What Is VoIP Peering?

I use to play a simulation called Falcon 4.0 in the late nineties and I use to play it online with friends and we would fly missions together. We would stay in touch with each other in the virtual skies using a little comms program called Roger Wilco. It would allow us to stay in touch with each other and coordinate attacks and such. unbeknownst to me I was using VoIP peering and didn't even know it. Peering is when two or more VoIP products gets together and 'talks' with each other. It could be a SIP based phone-to-phone call, a phone-to-computer running MSN Messenger, or a computer-to-computer using Skype for example. It is also when the telephone system is bypassed to complete the call. So to be VoIP peering you need two things in place. First you have to bypass the traditional phone system and second the call needs to be placed between two VoIP devices.

DIDX.net is poised to offer VoIP peering with ALL its numbers that are in use. DIDX.net is able to do this because all of its DIDs terminate on SIP (or AIX2) phones, devices, or other computers running the required software.

Buying DIDs 1-2-3

Buying DID numbers just got easier with the help of VoipSwitch's VSPortal. They have incorporated the DIDX API into their VSPortal making the buying of DID numbers that much simpler, I've embedded the video of it above for those who wish to watch it. It is a short video that get to the point.

Like most sites it starts off with you submitting you user name and password. You then choose a location and the portal will give you availability by area code and price. You pick the numbers you want from the inventory listed and they show in your local inventory ready to use. It really can't be much easier than that.

Vertical Or Horizontal?

Today I was asked if didx.net was in a vertical or horizontal market and I was not sure of the answer. One hand we will buy and sell phone numbers through the thousands of CLEC's and independent businesses we deal with daily. That would be the vertical market. The horizontal market , on the other hand consists of the variety of customers we have, i.e. a steel fabricator or small hotel. Since I'm not sure, I''ll just look up the differences and decide for myself.

According to the Wikipedia a vertical market is " a group of similar businesses and customers which engage in trade based on specific and specialized needs." While we have a wide range of customers they do have one thing in common. They all have a softswitch in place.

On the other side is the horizontal market and here is what Wikipedia says."A horizontal market is a market which meets a given need of a wide variety of industries, rather than a specific one." I just don't see didx.net as falling into this catagory. Given we do have a wide range of customers to work with they all need that 'softswitch' to buy and sell from us so I have to go with didx.net is in a vertical market.

A Good Post

An article I read titled "Defensively Installing A VoIP Telephone Adapter" makes for a good, quick read. If you are looking at getting a Vonage type of service I would give this article a look-see first

Cvent.com review

A business associate / friend of mine asked me to do a review of this site since I have some experience in ordering stuff needed for exhibitions and trade shows for your booth. I will focus on their Event Management products/services since this is their service we would use the most. You can reach Cvent.com here if you have any inquires.

It starts by you filling out some forms about your company and yourself. click the "Next" button to continue kind of stuff. Since I'm doing the Event Management thing it lets me search four types of venues. Sleeping rooms, meeting rooms, lunch/dinner meetings and service providers. I'll use the Communicasia 2009 show as our test subject and since I will be using a test account from Cvent.com I really cannot order anything, thus 'no harm, no foul'.

First I will see what trying to get room pricing is like. I whip up a new RFP and go through several screens of Q&A regarding my location and venue of choice until I get to search the hotels. I get back over eighty results with a picture of the property and a blurb about the hotel for each one. The fist thing I noticed was lacking was a distance to the convention center from the hotels. We like to walk to the show in the mornings so proximity to the convention center is important to us. You also don't get pricing immediately. You submit your RFP and expect it back by a certain date so you can base your decisions on it. Personally I would go with expedia.com, travelocity.com, or whatever your choice-of-the-day might be.

Next I thought about ordering electricity for the booth. I thought that would fall under the 'Service Providers' category so I clicked on it. It listed over a half-dozen providers such as Entertainment and Food Service, but alas no electrical. So I performed searches of the Singapore area foe entertainment and food service and came up empty handed also. I myself would use myfreemanonline.com to procure any services needed for the show as well as stuff for the booth.

In all fairness the upcoming show I used was in a distant city-state and maybe Cvent does stuff in the Americas a bit differently. They claim to be an event planner so maybe I'm using them as the wrong tool. Like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I was told by a co-worker that their web surveying software works pretty good.

Take 2

For those of you not in the know, in my spare time I'm busy fighting cancer. The doc said the brain MRI scan looked good. Just some residual surgery stuff was showing up on the scan. The chest scan told another story though. That lung tumor was growing again and would require more chemotherapy. oh wow, fun in the sun as you know it. The doc said I was going for my "2nd Line" treatment and the drug he was using was approved for this. He is using Taxotere, and the generic name for it is Docetaxtel.

I have gone for my second treatment as of yesterday and so-far-so-good. No nausea or vommiting as of yet, so that is a good thing. Maybe if I remember to take my anti-nausea pills on schedule I won't have near the problems.

If you want to learn more about the various types of chemotherapy try this site.
http://chemocare.com

VPN Tunnels, Oh What Fun.

A few years back I was tasked by the boss to create a secure connection between one of our servers and a really big telco. I'll call them Acme Telcom to protect the innocent. He also wanted to use an opensouce solution. I had to pass a testing phase first and Acme Telcom said that the only the only people to have any success with it in the past used BSD as the operating system and blah-blah programs to get the VPN tunnel working.

Well BSD wasn't going to work for me since the server used some flavor of Linux (the exact name escapes me at this moment) and after reading some reviews and have a good-old look at the few programs out there I settled in on Openswan. I've never seen it written anywhere but I think
it is an acronym for Opensouce Secure Wide Area Network and the program allows you to create secure connections across the web.

I wasn't able to find much help on the web, which I considered kind of weird so I got the company to plunk down the bucks to buy me the book "Openswan" by Paul Wouters and Ken Bantoft, and published by Packt Publishing. The book was full of options for the program itself and discussed in chapter 9, interoperability with other vendor implementations. Which is definitely what I was looking for. All in all it was a good read and I would recommend it for its covering of the history of IPSEC alone.

Within a week of reading this book I was able to go from not knowing squat about VPN tunnelling to having five tunnels running simultaneously from the same server and pushing SIP messaging across said tunnels to Amce Telcom's POPS. Not to shabby if I say so myself considering I was the first to do this with Acme and Linux.