Lazy Geeks Blog

With the government investing NZD$1,500,000,000 into this “Ultra fast broadband” Fibre-Optic network, you’d expect them to have good reason for it right? You’d also expect people would generally back the idea of it, and know why we, as a country, need this infrastructure investment. If only that were so! Communications and Information Technology Minister Steven Joyce is pushing for a major infrastructure rollout across the better part of NZ, and everywhere you look there’s talk of the $1.5 billion the Govt is investing.

That’s a lot of money, and as you can imagine a lot of people are keen to get their hands on a slice of that pie. What you also need to understand is that 3rd parties are also expected to front up that amount (and more) themselves, some estimates suggest that independent parties will need to invest over 6x the amount the Govt will be putting into this project. Read more…

Man if I had a couple of bucks every time I’ve heard that, I’d be so rich by now. Fact of the matter is, it’s unfortunately far from the truth, and many ISP-provided routers truly suck.

I work with VoIP, and running a Voice call over the internet may be easy with Skype, and you may be OK with choppy calls, but when you’re running an enterprise-grade telephony system, you don’t have the same tolerance for bad quality. Same for Home users, you should not have to put up with daily restarts!

What does that have to do with you? Most probably everything! If you’re here it’s likely because you’re having issues with your internet, and either you think it’s related to your router, or I’ve referred you here from PressF1.

So let’s clear the air about a few routers: Read more…

Let me just start by saying what an amazing and impressive tour it was, so much knowledge, so much cool tech stuff, so a big thankyou to Telecom Wholesale, Chorus and Jay Best for organizing the whole thing!
Anyway for now there’s just photo’s, I’ll go back later and add some tags or comments about them when I’m not so lazy but for now I just wanted to get them online so a few close friends / family could see. Talk about a TON of cables huh?!
Pix below the break Read more…

We all know that g711 (alaw / ulaw) is meant to sound the best. It’s uncompressed and equivalent quality to ISDN, which most businesses are used to with their traditional PABX System.

However, it comes at a price, 64kbps + overheads means around 111kbps when you factor in everything else over an ADSL PPPoA / PPPoE connection.

Now that’s a LOT when you think about it, considering on a standard ADSL2+ line you’re going to max out at around 5-7 SIP lines, especially if it’s a shared connection. This is where a compressed codec such as (My personal favorite) iLBC, or g729, can be incredibly cost effective, as you can load up around 15-20 on the same sort of bandwidth. When you’re a small business, that means with the right kind of QoS, you can share your ADSL Broadband connection and still have 5-10 concurrent phone calls, all happily living together.

So do away with expensive BRI interfaces and monthly charges, and go SIP!

We’re going to look at a few things very briefly:

1) MOS – What is it and why do I care?

2) Which codec is right for me?

3) g729 – Installation

4) iLBC – Installation

5) Trunk and Extension setup

6) Testing the codecs

Read more…

SIP combined with Elastix is nothing short of amazing.

Cost savings, flexibility, functionality, and I’ll say it again: Cost savings!

When deploying Elastix to use SIP over ADSL (for example), many find their existing Broadband connection does not quite provide satisfactory call quality, usually due to sharing the connection with other traffic.

We will follow this post up later with another on Diagnosing connectivity / quality issues.

NOTE: This is not the only way to do QoS, but after having struggled with the likes of pfsense, the budget / useless junk that many routers build in, and a host of other software / hardware solutions, I found Tomato did it the easiest, the best, and the most reliably! It’s a breeze to setup, and you’ll be kicking yourself for not having set something like this up earlier. Read more…