Graves on SOHO Technology

Last week’s VUC call with FWDs Dan Behringer brings to mind a common complaint about SIP desk phones, namely the lack of an alphanumeric keyboard. Lacking a proper keyboard it’s difficult to really push the idea of SIP URIs as a primary means of making calls.

There are a variety of approaches to overcoming this, including the use of ISNs as prescribed by the Freenum project. That project proposes a means of dialing SIP URIs indirectly, assigning them ISN numbers. Since ISNs use only numbers and the * key they can be dialed on a traditional phone keypad. It’s essentially a way of avoiding SIP URIs through indirection.

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Over at Nerd Vittles that Asterisk Guru Ward Mundy has posted a great how-to implementing ISN lookups with his popular PBX-In-A-Flash Asterisk distributions. It’s a great overview of ISN and ITADs, including Freenum.org.

ISNs are a novel approach to bridging the gulf between the worlds of legacy phones with traditional phone numbers, and the realm of SIP URIs. It’s a way of dialing something like a normal number and having it automatically be resolved to a SIP URI. This is easily implemented using Asterisk, especially when Nerd Uno shows you how.

All of this is an approach to transitioning from our current state into a time when SIP URIs are more commonplace. That would imply that more of what we think of as “phone calls” would transit a pure IP network. That fact is a major enabling mechanism for such improvements as wideband audio & improved call security, amongst many other things.