I came accross something odd the other day, I had some Cisco IP Phones on a DMZ interface and the Call Manager was behind the inside interface. If you made a call from a 7940 to a 7940 everything worked fine, if you made a call from a 7905 to a 7940 it failled!

I ran a packet capture and found that the phone was “bouncing” the RTP stream off the firewall rather than connecting directly to the peer phone… very weird! The problem was solved by enabling…

same-security-traffic permit intra-interface

I thought I post this for some future googlers!

Nokia starts tests of Wi-Fi Internet mobile calls | Reuters.com
Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, has started its first tests of a technology that allows users to roam seamlessly between phone networks and local wireless hotspots such as Wi-Fi.

As VoIP becomes more & more well know to Joe Public it’s good to see that Nokia move forward with perhaps the most useful implementation, if the system can work bi-directionally, i.e. if you are within Wi-Fi range and incoming calls route over said connection than this can only have good implications for signal/call quality as well as cost savings for out going calls.

Wojtek Felendzer held a mobile phone to his ear as he walked across the room, the call automatically switching behind the scenes from a Wi-Fi wireless hotspot to the regular cellular network

Check out this article, found via slashdot bring on the Mobile VoIP goodness !

What’s really cool about this article as it describes a working implementation…

works by tunneling cellular information packets through the Internet when Wi-Fi is available and reverting to cellular towers when it is not.

This is the first implementation I’ve seen aimed at consumers, not businesses, no “call manager” needed, just cheap calls !

Secure Voice over IP: Zfone

By Philip Zimmermann

Secure Voice over IP: Zfone

14 Mar 2006 – I’ve just released Zfone, a new product that takes a new approach to make a secure telephone for the Internet.

I think it’s better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all.

This looks like it might be quite cool, shame I’m not using linux at work any more, I’ll have to wait ’til this eve to have a play

Cisco and Microsoft Collaborate to Enhance Real-Time Business Communications: Open standards, SIP-based enterprise solutions enable effective communications.

For years, people have said, this year, the next best thing will be VOIP ! Hummm, with these too big players taking an interest may be 2006 will be year of the VOIP !

Nokia 6136 Phone

Smooth and seamless transitions between GSM and WLAN networks
…..

Available: Planned in the second quarter of 2006

All I can say is watch this space … <thinking aloud>What’ll be most interesting is how they achieve the voip/wlan link – cisco integration, skype, avaya? – gonna have to do some investigation me thinks ! </thinking aloud>

This article from yesterday cannot go unmentioned….

BBC NEWS | Business | Nokia launching net call handsets
Nokia is introducing new mobile phone handsets that will enable users to make calls over the Internet.

Nokia putting Skype were the 1st people to try and offer consumers or “Joe public” voip phones for home use, it’s not that the technology is new, cisco & avaya have been offering businesses the technology for years, it’s just that it wasn’t quite right for the market at large.

Where skype are failing, nokia will succeed, why ? Because people already own, buy and are familiar with the product “Joe public” can walk into any CarPhoneWareHouse and buy a mobile phone & if the new model comes with free* Internet phone calls then of course they’ll pick it.

So what does that mean to us, the professionals who work in networking and security ? Well networking will change, specifically wireless, more people will need access to WI-FI lans, so the bandwidth will need to increase, security of these lans will change, laptops and pdas will need authentication, but phone access will need to be simple. Security as a whole will change, it’s the windows syndrome again, people buy windows for home PC’s because that’s what they’re used to at work, and when they are at work they choose windows solutions because that’s what they have the most exposure to, since in their home pc’s run windows … sorry where was I…. yes, People will start to have VOIP on their mobile phones, so they’ll look at VOIP for their business solutions; and users will see VOIP IP PHONE printed on their desk phone, so when offered voip on their mobile they’ll consider buying it.

The shift to VOIP effects security, because now a single data network is responsible for the full communication of a business; what if their local call manager connects to an external provider, now their firewall is responsible for passing e-mail and voice communications (not to mention any other data)… all of a sudden the network infrastructure and the security implementation is solely responsible for comm’s where as before we all had the security blanket of if the Internet/e-mail/network fails we can all pick up the phone !

I guess this means the future is going to be bright, more wireless bandwidth for more VOIP communications running on a single network infrastructure with increased security awareness is a significant evolution, and hey, with the whole web2.0 thing pushing the hype along nicely we should all hopefully be in jobs for the next few years

* All free’s come with conditions, so it probably won’t actually be free, but you know the marketing will say it is.