Matthew Revell

Kphone is, unfortunately, the only SIP phone software in Ubuntu Warty Linux.

Over the past week, I’ve been wrestling with it, trying to get it work with both Gossiptel and SipGate. Kphone lacks documentation, which would be fine if it “just worked”. However, my experience has show a couple of quirks, that have led to several frustrated evenings.

Once apt-get has installed Kphone, you’ll notice it doesn’t appear in any menus. It is on your system, you just need to type “Kphone” from the command line. Once loaded, you’ll be able to edit what Kphone calls your SIP identity. This is fairly straightforward, just bear in mind:

• Full name: can be anything; it’s just a display name to show to other SIP users
• User part of SIP URL: almost certainly your SIP number. If your SIP provider gives you a SIP address, which looks like an email address, then it’s everything before the @ symbol
• Host part of SIP URL: is everything after the @ symbol
• Outbound SIP proxy: this varies from provider to provider, but with Gossiptel it’s sip.gossiptel.com and SipGate UK uses sipgate.co.uk
• Authentication username: this may be optional, but I’ve just re-entered my SIP username here.

You can then click “Register” to check your details. Frustratingly, if you’re changing an existing Kphone identity, you’ll have to restart Kphone before it uses the new details.

Depending on whether your firewall has explicit SIP support, or not, you’ll also need to visit Preferences->SIP Preferences->Socket, to enter details of your SIP provider’s STUN server. In simple terms, STUN helps Kphone to get round the restrictions put in place by your firewall. For Gossiptel. ensure Use STUN server is selected, and define your STUN server as “stun.gossiptel.com”. In my experience, it doesn’t seem to matter if you use your provider’s STUN server, or that of another.

OSS sound setup

You should now be able to make and receive SIP calls. However, like most of the rest of the Linux world, you’ve probably moved onto ALSA for your audio. Kphone has not. Kphone still uses OSS. So, even if you’ve had Skype running successfully, you’ll still need to go into your volume settings and have a fiddle.

For whatever reason, each time I restart Ubuntu, I have to reset the OSS settings, to make it work with Kphone.

Make sure your microphone is set to Mute and Rec, with the slider up high. Also set In-gain to full, as this boosts the signal coming from the mic. Of course, your setup may not need in-gain.

Even once you’ve got what appear to be the right settings, I’ve found it may not work until you’ve selected, unselected, then reselected those settings a few times.

Testing everything

On Gossiptel, you can call 160 for an echo test. You can also give me a bell on 9301661. If you’ve been a Skype user you’ll be surprised by just how reliable and clear a VOIP call can be.

Kphone, on my system, has been prone to crashing and is far from the most user friendly software out there. However, despite the more complicated initial setup, I’d say SIP is a far better system than Skype, which now feels rather like VOIP-lite.

A few months ago, General Motors ran full page ads in the national press, with a very strange offer. If you bought a car from their (relatively) recently acquired Daewoo brand, they’d swap it for another brand new one – this time with a Chevrolet badge – in six months time.

Whatever their reason for this bizarre offer, it signalled the move from the Daewoo brand, to Chevrolet. Interestingly enough, the cars remain unchanged and are not the same Chevrolets available in America.

Daewoo cars, during the twelve or thirteen years they’ve been in the UK, have more or less filled the gap left by Lada’s departure from EU markets and Skoda’s return to its roots as a quality car manufacturer. So, what sense does it make to move to the Chevrolet brand?

I’d bet the majority of Daewoo/Chevrolet UK’s target market have a very hazy idea of what Chevrolet is all about. I’m a car fan and a quick look at the US Chevrolet website shows that my perception of a Chevvy is something big, loud, not particularly pretty and with an enormous engine, isn’t fully representative of their range. So, the average Daewoo owner – i.e. someone who doesn’t really care about cars, they just want to move from place to place without using their legs too much – will almost certainly have no usable idea of what Chevrolet is all about.

Anyway, whatever their reason for the brand change, it appears that it’s now complete. Looking at the new Chevrolet UK website, the irony is that, whatever name you give them, the cars are the epitomy of anonymity.

Mark Shuttleworth seems like a cool bloke. He came onto LugRadio, to talk to us aboutUbuntu Linux and to explain a little more about why he’s working on it and what plans they have for the future.

I think many open source fans will agree with a lot of what Mark says. He seems to have a thorough understanding of why open source is a good idea and what can be achieved with it, both commercially and as a community.

Just watched Jerry Springer the Opera. Those Christians who actually have watched it will almost certainly be offended. Whatever points it’s trying to make, my initial impression is that elements were there simply to be offensive. If that is the case, I can’t say I’m too impressed.

I don’t like musicals, so perhaps I’m not the intended audience but I actually found it boring. All the swearing bored me. Only one line in the whole thing actually shocked me; the rest just tired me as it seemed to be the lazy use of swearing to provoke a reaction. The music bored me too.

I’m glad the BBC showed it, though. Now I, and everyone else who watched, are justified in holding an opinion on it. I didn’t enjoy it and I understand why Christians and many other people would be offended by it. I never want to see a day when minority interest groups can control what I watch on the tv, though.

