Convergin, a provider of core wireless convergence servers (WCS) today announced that Unefon, Mexico’s leading CDMA operator, has chosen Convergin to enable its 2.7 million subscribers to make and receive calls with a single number on virtually any phone: wireless, wireline or VoIP softphone. Ah, yes, the beauty of IP!

IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) will certainly aid in this type of convergence (Convergin supports IMS). IMS allows the service provider to combine wireline and wireless applications in the same session, and allows sessions to be dynamically modified on the fly, for instance add video to a voice call, or transfer a cell phone call to your landline seemlessly. This makes possible “blended” services such as video telephony, push-to-talk, chat, broadcast TV using multicast IP video streams, video-on-demand, video surveillance, and other applications. IMS carries signaling and bearer traffic over IP and acts as a session controller application that matches user profiles with the appropriate call/session-handling servers and then routes the call or session to the appropriate destination.

In any event, Convergin claims that this new service is the first full commercial deployment of fixed mobile convergence in North America, as seen by their press release.

Unefon Chooses Convergin for First North American Fixed Mobile Convergence Commercial Deployment

Core wireless convergence servers enable 2.7 million subscribers to make and receive calls with a single number on virtually any phone

New York, NY - December 13, 2005 - Convergin, the leading provider of core wireless convergence servers (WCS), today announced that Unefon, Mexico’s leading CDMA operator, is using Convergin’s Accolade Core WCS to enable its 2.7 million subscribers to make and receive calls with a single number on virtually any phone: wireless, wireline or VoIP softphone. The new service, marketed under the WOW-Unefon brand, is the first full commercial deployment of fixed mobile convergence in North America.

With the addition of Convergin’s Accolade platform to the network, Unefon seamlessly expanded its core network without any interruption of service or degradation of service quality. Unefon now extends beyond CDMA to include SIP/IP, which allows it to offer services to new markets including fixed line, enterprise, and advanced multimedia communication. Additional services include the ability to make Unefon calls from dual-mode (CDMA/WiFi) phones and from softphones, while roaming worldwide or over the Internet.

Unefon is one of the leading adopters of softswitch technology in its wireless network, which is being used together with Convergin’s WCS to provide the WOW services. All the new WOW services transparently interact with Unefon’s existing IN pre-paid charging system, leveraging the existing billing infrastructure and market awareness to the new domains. This allows Unefon customers to share a single account across the different access methods, and centralize their communications needs in a single Unefon wallet.

“Convergin met the challenges of our advanced IN network and allowed us to integrate the pieces together to offer unified service delivery not only to our traditional CDMA subscribers, but also to fixed-line users, and roaming users that use wireless IP connectivity via Wi-Fi.” said Mr. Ernesto Wagner, MIS Director for Unefon. “By adding the Accolade to our network we are able to significantly expand our service capabilities while evolving and leveraging our comprehensive network.”

Using Convergin’s Accolade SCIM functionality enables the convergence of SIP clients to Unefon’s network without compromising the full connectivity to its existing Wireless Intelligent Network Service Control Points (SCPs), that include Prepaid SCP and an additional SCP running advanced, location-based VPN services.

“We have now established ourselves as the leading vendor for Fixed Mobile Convergence solutions,” said Dr. Ayal Itzkovitz, CEO of Convergin. “We are the first vendor to take a Fixed Mobile Convergence solution to a commercial deployment in North America. Our core convergence approach is proving itself to decision makers looking to deploy these solutions today and looking long-term towards the network evolution to IMS.”

This page details the procedure that I followed in order to obtain a working (as in “non-crashing”) version of Asterisk 1.2.1 (the latest release from Digium) on the Nokia770.

If you’re in a hurry or you don’t want to mess with compiling and Scratchbox (or you simply don’t know what those are), just skip ahead to the binaries.

Step 1. Start Scratchbox.

