What is VoXaLot

VoXaLot is not a standard VSP as such - it is a special VSP created by a joint venture between SIPbroker.com and e164.org. You can register for free and use VoXaLot as a master VSP with special features. The main reasons you would use VoXaLot include:

1. VoXaLot has its own dial plan capability. It therefore allows people that do not have a sophisticated ATA to create dial plans that can use multiple VSPs. This will allow you to route your calls to more than one VSP and take advantage of the lowest cost service provider for each type of call. You do this by using VoXaLot Dial Plans. Using VoXaLot dial plan capability means you can get the benefit of gateways without having an ATA that supports gateways.
2. VoXaLot has a tool that allows you to make cheap (around 20 cents) untimed calls to anywhere in the world (Web Call Back) without any ATA hardware at all (either party). Therefore anyone can setup an account with a VSP and start using VoIP using their normal PSTN telephone without buying any hardware. You will need an internet connected PC to use this service.
3. VoXaLot provides free Voicemail.
4. VoXaLot dial plans can prepend the Australian country code (+61) to the front of your dialled number before it checks for ENUM (a free way to connect your call). This is useful if your VSP does not accept calls in the format 61 x xxxx xxxx. Engin for example doesn't accept calls like this. If you don't dial your calls with the country code first, then you wont be able to leverage ENUM. VoXaLot solves this problem.

Some things that VoXalot can do can also be done by SIP Broker. One advantage of VoXaLot is that you don't have to interact with SIP Broker as well as VoXaLot. The following VoXaLot functionality is provided at VoXaLot and also at SIP Broker.

5. Provide a way for people to call you from the PSTN network from many places around the world for the price of a local call (SIP Broker PSTN Dialling).
6. Automatically check to see if there is a 'free' way to connect your call (ENUM Routing). If there is a free way to do it, VoXaLot will find it. If not, the call will go through your prefered discount VSP.
7. Allow many users with a VoIP service to call you for free from anywhere around the world (SIP Dialling).
8. Provide other people with a free way to contact you. Anyone with VoIP can make a free call to an ATA that is connected to VoXaLot. If you also register your VoXaLot free calling path with ENUM at e164.org, then anyone with VoIP can contact you for free, and they don't even need to know you use VoXaLot.
Want to know more - then read on.
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Web Call Back

This is a new cool way to get very very cheap international calls. What's really cool about it is you don't even need to have any VoIP hardware. All you need is to have a VoIP account with a VSP and use the VoxaLot service called Web Callback.

How it Works
Say you live in Australia and your friend lives in England. Here's what you would do.
1. You sign up with a VSP that has competitive rates (say 10c flat rate untimed in Australia). You will need to select a provider that allows SIP calls. A full list of providers is provided at http://www.sipbroker.com/sipbroker/action/providerWhitePages
There are some notable providers that explicitly prevent you from making free SIP to SIP calls, namely Iinet, Engin, Nodephone, myfone, and bbpglobal.

If you are looking for a good cheap VSP that supports free calls between VSPs, try either http://www.sipme.com.au/ or http://www.astratel.com.au/

2. Your friend in England signs up with an English VSP (also from the list above) that has low call rates in England (let's say it is also 10c untimed). Now strictly speaking you don't have to use an English VSP. You can actually use 2 different Australian VSPs if you like. You will need 2 separate VoIP accounts though.
3. You register your phone numbers at the VoXaLot website by getting yourself a login, then following the registration process. http://www.voxalot.com/action/home
4. Once you are all signed up and registered, you log on to the internet, initiate a call between the two phone numbers using the VoXaLot web service using Internet Explorer. What VoXaLot actually does is get your local VoIP service to call your home phone number, and gets the English VoIP service to call the English home phone number, and then gets the 2 VoIP services to call each other. Wait a few seconds, then both phones will ring and you are talking to each other, and all it will cost is 10 cents each. Have a look at the tutorial at http://www.voxalot.com/action/static?task=display&itemOID=26 for more detailed instructions.

Now if you and your friend have VoIP in Australia and England respectively, then you might say 'so what', I can do that for the same price. However the thing to remember is that with VoXaLot callback, you don't need any VoIP hardware. All you need is an account with a VoIP provider. Now that's cool!
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SIP Broker PSTN Dialling

SIP Broker PSTN dialling is a system that allows you to call SIP URI numbers directly from the PSTN network for the cost of a local call. SIP Broker provides a list of local PSTN phone numbers that can be used from locations around the world. When you are in one of these locations, you simply dial this local phone number from any PSTN telephone. You will hear a recorded message asking you to enter the SIP broker code and phone number. Every VoIP service provider that doesn't block incoming SIP calls has a unique 3 digit SIP Code. ie VoXaLot's code is *010, SIP broker's code is *011, Pennytel is *234 etc. A full list of SIP codes is provided at the SIP Broker Whitepages.

