The Federal Communications Commission published an initial draft of proposed new rules (pdf) on Thursday that would, if approved, effectively make net neutrality the law of the land and open the door to WiFi VoIP as never before.

The Draft Rules to Preserve the Free and Open Internet seek to codify non-binding policy guidelines in place since 2005 and incorporate rules first elucidated last month by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (pdf) lists six terms that would prevent Internet Service Providers from denying their customers the right to use any legal applications, devices or services. The rules would also ban other forms of discrimination — although allowing for neutral, “reasonable” network management — and require that providers publish any steps they take for network management, such as throttling or metered service.

The proposed rules would apply to all providers of both wired and wireless Broadband Internet connectivity as well as to applications and service providers who deliver their products and services over Broadband or otherwise do business on the Internet. If approved, the rules would then significantly impact VoIP applications, VoIP service providers, and others such as Google, that provide voice services and communications over the Internet.

In proposing the rules, the Commission’s two Republican members concurred and dissented in part on the vote to issue the Draft. While agreeing with the concept of an open Internet, they also questioned whether the FCC has the authority to draft a net neutrality policy and cautioned that other countries could use the US government’s action as a basis for imposing more restrictive access rules in their own jurisdictions.

Public comments to the proposed rules will be sought by the FCC until January 14, with replies to those comments accepted up to March 5.

After a long and very public debate on both sides of the question, Thursday’s action finally sets in motion the arduous process of turning ideas into law. Many of the largest carriers and Broadband providers are expected to staunchly oppose the proposed rules and the rhetoric will no doubt remain thick and hoary well through the spring of 2010.

With an eye toward the high emotions already raised on both sides of the neutrality debate, Chairman Genachowski cautioned all parties as to his view of the government’s responsibility, saying the Commission’s role “should be no greater than necessary to achieve the core goal of preserving a free and open Internet…the goal is to provide a fair framework in which all participants in the Internet ecosystem can operate, ultimately minimizing the need for government involvement.”

Digium and IBM announced a new partnership at Astricon Thursday that highlights both the Asterisk company’s increasing attention from the enterprise telecommunications sector as well as Big Blue’s growing appetite for SMB market share.

The two companies announced the creation of an Asterisk-based phone system available now for the IBM Smart Cube platform. Smart Cube is a product of the company’s Smart Business initiative for small to medium-sized businesses, a pre-integrated solution (including hardware, operating system, security, backup, middleware and business applications) that SMBs can download from the IBM Smart Market.

This IBM-certified integration marks the first formal collaboration between the two companies. Asterisk for Smart Cube will give small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers using IBM’s Smart Cube platform a business phone and unified communication system that can be downloaded, configured and up-and-running within half an hour, according to Digium.

The total solution also integrates with IBM/Lotus products Domino and Sametime for multimedia collaboration and unified messaging.

“Digium’s collaboration with IBM to jointly develop an Asterisk-based phone system represents a huge advance toward our commonly held goal of giving SMBs powerful IT capabilities in a flexible, easy to implement system,” said Danny Windham, CEO of Digium. “The ability to deploy and manage sophisticated telephony applications right alongside other critical business software appeals to SMBs across industries. We’re proud that IBM partnered with Digium to meet the needs of its Smart Cube customers.”

Asterisk has grown in ten years to become the most widely used open source telephony platform in the world. With millions of worldwide downloads, it has become the backbone for flexible, cost-effective business phone systems used by companies large and small, and the company’s growth has lately gained the notice of enterprise heavyweights such as Cisco and now, IBM.

On balance these developments are a big positive for Digium and bode well for the long-term growth and stability of the Asterisk platform. As the power and flexibility of systems formerly reserved to only the largest enterprises come increasingly within reach of small and medium sized companies, increased innovation and competition across the business landscape should be good for everyone.

Note: This post has been updated with a new FreePBX in a Cloud instance for Europe.

Because of the interest in our series on VoIP and the open source Asterisk PBX using Amazon’s convenient Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), yesterday (2009-02-23) Voxilla released a pre-built virtual machine EC2 image using FreePBX, the popular graphical front end administration tool for Asterisk.

