Open Source products A company used AstBill with 11 Asterisk servers, and managed more than 7000 subscribers The cost of AstBill and Asterisk it self is zero Codecs costs are zero Protocols are open standards To customize it, mostly you need a team of PHP programmers and an expert in Asterisk
Summary VoIP Rakyat is the only online community focusing on wide spreading VoIP Technology to Indonesian Open Source products can be used to create low-cost production level telecommunications solutions To successfully gain acknowledges and hopefully turning them into cash, you need more than Free Calling, you need to create online community