SARK UCS/MVP Softphone Guide

Softphones:

There's a plethora of softphones flooding onto the market at the moment, most of them SIP based but also a few which support IAX and even H323. The big challenge with softphones is matching them up with suitable headphones or USB handsets. They are not guaranteed to work together. Most of the USB handsets coming out of the far east at the moment have been built to work primarily with Skype. It is not always easy or even possible to get them working with anything else. Caveat emptor! (no matter what it might say on the box). Below we'll look at a few of the more popular softphone offerings.

DISCLAIMER

Due to the, generally, poor quality of both on-board laptop A/D converters and USB driven telephone handsets, Selintra Limited does not recommend the use of softphones as workaday business devices.

X-Ten and X-Ten Lite

X-Ten has changed its name to Counterpath Solutions but the site can still be found at http://www.xten.net. The X-ten softphone was one of the earliest softphones available and it is still one of the best around. Also voip-info has a good section on the unit at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/xten. SAIL has a defnition for X-Ten lite in its database.

X-Ten Setup

Click on the menu button for the x-lite and go into the SIP Proxy settings and choose the first setting. Set the phone up as shown in the image above. Close the window and you're done.

Cubix (Firefly)

Prouced by Virbiage (see http://www.virbiage.com/cubix.php). This offering used to be called Firefly. It is a good and visually attractive IAX/SIP product. You can read about setup at http://voip-info.org/wiki-Firefly. Cubix is supported in both IAX and SIP guises in SAIL.

Cubix Setup

Set-up for this attractive looking softphone is straightforward and easy. After setting up an extension (either IAX or SIP) in SAIL, bring the softphone up and click on the menu button. In the network sub-menu click on the IAX or SIP button depending upon the protocol you want to use. For LAN connected devices use SIP unless you have a good reason not to and for remote devices, on the outside of the firewall, choose IAX.

Fill out the server-address, user-name and password (user-name is the extension number of the unit as allocated by SAIL). Choose your CODEC, ulaw/alaw if you are running SAIL in Fidelity mode, gsm/ulaw/alaw if you are running in thruput mode. In its "free" form, the G729 box is greyed out. We're guessing that it's only available in the paid-for version. Finally, save your changes and off you go.

SJPhone

Along with its USB phone driver software, the SJPhone is, in our opinion, the best USB/Softphone implementation available at the moment. The screen response to a phone pick-up is instant and the software looks nice and is easy to configure for SAIL/Asterisk. The only thing that may catch you out is that the SJphone uses RFC2833 for its DTMF, however as long as you use the standard definition in SAIL, this will be taken care of for you.

SJphone Setup

Bring up the softphone and open the menu by pressing the toolbox button in the centre of the phone.

Choose "Profiles" and either modify one of the samples or create a new one. Press Edit and fill out Domain and Proxy Domain with the address of your SAIL/Asterisk server, press Save and then press "Initialize" which will bring up another window.

In Account put the extension number of the phone (from SAIL) and the secret (again from SAIL) in the password field. Press OK and you're done.

Linux Clients

There are a few available, check your distro repositories

Kphone

Setup a new extension using the device 'General SIP'
add these settings

dtmfmode=rfc2833
allow=ulaw
allow=gsm

Setup kphone
in identity, set typical values
enter full name 'James Brown'
User part of SIP '6004'
Host part of SIP 'local IP of server'
Authenticate '6004'
toggle 'Auto register'

in preference > audio preferences
set your codec, G711u is the default
toggle, 'use ring tone'