voopIXBuilding the Educational

VoIP Cloud in Croatia

Branko Radojević, M.Sc.Deputy CEO

September 2014.(v 2.42)

CARNet – Who we are & what we do?• Public Institution funded from National Budget

• NREN – National Research and Education Network

• Over 20 years ISP for Educational Institutions in Croatia(schools, universities, research institutes, ministry, agencies, public hospitals, etc.) – 3000 locations in Croatia

• Since 2004 adding more and more services for our members:(National Educational AA infrastructure, CMS for schools, LMS for schools, National e-learning portal, National portal for schools, Content

filtering for schools, (many, many more), and voopIX )

• All our services are free for our member institutions

CARNet – voopIX goals• To interconnect all our member institutions (3000

locations) to a single VoIP cloud and to provide to them:

• Free telephony service between institutions• Interconnect different locations of the same institution• Let them use legacy PBXs with our system• Provide advanced telephony possibilities available only in VoIP

PBXs• Provide free international calls to certain destinations for free• TRY TO BE AS TRANSPARENT TO THEM AS POSSIBLE

• Open their eyes and let them discard legacy PBXs and move to VoIP

How we arrived to this idea?

voopIX - Evolution• It all started at the University of Dubrovnik in 2004.

University of Dubrovnik

Telco Telco

Legacy PBX

1x ISDN PRIProprietary phones

1x ISDN PRI

voopIX – Evolution (cont’d)• In a matter of no time ...

University of Dubrovnik

Telco Telco

University of Dubrovnik

University of Dubrovnik

University of Dubrovnik

University of Dubrovnik

DUNDi DUNDi

voopIX – Next Step

In 2005 I’ve got married, moved to Zagreb and changed my

employer to the current one .

voopIX – Next Step (cont’d)• CARNet – my new employer already has ordered new

VoIP PBX (normal PBX functionality + Call Center), but it’s a Cisco Call Manager

• When it arrived, it took just few days to add an Asterisk to CCM (connected with SIP trunk), and to bring up DUNDi cloud and interconnect it with the Asterisks at the University of Dubrovnik

• It proved to be reliable solution, so why don’t expand it?

• voopIX was born

voopIX – Building the core

ZG

OS

RI

DU

ST

• We started to buildvoopIX core, based onfive servers runningAsterisk positionedin five of our largestPOPs

• Connections shown are logical DUNDI peeringconnections

• No clustering at this time

voopIX – Legacy PBXs• Our members don’t want to throw away their working

PBXs. Some of them were purchased recently

• We had to find a way to transparently connect them to our system.

• Obviously, we are talking about hundreds of different combinations of PBXs, software, cards, setups, etc.

• Telco connection is also non-unified: from R2/MFC, ISDN BRI, ISDN PRI and some SIP trunks (recently).

• We had to put our box between PBX and the Telco connection in order to intercept calls. Our solution should be reliable.

voopIX – Appliance (large)• Custom designed in CARNet

• Runs Linux (debian lenny) + Asterisk

• 2x or 4x ISDN PRI voice card installed

• No hard drives

• It has custom madefailover switch thatcan bypass the cardand connect backPBX directly to Telco.

Telco Telco

PBX

Interconnecting voopIX and PBX

BASIC

Telekom operator

Telekom operatorOld phones Legacy PBX

CARNetvoopIX

CARNetvoopIX

voopIX app.

Interconnecting voopIX and PBX (2)

Telekom operator

Telekom operatorOld phones Legacy PBX

CARNetvoopIX

CARNetvoopIX

HYBRIDBASIC

voopIX app.

Interconnecting voopIX and PBX(3)

Telekom operator

Telekom operatorOld phones Legacy PBX

CARNetvoopIX

CARNetvoopIX

HYBRIDBASIC

voopIX app.