If you are interested in a stock installation of Asterisk on the Amazon cloud (either you prefer to manage your PBX manually through command prompts and edited text files, or you wish to install a GUI front end other than FreePBX), you’ll be more interested in Voxilla’s Asterisk in a Cloud step-by-step tutorial).

In the Asterisk in a Cloud tutorial, we led you through the use of Elasticfox, a hearty plug-in for the Firefox browser that gives you easy access to the administrative functions of your Amazon EC2 account. In this tutorial, we forego Elasticfox and use Amazon’s AWS Management Console.

Amazon’s console is much easier to use than Elasticfox; any browser will do and no plug-in download/installation/configuration is required. The console  appears to have replaced Elasticfox as Amazon’s preferred AWS management front end.

A small warning: the AWS Management Console is still in beta, and though we have not found problems, future changes may deem some of the instructions below incorrect. In the event that this tutorial needs changes for future releases of the management console, we’ll make them directly on this post.

In this post,  we provide step-by-step instructions to install Voxilla’s FreePBX in  a Cloud. We will:

• Log into your Amazon EC2 account;
• Configure your Security Group settings;
• Create a new SSH key pair or use your existing key pair;
• Launch the FreePBX instance;
• SSH to the FreePBX instance to retrieve the FreePBX and Webmin web interface URLs and passwords;
• Connect to the FreePBX web interface.

To follow this guide, you will need an SSH client installed on your computer — Mac and Linux machines have a built-in SSH client, Windows users can use PuTTY.

1. Launch the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Management Console.
    If you don’t have an Amazon EC2 account, you can sign-up for EC2 by following the link in the Getting Started section of the console.
2. Click the button labeled Sign in to Amazon EC2 Console.  Then sign-in with your Amazon credentials.
3. In the Navigation menu — left column, click Security Groups.  The Security Groups view will load.
4. Look in the Security Groups section — main section of the page.  If you don’t have an Asterisk security group, follow the instructions below to create one:
   • Click the Create Security Group button — upper left corner of the main section.  A new Create Security Group window will appear;

   

   • Type Asterisk in the Security Group Name field;
   • Type Security group for Asterisk instances in the Description field;
   • Click the Create button to create the security group and return to the Security Group page.

    

5. Select the Asterisk security group.  The security group rules will appear at the bottom of the main frame of your browser.      
   

   Asterisk Security Group

    Your Asterisk security group needs to allow the the following traffic:

   Connection Method	Protocol	From Port	To Port	Source (IP or group)
   Custom…	ICMP	-1	-1	0.0.0.0/0
   HTTP	TCP	80	80	0.0.0.0/0
   HTTPS	TCP	443	443	0.0.0.0/0
   Custom…	UDP	10000	20000	0.0.0.0/0
   Custom…	TCP	5060	5061	0.0.0.0/0
   Custom…	UDP	5060	5060	0.0.0.0/0
   SSH	TCP	22	22	0.0.0.0/0 or your public IP address/32
   Custom…	TCP	10000	10000	0.0.0.0/0 or your public IP address/32

6. If any or all of the above rules do not exist in your Asterisk security group, you will need to add each individually. If your group includes a service above, but contains different values, you will have to remove the service (using the button on the right of the row containing the service), and re-enter the correct values manually.To add rules to your Asterisk security group:
   • Copy the values from the table above into the bottom entry of the security group, then click Save.         
     