Step 2. From within Scratchbox, do “wget http://ftp.digium.com/pub/asterisk/asterisk-1.2.1.tar.gz” to download the latest sources.

Step 3. Unarchive the sources with “tar xvfz asterisk-1.2.1.tar.gz”. This will give you an “asterisk-1.2.1″ folder. Change to that folder (”cd asterisk-1.2.1″)

Step 4. You will need to patch the main Makefile and the one for the GSM codec in order to make them compile for the 770. Do “wget http://www.cayennegraphics.com/asterisk770/Makefile.diff” and “wget http://www.cayennegraphics.com/asterisk770/Makefile-gsm.diff” to download both diffs.

Step 5. Patch the main Makefile: “patch Makefile Makefile.diff”.

Step 6. Patch the GSM makefile: “cd codecs/gsm; patch Makefile ../../Makefile-gsm.diff”

Step 7. Switch to the ARM target if needed (”sbox-config -st SDK_ARM”). Type “make”. Wait .

Step 8. After compilation has completed, type “make install”. This will install Asterisk in your Scratchbox environment, under /tmp/ast121/

Step 9. Go to /tmp/ast121/usr/lib/asterisk/modules and do “rm -f *ilbc* *lpc* *sqlite* ; strip *.so”. This will remove the ilbc and lpc10 codecs that are too processor intensive for the Nokia 770, the cdr_sqlite.so file and remove all symbols to make the files smaller. Also, go to /tmp/ast121/usr/sbin/ and do “strip asterisk” (I’m sure this could somehow be done directly at compilation time, but I don’t know how yet). You can also take out the “mohmp3″ folder from within /tmp/ast121/var/lib/asterisk/, it contains 4 large MP3 files used for music on hold (you can put them back if you figure out a way to play them on the 770).

Step 10. You’re ready to move the binaries to your Nokia 770. Go to /tmp/ast121/ and type “tar cvfz asterisk-1.2.1-nokia770-arm-binary.tar.gz *”. You can also download the binaries directly from cayennegraphics.com/asterisk770/asterisk-1.2.1-nokia770-arm-binary.tar.gz . Drop the files on your memory card or SCP them from your machine, your choice.

Step 11. On the 770, start an XTerm and become root.

Step 12. Go to the folder where you dropped the asterisk-1.2.1-nokia770-arm-binary.tar.gz file and (as root) type “tar -zvx -C / -f asterisk-1.2.1-nokia770-arm-binary.tar.gz”

Step 13. That’s all. To run Asterisk, edit the configuration files at “/etc/asterisk”, then type “asterisk -vvvvvc” to start it and get a console prompt.

We have taken over 10 different calling card company cards and tested to see if they really have the rates they say they do. The fact is, they have the rates they say they do, but after all of the fees, the price is often 60% more per phone call than advertised.

For example, there was one card in particular that was a $5 card that we purchased to test. The advertised rates where 4.5 cents to the Dominican Republic. This seemed very good, as more providers’ costs are 4.5 cents to the Dominican, it appeared to be at cost. There was a weekly fee of $0.69, a hang-up fee of $0.15, a general fee on each call of 35%, and rounding was to every 3 minutes. We did the following test:

Based on these variables it became very apparent that the advertised rate of 4.5 cents was actually between 10 and 11 cents. Some other cards advertising the same rate of 4.5 cents had best case scenarios of 7.2 cents.

Basically, the cost of minutes may or may not be 4.5 cents when they buy them. The fact that a consumer agrees with the terms of the calling card when they purchase a card sets the precedence for the rate. We recently did this test to do the following:

Show that Calling Card Profits are 60% and up, and on average make a profit of 40% after distributor commitments and printing.
To show that at cost rates of 4.5 cents are not at cost, they are making profits on the fees.

To get into the calling card business and design the most ethical and profitable models, please contact gibson@vocalscape.com. Or review the website www.vocalscape.com for more information.

Go to: http://www.vocalscape.com/callingcard.htm