Free Phone Calls with Symbient™ VoIP


In this era of all-things-technology, it's uncommon to find someone that doesn't carry a smart phone or a typical cellphone at the very least. Even thoughGrandstream GXP1620 IP Internet Phone cellphones are convenient, portable, and work in most places, there are times and places where cell signals are weak or completely non-existent. While most smart phones support WiFi calling, this too has its limitations and drawbacks. For example, the use of cellphones in the workplace can be prohibitive, even if used over WiFi networks. This is because employees typically don't like using their personal cellphones for work purposes, and employers typically don't provide their employees with cellphones reserved for work-only purposes. But, most employers do have desktop/land-line/analog phones in their facilities, offices, conference rooms, and the like. In fact, even the smallest business can have a two, three, or even more telephones, but providing service to these phones can be expensive. That's why at Lucus Labs we decided to take advantage of VoIP (Voice Over IP) technologies that drastically reduce the costs for small businesses to operate an extensive (or even the simplest) telephone system.

What is VoIP?
According to Wikipedia, VoIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol, also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet telephony, broadband telephony, and broadband phone service specifically refer to the provisioning of communications services (such as voice, fax, SMS, & voice-messaging) over the Internet, rather than via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), also known as Plain Old Telephone Service (or POTS).

What is PSTN?
The Public Switched Telephone Network (or PSTN) is the aggregate of the world's circuit-switched telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local telephony operators. These consist of telephone lines, fiber optic cables, microwave transmission links, cellular networks, communication satellites, and undersea telephone cables, all interconnected by switching centers which allow most telephones to communicate with each other.

Because there are so many players involved in the PSTN (including all the companies that own and operate the physical phone lines), leveraging the PSTN in a small business can be costly. Think about small businesses such as family owned & operated real-estate companies that require their employees to be on the phone all day, calling & selling, or larger customer service call centers with lots of employees. The costs associated with PSTN can really add up quickly, but that's where SIP comes in.

What is SIP?
SIP, short for Session Initiation Protocol, is the technology that makes VoIP calls possible. It's an application layer signaling protocol that creates, modifies, and terminates sessions with one or more parties in an IP network, including the Internet. SIP is used in Internet telephony and private IP telephone systems, as well as mobile phone calling over LTE (VoLTE).

How do VoIP calls connect to analog land-lines?
While VoIP calls are inexpensive and can be used anywhere there's an Internet connection, more often than not, those calls will need to connect with the analog land-lines on the PSTN. Since SIP and PSTNs speak different languages, a PSTN Gateway is required. This Gateway acts as a translator between SIP and PSTN, allowing calls placed over VoIP to communicate with users on the PSTN, including talking with grandma on her old rotary-dial telephone.

Introducing Symbient™ VoIP
As part of our mission to help small businesses cut costs and reprioritize their spending wherever possible, Lucus Labs has developed a Voice-Over-IP solution simply called Symbient™ VoIP. Along with allowing small businesses to place calls over the Internet at a much better rate than using PSTN directly, Symbient™ VoIP can be paired with our Symbient™ AI technologies which provide a fully automated call center, turning even a 1-person company into a sprawling enterprise powered by artificial intelligence.

Pay-it-Forward
At Lucus Labs, we have a Pay-it-Forward program where we provide "lite" versions of our technologies for free. While they don't include all the bells and whistles that their commercial counterparts offer, these lite products still provide enough features and functionality that make them useful for all types of use cases and environments.

With Symbient™ VoIP Lite, you can provide free calls between your friends & family, internally, using a local network, or around the world over the Internet. This Lite version doesn't provide things like SIP trunking that connects to the PSTN. You also don't get call forwarding, conference & video calling, virtual assistants, etc, but you do have the ability to place free phone calls using any softphone software, such as Zoiper, and/or IP phones, such as the Grandstream GXP1625 which is what we use internally at Lucus Labs.

Getting Started
To get started, click the download link below that matches the operating system you plan to run Symbient™ VoIP on. The Lite version of Symbient™ VoIP is provided for Windows and Raspberry Pi, but we can provide builds for any operating system of your choosing. Just send us a message with your operating system using the "Let's Talk" link at the top-right of this page.

Downloads:
Symbient™ VoIP for Windows
Symbient™ VoIP for Raspberry Pi

Once you've downloaded and extracted the version for your operating system, simply run the executable application found in the extracted folder. When you do, you will be presented with a usage message that shows which parameters are required by the app. In the Lite version of Symbient™ VoIP, only 2 parameters are supported: the IP address of the network interface you want to listen on and the port number. If you want to listen on all network interfaces, you can use "--ip=0.0.0.0", and the default port for VoIP systems is typically port 5060 which you can specify using the flag, "--port=5060".

Example:
$ ./SymbientVoIP -i 0.0.0.0 -p 5060

Note: If running on Windows, you may be asked to allow access from the network to this application. You may also need to allow incoming connections to port 5060 in the Windows Firewall. Shoot us a message if you have questions regarding how to do this, we'll be happy to help.

It works!
If everything worked accordingly, you should now be presented with a message indicating the server has been started and is listening for incoming connections. You can stop the app at any time by pressing any key.

Making Calls
With your Symbient™ VoIP server running, you'll need to download, install, and configure a softphone app, such as Zoiper (available at https://www.zoiper.com/en/voip-softphone/download/current). Regardless of the softphone (or IP phone) you choose, enter the IP address of the computer running the app into the Domain field. You can use any username you wish, but note that credentials are ignored by the Lite version of Symbient™ VoIP. This means there's nothing stopping someone from using the same username (password is ignored) when connecting to your VoIP/SIP server.

When placing calls, you will use the format "sip:[receiver]@[ip address]" where "[receiver]" is the username of the person you're looking to call, and "[ip address]" is the IP address of the computer running Symbient™ VoIP. To make things easier when calling other receivers, we suggest using a number (such as 1000, 1001, 1002, and so on) in place of the username in your SIP client. This acts like an extension number that can be easily dialed by soft & IP phones. See screenshot below for an example.

Zoiper Account Settings Example

It's also worth pointing out that the Lite version of Symbient™ VoIP only supports UDP. This may be important to know when configuring certain IP & soft phones.

If you plan on using Symbient™ VoIP over the Internet, you can install it at a cloud provider, such as on an Amazon AWS EC2 instance. Just make sure you include a security rule that allows incoming connections to the port you provide when running the app (default is 5060). You will then use the external IP address of your cloud server as the Domain in your soft or IP phones. If you map a domain to your server, you can also use that for the Domain when configuring your soft & IP phones. Plus, you can use that in your SIP addresses when making calls, such as "sip:lucus.darnell@lucuslabs.com".

If you want calls placed over your VoIP network to also connect with users on the PSTN, you will need access to a PSTN Gateway where you'll list your Symbient™ VoIP server as a SIP Trunk.

Once everything has been set up properly, you can begin making free calls (or inexpensive calls if using a PSTN Gateway) internally if on a private network only, or over the Internet if installed on an Internet-accessible server.

Zoiper Incoming Call Example

As always, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop us a line using our Contact Us form. And, if you decide to use Symbient™ VoIP Lite for whatever reasons, please let us know as we enjoy hearing how innovative people use our products and technologies.

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