Mediawatch UK would have made a far better argument if they’d simply said, “Actually, it’s just a bit tedious and repetetive really and you’ll be more tired of the swearing than offended by it. As for having a Jesus figure saying he’s gay, with no context, what’s the point of that, eh? Don’t be offended, just do something else.”

Congratulations to MediaWatch UK for ensuring that the BBC’s televising of Jerry Springer the Opera has gained far more media coverage than it ever could have without their histrionics.

This evening – 8th Jan 2005 – tune into BBC 2 at 10pm to watch Jerry Springer the Opera. Then, write to the BBC to congratulate them on standing up to the right wing bullies who would have Eastenders banned, let alone anything more challenging.

Oh, and you can hear me on Radio 4′s Any Answers, making a rubbish and stuttering attempt to point out MediaWatch UK’s lies. Don’t be too harsh on me, I was the last person on and everyone else had made the main points I’d wanted to, including that I find many aspects of Christianity offensive but I don’t complain to the BBC every time Songs of Praise is on.

Vonage – one of the VOIP pioneers in North America – soft launched its UK service on Tuesday.

I find paid-for voice over IP interesting because its success may ultimately lead to its demise. The business model depends on people wanting to save money on calls to standard landline and mobile phones. However, the more people who sign up to VOIP services, the smaller the demand for savings on calls to standard landlines, as VOIP phone to VOIP phone calls are, obviously, free.

At first, this would be an advantage to VOIP operators who charge a flat monthly fee for standard landline calls. With less of their monthly flat fee income going to pay termination fees for standard landline calls, their margins will increase. However, if the demand for calls to standard landlines isn’t there, people will simply stop buying flat fee services.

Mobile and international calls may offer a few years of income but free VOIP to VOIP is ideal for international calls. I reckon mobiles will hold out a little longer, as the operators won’t allow their lucrative termination fees to disappear. However, the day when mobile operators become little more than wireless bandwidth providers will also be the day when mobile VOIP goes mainstream. WiMAX and other wireless internet technologies are already of concern to the 3G operators.

Unless VOIP operators plan to become your broadband provider, ultimately their success will kill them. It’ll take years, but eventually we’ll be making IP calls as standard, simply paying for bandwidth to our usual bandwidth provider.

Why not just your normal phone, for now?

The new Vonage UK service has a consumer option at ?9.99 a month, which includes unlimited UK landline calling (standard geographic numbers only, of course). Also included is an analogue to IP phone adaptor and reasonable call rates to mobiles, international numbers, etc. Oh, and there’s no minimum contract period.

It’s not a particularly compelling offer. I’d be tempted simply because I’d be excited, for a week or two, about making and receiving my calls using VOIP, without a PC. If saving money is your aim, you can do a lot better elsewhere through your normal phone line.

For ?10.99 per month, OneTel offers unlimited standard landline calls on your normal phone and for ?3.99 a month they offer free standard landline calls in the evening and at weekends – i.e. when most consumer make calls. While OneTel’s ?10.99 is more expensive than Vonage, my phone line is a helluva lot more reliable than my broadband connection and also works during a power cut.

Even better, though, TalkTalk is offering their free evening and weekend calling package free for a year, with free calls to other TalkTalk customers for life. The mobile and international rates are good too.

The only reason, that I can think of, to use the Vonage consumer service is if you want to save your phone line rental, or get a cheap second line. If you have ADSL through a BT line, you’re not going to be able to ditch your first line’s rental, though.

I’ll stick to Skype for VOIP, even if I do seem to spend most of time saying, “Can you hear me? Oh, you’re really echoing.”

A small Crewe based company, OneStopPhoneShop, has T-Mobile’s MDA III for ?24.99, with an 18 month contract. That’s around ?125 cheaper than the equivalent from Orange (the SPV M2000) via the Carphone Warehouse’s online e2save brand and ?225 cheaper than O2′s XDA IIs.

In brief, the MDA III is a quad band, wi-fi, Bluetooth, Microsoft Windows for Mobile 2003 device, which looks like a standard Windows PDA but also has 2G/GPRS phone functionality. There are O2 and Orange versions because the device is actually produced by a Hong Kong firm called HTC, and then rebadged by the phone networks.

Fellow LugRadio presenter Stuart (Aq) said he wouldn’t use it because:

a. it’s Microsoft based
b. he prefer specific devices for specific tasks.

I prefer fewer things in my pockets. The Microsoft issue bothers me less than Stuart, simply because there’s no alternative. Stuart mentioned the Palm Treo but I’ve yet to find it at an equivalent price. Anyway, to my knowledge, Palm devices are no less proprietary than Microsoft, so why spend the extra just to end up with a different type of closed system?

It’s unlikely I’m going to go for the deal, simply beacuse T-Mobile’s data charges are extortionate. I don’t use that word lightly: you’re locked into a 12 or 18 month contract and have nowhere else to go, with a device that is made for data. ?7.50 per megabyte is prohibitively expensive and even their data-bundles are more expensive than Orange or O2. At least now we know why they can afford to subsidise the handset so heavily.

Oh, and a happy new year all.