It’s been a long trip since I started playing with Asterisk… I did a few more things than integrating Asterisk with Twilio.
After doing that, I compared flowroute with Anveo (which works great for outgoing calls, but had issues with an incoming number on Argentina. I ended up using Anveo for most of my outgoing calls and it works just fine.
But, I wanted to be able to forward calls to my mobile phone (or my wife’s) for free… ooor, as close to free as it gets. I then bought a Portech MV-372 (link dead) on Ebay… yeah, that’s probably the opposite to free… but once I got my hands on it, I bought 2 SIM cards… one of them can call me for free, the other can call my wife for free (as long as I put $5 on them every month).
I quickly realized that the NAS (a Synology DS112j) didn’t have enough power to deal with the calls. I read that Asterisk needs a kernel with a clock interrupting at least at 1000 HZ. When I first read that, I didn’t have a clue on what that meant… but then, I found this great post that explained it with an app that lets you figure out yours. The NAS had 96 HZ.
I then moved to a VPS… but that made calls originating on my home line to the Portech travel all the way to the US. That generated a delay that was totally unacceptable. I started to think that maybe there’s a reason for everyone to run Asterisk servers locally… you can’t beat a LAN.
Also, at that point, the friends from Asterisk released Asterisk 12… with a RESTful interface that really got me thinking…
My good friend Juan lent me his Raspberry Pi to try it out. I know there are some images around with Asterisk already installed, but I preferred to go ahead and cherry pick what would be installed. I followed the steps at Mathew Jordan’s blog (now offline) and voilá… I won’t say that the compilation was fast… but it got there :) and here I am, placing calls through the Raspberry.
I still perceive a small delay on the calls (way better than on a VPS though) even when I set ulaw:10 and alaw:10 as codecs… not exactly sure why that happens (I’m just getting started here), but I’ve already ordered an ODROID U3 to discard that it’s due to the Raspberry Pi’s lack of power.