     Add rule

   • To add more rules, repeat step 1.
7. Click Key Pairs from the Navigation menu in the left column.  The Key Pair page will appear in the main section of the page.  You need at least one key pair to launch your instance. If you do have a key pair, skip to step 8. If you don’t, follow the steps below to generate a new key pair:
   • Click the Create Key Pair button in the upper left corner of the main section. A Create Key Pair window will appear.
   • Type ec2-keypair in the Key Pair Name field.
   • Click Create to generate the new keypair.  The console will generate a new key pair for you and your browser should automatically download the private key and save it as ec2-keypair.pem.
   • You will need to move the private key file with your other SSH private keys. If you’re using PuTTY on Windows, follow these directions from Amazon to store your keys; if you are on a Mac or Linux, move your keys into the ~/.ssh directory. On a Mac using the Safari browser with its default download settings, get the keys in the right place by opening Terminal.app and enter the following: mv ~/Downloads/ec2-keypair.pem ~/.ssh
8. Click Instances from the Navigation menu.  The My Instances view will appear in the main section of the web page.
9. Click the Launch Instances button in the upper left corner of the main section.  A new Launch Instances window will appear.
10. Select the Community AMIs tab.
11. In the search box in the center of the window, type voxilla.  The list should automatically update and list all the available instances published by Voxilla.
12. Press the appropriate Select button: If you are in the United States, choose the voxilla/FreePBX-Asterisk-1.6.0.5-i386.manifest.xml instance.  If you are in Europe, select the eu-voxilla/FreePBX-Asterisk-1.6.0.5-i386.manifest.xml instance. You will be taken to a page that looks like the image below.          
    

    Launch Instance

13. In the Number of Instances field, type 1.
14. Make sure the Instance Type is set to Small.
15. Select ec2-keypair from the Key Pair Name drop-down box.
16. Select Asterisk from the Security Groups.
17. Click the Launch button to launch your FreePBX instance.
18. From the My Instances view, you can watch the progress of your instance.  It may take up to five minutes for your instance to start.  
19. Typically you don’t need to SSH into your FreePBX instance. But, for security purposes, we generate new passwords each time an instance of the Voxilla FreePBX in a Cloud AMI is created. So we must SSH into the box to retrieve the FreePBX and Webmin interface passwords for the instance you’ve just created.  Once your instance has a Status of running, select the instance and click the Connect button at the top of the main section.  A new window will appear and explain how to connect to your instance via SSH. Just copy and paste the string in the amazon Example into your SSH client, and click Return.
    

    AWS SSH Help Screen

20. The first time you connect to your instance, your connection attempt may be rejected, this usually means your instance is still starting up .  Wait a minute or two and try your connection attempt again. You may receive a warning message similar to “Warning: Identity file ec2-keypair.pem not accessible: No such file or directory.” If so, your keys cannot be found on the local machine. If so, then enter the path to the keypairs (i.e.: ssh -i ~/.ssh/ec2-keypair.pem). When prompted to accept the server SSH key, choose Yes.
21. At this point, if your connection attempt is rejected, it means the SSH daemon is still starting, give it a minute or two and try again.
22. Whenever you log into the instance, the first thing displayed are the urls for the FreePBX and Webmin web interfaces.  Note them for later or copy and paste the urls into a new web browser window.
23. Each time you log into the instance, you will also see the location of the release notes and the passwords file.
24. You should read the instance release notes by typing more release-notes on the command line (These release notes can also be found here on the Voxilla Forum).
25. To display your system passwords, type more passwords on the command line.  These passwords were randomly generated when your instance started.  You should copy these passwords to a safe location on your computer, so you don’t have to SSH back into the machine to retrieve them.
26. Paste the FreePBX web interface url into your web browser.  You will see a warning prompt about the SSL certificate.  Accept the certificate and continue with the connection (see the release notes for more information).  When the page loads, click FreePBX Administration.
27. Enter admin for the Username and the password from your password file.
28. You should now see the FreePBX Administration status page.
29. You can close down your SSH session.

You can now configure FreePBX and Asterisk. To determine what to enter as the SIP server when configuring devices such as telephone adaptors and IP phones, click the Instances link in the AWS Management Console’s navigation area, and look up the Public DNS for the Asterisk/FreePBX instance. Use this value as your SIP server name.

Note: This post has been updated with a new FreePBX in a Cloud instance for Europe.

Since making freely available Voxilla’s  “pre-built” Asterisk installation for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (Asterisk on the Cloud With a Click), we’ve received many requests for a version that includes a graphical administration front end for the well-regarded open-source PBX.