ADVANCED

/ /

voopIX - Appliance (cont’s)

voopIX - Appliance (cont’s)

FAILOVER SWITCH

NETWORK

VOICE CARD

voopIX – Appliance (small)• Commercially available

• Runs Linux + Asterisk

• 1x FXS port installed

• 2 module slots available for line cards:

• 4x FXO, 4xFXS, 2xBRI, 2xGSM

• No hard drives, USB and SD Card reader included

• It has failover switch that can bypass two FXO and FXS ports directly to Telco.

voopIX – Call flows (available number)

Telco ISDN Network

Telco ISDN Network

Legacy PBX

ISDN PRI

CALL

ISDN PRI

DUNDivoopIX context

Look

up

CDR (RADIUS)/LOG

Server

AVAIL

ABL

E

IAX2

voopIX – Call flows (unavailable number)

Telco ISDN Network

Telco ISDN Network

Legacy PBX

ISDN PRI

CALL

ISDN PRI

DUNDivoopIX context

Look

up

CDR (RADIUS)/LOG

Server

NO

T AV

AIL

CALL

voopIX - Today• Around 110 locations

(our first target were the institutions with larger phone installations and those considered most interesting ones)

• We expect to double thenumber until the end of2014.

51

9

10

6

7

1

1

4

1

212

1

1

11

1

Problems we encountered - AOC

Telco ISDN Network

Telco ISDN Network

Legacy PBX

ISDN PRI

CALL

AOC-D

• AOC = Advice Of Charge (D-During, E-End)

AOC-E

Problems we encountered – AOC (cont’d)

Telco ISDN Network

Telco ISDN Network

Legacy PBX

ISDN PRI

CALL

AOC-D

• AOC = Advice Of Charge (D-During, E-End)

ISDN PRI

CALL

AOC-D

AOC-EAOC-E

Asterisk Implementation Overview(Technical Details)

Node becomes available

ZG

OS

RI

DU

ST

DUNDivoopIX context

Telco ISDN

Network

Telco ISDN

Network

Legacy PBXNumbers: (51)-400-500 to 400-799

ISD

N P

RI

IAX2 peering +

registration

[iax-pbx-reg]exten=> _38551400[5-7]XX

_38551400[5-7]XX

Node becomes unavailable

ZG

OS

RI

DU

ST

DUNDivoopIX context

TelcoISDN

Network

TelcoISDN

Network

Legacy PBXNumbers: (51)-400-500 to 400-799

ISD

N P

RI

IAX2 peering +

registration

[iax-pbx-reg]exten=> _38551400[5-7]XX

_38551400[5-7]XX

RIP

NAGIOSServer

Interconnection with TERENA NRENUM.net

NRENUM.net

• Since the two systems (ENUM and DUNDi) are incompatible, we had to build gateway service

• Outgoing calls are easy to implement, since Asterisk has built-in ENUM support that we are using

• Publishing our numbers to NRENUM tree were more difficult, since our system is highly dynamical, and DNS zones are more statical

• We built on top of PowerDNS software that has ability to query not only its internal database, but also invoke script for subqueries. So, for every query that we receive through ENUM, we do subquery in DUNDi and return results.

Advanced Telephony Functionality provided by voopIX

Skype to PBX

• We allow calls from Skype to any number in our system

• Often used to place calls directly from web pages

Users traveling around the World

• We provide the possibility for user traveling around the World to use softphones which allows them to become extensions on their PBX

• It is also useful to someone working from home

• ZoIPer is a popular (and free) softphone which is beside having SIP protocol also provides IAX2 which has much lessproblems traversing NATs

• Now available for Windows, MacOS, iPad/iPhone, Android, Windows Phone

Centralized Services(logging, monitoring, configuration, …)

Centralized ServicesGenerally, we tend to use Open Source software:

• Logging: Syslog NG

• Fault Monitoring: Nagios

• Graphs + Performance Monitoring: Munin

• Accounting: FreeRADIUS + mySQL

• Configuration+User Mgmt.+ … : Puppet

voopIX Future ?

voopIX – Future?• Scalability problem - not yet seen, but may become an

issue

• Web portal for members (billing, some setup, etc.)

• Solution for smaller institutions (Schools on small islands)

• Shown interest from other public/government institutions

• Try to animate institutions in other countries to start up similar project and to peer with us - we’re ready to help

• Add more advanced functions to our system

Open Platform

Open Platform• The idea here is to be able to create VoIP infrastructure

on the Open Platform, which doesn’t rely on a single vendor, single technology or a proprietary solution

• At any time, if there is a technology or protocol that shows up to be superior to currently used, we can move to them without investing in new equipment or paying additional licenses

• By using central configuration, we can switch hundreds of appliances to new system in a matter of hours

Thank you for your time !

voopix@carnet.hr

All questions and suggestions are more then welcome.