Use Bluetooth cell / mobile phones as FXO devices using Asterisk

It is pretty old news but very interesting that, Asterisk Channel Driver to allow Bluetooth Cell/Mobile Phones to be used as FXO devices and Bluetooth Headsets as FXS devices

Features

• Supports multiple Bluetooth adapters
• Supports multiple Bluetooth devices
• Use cellphones and/or headsets
• Send and Receive SMS
• Presence Sensing
• Channel Groups for implementing ‘GSM Gateways’

The official Homepage is http://www.chan-mobile.org.

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Mark Spencer's Transcript (Skype for Asterisk)

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Googlified Messaging: Asterisk’s New Best Friend

Within the past few months, we've added several hundred million free phone numbers to our Asterisk PBX by creating a Skype Gateway as well as Gizmo Backdoor Dialing and ENUM interfaces that didn't cost us a dime. And, today, we turn our attention to Google's recent transmogrification of GrandCentral into Google Voice. More specifically, what we want to do is examine some ways to integrate the Google Voice feature set into our existing Asterisk implementations. The potential benefits are enormous.

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Google Voice: Coming soon

Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.

Google Voice is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon.

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Why Skype for Asterisk is more important than Skype for SIP

Back in September of 2008 and now today, Skype has announced initiatives to open the Skype network to SIP users. These two solutions; Skype for Asterisk and Skype for SIP are very different and offer significantly different capabilities. Just to recap the details.

Skype for Asterisk, which is still in closed beta, is a true Asterisk channel driver. This allows Asterisk based solutions to make, receive and transfer Skype calls. A significant capability of the SFA solution is its support for terminating a call to a Skype user name, for example a PC based user of the Skype client.
Skype for SIP is a very different animal. This service provides VOIP trunk support for existing SIP based PBX systems, which may include Asterisk. Unlike SFA where calls may be place to any Skype user, SFS calls may only be terminated to PSTN end points.

So what does this all mean to the Voice/Telco 2.0 marketplace. Overall Skype is beginning to leverage their extensive VOIP network to compete in the VOIP origination and termination marketplaces. Both of these services would enable a SIP based PBX user to utilize Skype as their transport vendor. For example, a traditional SIP PBX customers would directly use SFS for call termination and would provision Skype in numbers to provide origination.

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Latest Developments in VoIP over Mobile

IP telephony over cell phones—and other mobile devices—has been catching on for some time now, giving users the convenience of placing and receiving long distance and international calls at a fraction of the expense of cellular termination rates.

This week, two leading players in the VoIP over mobile realm— UK-based Truphone and Silicon Valley-based JAJAH—both announced programs that promise to greatly expand the reach of their cost-cutting services.

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Wireless VoIP Standard Approved By IEEE

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has finally approved the much awaited roaming Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11r, which primarily aims to allow the Wi-Fi enabled devices to roam amid the WLAN access points.

The service would help in sprucing up the voice over internet protocol (VoIP) enabled services, as swapping from one access point to other takes considerable time, with the existing protocols, thereby embarking quality and security issues for the users.

The new standard, also known as Fast Basic Service Set Transition, would substantially help in maintaining the quality of reception of services, when a user switches to a new access point, as it takes less than 50 milliseconds for enabling the security authentication of the service, during the course of switching over.

Rob Bamforth, principal analyst from Quocirca, has opined that the new addition wouldn’t create any quick impact over the industry; however, he upheld the relevance of the standardization in future of communications.

“This kind of standard is likely to be seen as big comfort blanket by enterprise-scale users”, he added, but the primary concern lies in the amount of time vendors will take in introducing products based on new standards.