If your VSP allows incoming SIP calls (most do except Engin, Myfone, Internode, iinetphone) then all you have to do is create an account at SIP broker using your phonenumber@yourVSP.com, and then select a unique phone number for yourself. The SIP Broker Whitepages shows if your VSP blocks incoming SIP calls or not. If you VSP blocks incoming SIP calls, then your choices are more limited. If you have an advanced ATA like the SPA-3000, you can set up inbound direct IP dialling to get around this problem. This is an advanced feature, however there are step by step instructions provided on this site to ensure you don't get in trouble.
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ENUM Routing

ENUM routing is one of the more exciting yet less visible sides to VoIP. If everyone registered their PSTN phone numbers and their DID numbers, and provided an direct internet path to their ATA, then most people with VoIP would be able to call you for free. The following graphic shows how ENUM routing works. The topic has been covered in more detail on the e164.org page

How to set up VoXaLot

It is free to set up a VoXaLot account. Instructions on how to do this are provided in the following section. There are also excellent online tutorials available at VoXaLot - even if I do say so myself :-)
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Setup Account

The first thing to do is to get yourself an account. To do this, go to http://www.voxalot.com and click on the register link.

At this point you have to select a user ID for yourself. You can select any 6 digit number you want, but be aware that this will be your VoXaLot phone number. So make sure the number you select for yourself at this step is a phone number that you will be happy with.

Register your VSPs

Once you have registered, sign in to VoXaLot and then register each of your VSPs.
1. Click on My Account then Providers

2. Once you have selected providers, in the centre of the screen click on the

link.

3. Enter the details of your VSP. You will need to use your username and password provided to you by your VSP.

If you have more than 1 VSP, go ahead now and add the other VSPs as a separate provider. That is the base setup for VoXaLot. You now need to go ahead and set up your dial plans, speed dial address book and/or web dial address book to be able to use VoXaLot.
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VoXaLot Dial Plans

VoXaLot dial plans use a different syntax to dial plans in a standard ATA. This is because VoXaLot uses Asterisk as the base software for its VoIP service. The great benefit of VoXaLot dial plans is that it will mean that you can use multiple VSPs to route your calls. In effect you end up with an ATA that has gateway capability, even if your hardware doesn't support this.

With VoXaLot dial plans, you can create as many dial plans as you like, and put them in priority order of operation by giving them a priority number. VoXaLot will then start at the first numbered dial plan, if it can't make a match, it will move on to the next numbered dial plan and so on. When it finds a match, it routes the call to the service provider you have selected for that type of call. This way you can take advantage of low rates for different call types.
VoXaLot has 2 formats of dial plans - simple and advanced, and we will look at these separately below.
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Simple Dial Plans

1. If your not already logged on, you should logon to your VoXaLot account. Once you have done that, click on My Account then Dial Plans

2. Once you have selected Dial Plans, in the centre of the screen click on the

link.

3.1 Enter a priority (1 will be the first dial plan, 2 will be the second etc). You may like to number your dial plans in 10s ie 10, 20, 30 etc so that it is easier to change the order of the dial plans later.
3.2 From the drop down list, select either equals or begins with.
3.3 Enter the number to match in the box provided
3.4 Select which of your registered VSPs to route the matching number to.

In the example below, I have set up a dial plan that will take any mobile number (ie starting with 04) and it will send the call to Engin.

Advanced Dial Plans

To get the real benefit of dial plans, you need to use advanced dial plans. The notation is different to standard ATA boxes however it is not hard to learn. So first I will explain how they work.

An advanced dial plan has 5 main sections:
1. The Priority (straight forward - what order is the dial plan executed)
2. Pattern (a string that either matches the dialled number or not)
3. Replacement (instructions on what to replace the matched phone number with)
4. Provider (who to send the matched number to)
5. ENUM Replacement (instructions on what to replace the matched phone number with to use ENUM)

So let's look at each section one at a time.
1. Priority
This is easy. It is just the numerical order in which VoXaLot will search your dial plans trying to find a match. It will start at the lowest numbered priority dial plan, check for a match. If no match, it will go to the next lowest numbered priority dial plan, and keep going until it finds the first match, and then send the dialled number to the VSP specified when a match is found.

2. Pattern
A pattern is a string of characters against which a dialled number will be compared. The dialled number with either "match" or "not match" the pattern. There are only a few rules for the pattern

All dial plan patterns must begin with an underscore _
X matches any digit from 0-9
Z matches any digit from 1-9
N matches any digit from 2-9
[ ] matches any digits in the brackets. eg [25] will match 2 and 5, but will not match 0,1,3,4 etc. [2-5] will match 2, 3, 4, 5, but will not match 0,1,6,7 etc. [02-5] will match 0,2,3,4,5 but will not match 1,6,7 etc.
. wildcard (full stop), matches one or more characters

Some Examples
_9XXXXXXX matches 98175555 etc
_9817XXXX matches 98175555 but not 92595555 etc
_13ZXX. matches 131241 but not 1300 123 456 (because the Z excludes 0 as an option)

3. Replacement
Replacment is the method to replace (or add) one or more digits to your dialled number after it has been matched. So if the dialled number matches the pattern in step 2. above, then you can apply a replacement.

