Signal to Noise

Jazinga is a Canadian VoIP software startup that offers a small business telephone solution, among other VoIP technology procurements. The solution works with SIP phones and consists of a shiny grey appliance that certainly conjures thoughts of its contemporary, the Asterisk Appliance, another VoIP telephone system from Digium. When I first looked at the Asterisk Appliance, I was mostly impressed–there were a few key things missing, though, and if Jazinga can seize on Digium’s shortcomings with their product, I’ll give ‘em a high-five.

First off, know that the Jazinga product is not yet available to the general public, however the software and hardware I looked at was in a very functional state. So it’s fair to compare with the Digium device, since it too was in a pre-release state when I looked at it.

Let’s talk about the Asterisk Appliance for a minute. It looks great, offers support for up to four analog phone lines, and has a “pretty good” GUI web interface–nothing as slick as Switchvox or Fonality, but functional.

The Asterisk Appliance MUST be directly connected to the Internet in order to act as a VoIP trunk gateway, and this is hugely bad. For one, the Linux under the hood of the Asterisk box isn’t all that easy to keep up-to-date security patch wise, and for two, the underlying routing, NAT, and access functions necessary to the Appliance’s functioning as a router aren’t available via its web interface. That’s why I haven’t actually used an Asterisk appliance in the field yet.

Small businesses don’t have a block of IP addresses to work with, and typically don’t have a DMZ segment to sit their phone system on, so I haven’t been able to recommend it as a production PBX.

Let’s hope Jazinga has solved some of these problems.

The first thing I noticed about the Jazinga box was its inclusion of an antenna, ostensibly making it a wireless access point as well as a PBX. A quick glance at the back panel of the main unit, and I realized it’s also an Ethernet switch and a broadband router, just like the Digium unit. The Jazinga offers 4 LAN ports, one WAN port, two analog phone connections, and one analog phone line connection.

According to the quick-start card Jazinga includes, the Jazinga must act as the Internet gateway, which is somewhat problematic. Like the Digium unit, which frustrates me that it has to be the Internet gateway router, the Jazinga insists on being “directly” connected to the Internet–ie. there cannot be a NAT point in front of the Jazinga as it communicates with hosts on the Internet. This is unfortunately, if excusable. VoIP signaling protocols still haven’t totally bridged the NAT gap, but the Jazinga innovates its way out of that mess by allowing you to disable routing altogether, and by providing support for IAX trunks–which are immune to NAT problems normally imposed on VoIP protocols.

Initial setup was easy. I only had two snags. The documentation I received said to use a URL with a host of jazinga.local, but the DNS obtained from the Jazinga through DHCP didn’t resolve that name. Fortunately a quick ifconfig told me what IP address the Jazinga was on and it was mostly smooth sailing from there. The second issue I ran into was a difficulty with the DHCP client on the WAN side. In this case, I was using the Jazinga with a cable modem, which, after a reboot, got the Time Warner DHCP server back on track. So, pretty easy.

Jazinga is going to offer a branded VoIP trunk service especially for this device. At this point I don’t know where their PRIs sit, but I expect you’ll be able to get a local number anywhere in N. America. So, not wanting to be held up, I got to work connecting the Jazinga to my Gizmo account, with which I have a Gizmo CallIn number.

I’ll post the results of that experiment and the rest of my Jazinga evaluation in a day or two. Stay tuned.