Answering the demand, we settled on FreePBX, itself an open-source Asterisk GUI developed under the guidance of internet and SIP phone services provider Bandwidth.com, because it is itself becoming very popular in the Asterisk world and, though tricky to install (requiring some knowledge of Linux and the installation of large external packages),  it is very easy to use once it’s running correctly.

To make it as easy as possible, we built an Amazon machine instance (AMI) with FreePBX, some custom modules, and Webmin (a web based server administration tool).  What we came up with is an installation of FreePBX that is usable in three easy steps:

1. Start the AMI;
2. Retrieve the FreePBX interface passwords from SSH;
3. Securely access the FreePBX web interface.

The default FreePBX configuration assumes that FreePBX is running on a secured network (LAN) behind a firewall.  The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), ufortunately, does not provide such an environment.  In this build, we secure Free PBX for use in the cloud, Apache and Webmin redirect http traffic to https, and the FreePBX Administration interface requires authentication.

Free PBX, Webmin and MySQL use a number of usernames and passwords. To protect against default password exploits, Voxilla’s FreePBX in a Cloud is designed to randomly generate new passwords for key administrative controls each time you launch a new instance of the AMI. We do this in order to ensure that all instances of this AMI in use have different sets of security credentials. Otherwise, unless you take the complex steps required to secure FreePBX manually, others would have access to your installation if they know the default passwords.

In addition to the stock modules that ship with FreePBX, we made three new custom modules and included them in the AMI:

• Amazon Web Services – adds menu links to Amazon Web Services tools;
• Webmin – adds a menu link to the Webmin management interface;
• Voxilla – adds menu links to Voxilla’s Forum and tools where ample assistance for running FreePX and Asterisk on the Amazon cloud is avaliable.

The FreePBX in a cloud AMI provides an easy way to get Asterisk up and running without having to dig through configuration files.

For the United States:
AMI ID: ami-e8c22581
Manifest: voxilla/FreePBX-Asterisk-1.6.0.5-i386.manifest.xml

For Europe:
AMI ID: ami-7a58730e
Manifest: eu-voxilla/FreePBX-Asterisk-1.6.0.5-i386.manifest.xml

Release notes for this AMI are available in the Voxilla Forum.

Note: This post has been updated with a new FreePBX in a Cloud instance for Europe.

Our two-part tutorial explaining how to use VoIP (Part 1) and Asterisk (Part 2) in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has garnered quite a bit of attention. But due to the time required to complete the many steps needed to get up and running, some of you have asked if it is possible to create a much simpler to install “pre-built” Asterisk EC2 “instance.” 

In short, yes it is. And we’ve done just that for you.

With the power of the cloud, it’s not necessary have to wait days or hours for servers to be rebuilt. We don’t even need to start with a server that has nothing more than an operating system on it. Someone (Voxillans) can do all the grunt work: building, compiling, installing software; then share the complete server with others (you). Amazon calls this sharing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Now you have two choices, you can either build the Asterisk server yourself by following all the steps as listed in Part 2: Asterisk in a Cloud. Or you can use Voxilla’s pre-built image to eliminate a lot of the heavy lifting.

If you want to use the pre-built Asterisk image, go to the Asterisk in a Cloud tutorial and:

• Follow steps 1 through 4;
• In step 5, after selecting your region, do the following:
  1. Select the AMIs and Instances tab in Elasticfox;
  2. In the Machine Images (AMIs) box, type voxilla into the search box in the upper right corner; 
     

     Select Voxilla AMI

  3. Look in the Manifest column and select the row appropriate to your location. For the United States, select voxilla/asterisk-1.6.0.5-i386.manifest.xml. For Europe, select eu-voxilla/asterisk-1.6.0.5-i386.manifest.xml. You can click on the Manifest header to display the names in alphabetical order.
  4. Click the green power button to launch the instance.  A new window will appear;
  5. Set the Instance Type to m1.small (Amazon’s smallest and most affordable instance);
  6. Make sure the KeyPair drop-down is set to ec2-keypair;
  7. Set the instance to launch in the Asterisk security group; 
     

     Launch AMI

  8. When your settings look like the image above, click Launch.

  Your new instance will appear in the Your Instances section at the bottom of the AMIs and Instances tab in Elasticfox.  You will notice that the initial state of your instance is pending.  It will take 30 seconds to 5 minutes for an instance to start.  You can click the blue refresh button in the Your Instances section to refresh the status.