The replacment syntax is Prefix${EXTEN:count1:count2}Suffix where count1 and count 2 are optional. Let's look at this in parts.

3.1 $[EXTEN}
This is the default replacement string, and it IS the dialled number.
eg if you dialled 98175555 and it matched your pattern in step 2. above, then ${EXTEN} = 98175555.

3.2 Count1
Count1 can be a positive integer or a negative integer.

If it is a positive integer then we skip that number of digits from the left.
eg if you dialled 0298175555 and it matched your pattern in step 2. above, then
${EXTEN:2} = 98175555
${EXTEN:6} = 5555 etc

If Count1 is a negative integer, you drop that number of digits off of the end of the string.
eg if you dialled 0298175555 and it matched your pattern in step 2. above, then
${EXTEN:-4} = 029817
${EXTEN:-6} = 0298

3.3 Count2
Count2 can only be used if Count1 is used. Together they specify a starting point in a dialled phone number, and the number of characters to be taken. Count2 can only be a positive integer and indicates how many digits should be counted from the point indicated by Count1.
eg if you dialled 0298175555 and it matched your pattern in step 2. above, then ${EXTEN:2:4} = 9817 (ie skip the first 2 digits, then take the next 4 digits

3.4 Prefix and Suffix
You may also add prefixes and suffixes to your dialled number.
eg if you dialled 98175555 and it matched your pattern in step 2. above, then 612${EXTEN} = 61298175555
eg2 if you dialled 0298175555 and it matched your pattern in step 2. above, then 61${EXTEN:1} = 61298175555

4. Provider
Simply select one of the VSPs that you have registered with VoXaLot from the drop down list. This provider will be used for all calls matching the pattern you have set up (including those that matched the pattern but didn't find an ENUM match - see point 5 below).

5. ENUM Replacement
ENUM replacement follows exactly the same rules as covered in step 3 above, however it allows for a different replacement string to be used to find a ENUM match. You would want to use ENUM replacement so that VoXaLot can first try to find an ENUM match for your dialled number. Some VSPs (such as Engin) wont allow you to call a number in the format 612 xxxx xxxx. However ENUM must use this format. VoXaLot therefore caters for both. This is how it would work:

a. you dial 98175555
b. It finds a match in your number pattern
b. The dial plan has Repacement set as ${EXTEN} = 98175555
c. Your Provider was set as Engin
d. Your ENUM Replacment was set as 612${EXTEN} = 61298175555

VoXaLot first checks to see if there is an ENUM match for 61298175555. If not, it goes ahead and routes the number 98175555 to Engin and the call is placed as normal.
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Using Dial Plans

You can use VoXaLot dial plans in the same way that you use dial plans with a standard ATA. There are a couple of distinct advantages of VoXaLot dial plans over an ATA dial plan.

Only advanced ATAs have the capability to use more than 1 VSP. With VoXaLot you can use as many VSPs as you like.
VoXaLot allows you to modify the dialled number in 2 different formats: one format to be checked against ENUM, and a different format to by routed to your VSP if an ENUM match is not found. This is useful if your VSP doesn't accept internationl number formats for regular dialling (ie Engin).

Examples of Using dial plans

Here is a set of sample dial plans that could be set up at VoXaLot to leverage the benefits it offers.

Priority	......Pattern......	Replacement	Provider	ENUM Replacement	Comments
10	_NXXXXXXX	02${EXTEN}	Engin	612${EXTEN}	If you call any 8 digit number starting with 2-9, then prepend 612 for ENUM, or prepend 02 for Engin
20	_0NXXXXXXXX	${EXTEN}	Engin	61${EXTEN:1}	If you call 0x xxxx xxxx then scrape away the 0 and prepend 61 for ENUM. Using the N excludes any number starting with 00 or 01
30	_1[38]00XXXXXX	${EXTEN}	Engin	61${EXTEN}	If you call 1300 or 1800 then prepend 61 for ENUM.
40	_04XXXXXXXX	${EXTEN}	Pennytel	614${EXTEN:1}	Send all mobile calls via Pennytel unless they find an ENUM match
50	_0011.	${EXTEN}	Engin	${EXTEN:4}	If you make an international call, scrape away the 0011
60	_XXX.	${EXTEN}	Engin	${EXTEN}	send any other number with more than 3 digits for ENUM then back to Engin. It is important to only send > 3 digit numbers as VoXaLot has some 3 digit exentions such as voice mail 500.

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