This project, one of four East of England FOSS projects funded by ChangeUp, is a pilot to test the viability of a FOSS based private VOIP system for use by the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS). For this pilot project we have concentrated on providing a limited set of initial features that can be built on later. Voluntary and Community Organisations in the East of England that want to participate in using the system should contact chrisbailey@ciac.org.uk.

The initial system provides the following to all users as standard:

  Free VOIP phone calls between all users of the system.
  Voicemail, including voicemail to email.
  Conference calls.
  Call forwarding.
  Call parking.
  A connection between the standard phone service and this private VOIP system. This is via a phone line at Cambridge Independent Advice Centre (CIAC). It is only enabled for incoming calls into the VOIP system at the moment as allowing calls out would mean everybody on the system could use CIAC’s phone for free!
  A connection into the Free World Dialup (FWD) VOIP system enabling calls to be routed between users of our system and users of the FWD system. Although the most popular commercial VOIP system at the moment is Skype this uses closed standards of its own making it much more difficult to interface with the Skype system. We have not attempted to do so.

An extra features that can be provided on request is a Call Centre style queueing system. This includes all the normal features of such a system (details on request). We did not implement this as standard as we thought it would probably only be of limited use to most VCOs.

Future expansion of the system

This initial VOIP system can, at a further stage, be added to with a range of additional features. These include:

  Fax services, including fax to pdf and fax to email.
  Video conferencing and whiteboard.
  Text to speech services - reading out of emails over the phone, for instance.

We can also expand the size of the system by adding more VOIP servers. This initial system is based on a single server based at CIAC. We estimate that it can handle a total of about 20 people using their VOIP phones at the same time. This number could be much larger if SDSL rather than ADSL was used. ADSL gives a fast broadband down speed, but a relatively low up speed. SDSL provides the same speed both ways. VOIP uses both directions equally, so is considerably restricted by using ADSL rather than SDSL. Unfortunately, the development of SDSL services in the UK has been something of a disaster [1] with ridiculously high pricing at the moment. We could set up additional SDSL servers outside the UK. Doing this would not affect VOIP calls within our system, but would obviously make interfacing these servers with the UK phone system prohibitive.

Chris Bailey

chrisbailey@ciac.org.uk

VCS VOIP Number: 201