Telecommunications

Ready to Mobile Roam into the Kingdom of Tonga

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa on November 25, 2006 5:04:17 AM

I have the occassion to check out the pricing for mobile roaming. What I really need is a local (Australian) number for people to contact me while I'm in Tonga.

The only partnership that I know of to get this service is Tonga's TCC and Australia's Telstra service so I'm walking around their websites checking what the deal is (how and where, and when)

The short and tall of it is, if you intend to use your mobile phone in Tonga, just get out at the airport and buy yourself a local sim card. Making local calls is a lot cheaper and making international calls is a whole lot cheaper.

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WLMD - Download your @nomoa.com messages

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa on August 31, 2006 7:01:20 PM

I've been a @gmail user since I could get an invite. The main reason for moving there, was simply to get an International email address that I can travel with, but more importantly an email address that I can send/recieve messages using a desktop client.

I've used a bunch of different desktop clients, notably: Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, and now Windows Mail (with Vista) and Windows Live Mail Desktop (Beta).

The Big News.

Windows Live Mail Desktop (Beta) together with a registered Windows Live ID now lets you download your @hotmail.com and your @nomoa.com mail messages.

As I understood it, you previously could only download your @hotmail.com messages if you had signed up as a paying customer with Microsoft Hotmail. Fine. Unfortunately, there was no chance in Hell of living through the webmail from Tonga. It's slow enough, no one needs the additional pain. So, after using samiuela@hotmail.com as my primary "international" email address, it got dumped quickly when Google offered gmail which let me download my mail messages to my desktop.

With WLMD, and a registered (join the Beta @ http://ideas.live.com) you can get that same work on my desktop. I can now read my samt@nomoa.com mail messages without logging onto the web (which is why some people used to get very slow responses from that account.)

WLMD allows checking email from Google GMail as well, so the benefits of both worlds.

I only wish that WLMD would have allowed all incoming mail to go to a single INBOX and sort out (without my hand holding) which account to use for responses by itself.

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VoIP and Asterisk IAX Clients

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa on May 09, 2006 4:24:51 PM

IAX is a VOIP Protocol designed by the folks at Digium, developers of the Open Source Asterisk PBX/VoIP Server.

As invariably every six months I have to try and track down the clients for IAX2, I thought I might as well add a list here. Asterisk/Digium releases a set of libraries for people wishing to develop interoperable software, and below is a list of applications using another FOSS library http://iaxclient.sourceforge.net

IAXClient is an Open Source library to implement the IAX protocol
used by The Asterisk Software PBX

Projects Using IAXClient

iaxComm: a GPL softphone built using IAXClient and wxWindows.
- Runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris.
DIAX: From the home page:
- "This is a full featured and very small (less than 100KB for all the files) IAX based software phone for Microsoft Windows platforms (only).
  The application is distributed as a freeware for personal use."

IaxPhone: another GPL softphone built using IAXClient. Written in VB6.

IDEFisk: Another Windows softphone from asteriskguru.com

KIAX: A QT-based softphone

Why use the IAX protocol, and not SIP or H.323?

While asterisk does support SIP, and can be made to support H.323, the IAX protocol has some inherent advantages over these protocols, because it is small and simple. Also, since it uses just one UDP port-pair for both media and control, it is much simpler to use in environments where NAT is is use, or with network tunneling.

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