  You can check on the status by looking at the State column, the state will change to running when your instance starts. The Public DNS and Private DNS columns will also contain values.  Your running instance entry should look something like the image below.

   

  

  Your instances

• If you want to assign an elastic IP address to the server, follow step 6.  Note that the server is configured to use STUN every hour to determine its public IP address, when you change the instance IP address to the elastic IP address, reload the sip module to tell Asterisk to update the external IP address;
• Follow the first part of step 7, Connecting to an EC2 instance, then skip the rest of step 7 and all of step 8;
• If you want to use Elastic Block Store (EBS), stop the Asterisk server by running /etc/init.d/asterisk stop on the instance command line, then follow step 9 and step 10.

These instructions should get you up and running in less than hour (or about 10 cents on the AWS cloud meter).  

If you need help with the AMI or Asterisk in the cloud, technical help is available from the Voxilla Forums.

Millions of people use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) every day. Skype is mentioned in conversation as casually as Twitter. So how come more people don’t understand what VoIP (and Skype) actually is?

Broadly defined, VoIP is a number of transmission technologies that deliver voice communication over the internet or other IP networks. But, don’t expect the average VoIP user to tell you this.

Let’s explore the three main reasons why people don’t understand VoIP.

1. There’s no need to know: This is probably the reason people don’t understand a lot of things. They don’t care because they don’t need to care. As far as they know VoIP is just a fancy way to make cheap phone calls. They don’t realize that VoIP is all around them and that, even without knowing it, they’ve most likely used it because a huge percentage of all phone calls travel along the IP network at some point.

But can you blame them Most people don’t care how their car works if it gets them from point A to point B. Even when the car breaks down, they just want to know who can fix it and for how much, not why it stopped running. The same goes for VoIP.

Most VoIP users know that they need an internet connection, but nothing more. When call quality worsens or outages occur, most don’t investigate why it’s happening. Like the typical driver whose car won’t start, they just want to know who can fix it.

2. Ads tell only part of the story: For the most part advertising does a poor job of explaining VoIP. Most ads are simple promotions for cheap phone rates and free features. For example, you would not know only from watching the countless Vonage ads that have run on TV over the years that VoIP is behind the cheap unlimited calling rates and features.

But, it’s hard to blame Vonage and other VoIP providers for not explaining the technology. There is no evil plot to keep the public uneducated about VoIP. If you are spending precious advertising dollars trying to sell a VoIP service, would you try to explain what exactly VoIP is? The technical details are best left to be explained once you’ve cantacted a sales representative on the phone.

3. Change is scary: Let’s be real, people don’t like the unfamiliar, and VoIP is still new. It took decades from the time Alexander Graham Bell made the world’s first phone call in 1876 for there to be a telephone in the majority of homes. It was only about 15 years ago that the first Internet phone software was created. It’s no wonder that VoIP isn’t the norm yet, much less understood.

Will most people ever get what VoIP actually is? Will VoIP knowledge ever proliferate through the masses? Probably not. The best thing to do is continue educating, one person at a time.

Or not. VoIP works either way.

Junction Networks released a major upgrade to its flagship OnSIP hosted PBX phone service Thursday, adding browser-based IM, presence and phone status to one of the most compelling hosted VoIP services on the market today.

A single browser window presents all users in an organization complete, one-look status on who in the company is “present,” which of them are on the phone, and who is free to call with a click on their names. One click and the user’s extension – be it a desk set in the office, a wifi phone at a temporary job site, or a SIP phone in a hotel room – completes the call to the called party, saving everyone potential