Note: EVERYTHING in this article is just my opinion. NOTHING here should be taken as a statement of fact.
Barring something unforeseen that might cause me to change my mind, I think I am going to wrap up blogging. I am into my “hiatus” and I have realized that I really don’t miss blogging. However, there are a few things I might like to say on my way out the door, so to speak, and one such thing has to do with Obihai device dial plans and some of the drama in their forums.
I have said before and I will say again that I honestly believe that the Obihai devices are the best of that type of product that has ever been manufactured up to this point (and I am not saying this just because I received some devices from them for review purposes and have been allowed to keep them, though I suppose I need to disclose that yet again lest I run afoul of the FTC). Not only do they just work better than previously available devices, but they are far more configurable. You can make an Obihai device do a lot of things that are simply not possible on Cisco/Linksys/Sipura and similar devices.
However, with great configurability sometimes comes great complexity, and many consumers and end-users don’t like complexity. This is actually an issue in the tech world. Techie types hate using devices that have been “dumbed-down” for mere consumers (particularly when it means that functionality has been disabled), while most consumers hate dealing with any piece of technology that requires reading instructions to configure.
Obihai devices are probably the most configurable you will ever want to see when it comes to setting up dial plans. In case you don’t know what I mean by a dial plan, those are the instructions that determined when a string of dialed digits is valid, and sends them on to the server, in some cases translating them to a format the server understands (example, stripping the leading “1″ off an 11-digit U.S.A. number if the server only wants to see ten digits). If a device is capable of connecting to multiple service providers, then dial plans may also be used to route calls between providers (for example, when a call is received on one service provider, it might in some cases be forwarded out through another service provider).
In order to let you make calls using any format the server will accept (and maybe even a few it won’t, without translation) and to route calls using any combination of providers (within reasonable limits), Obihai devices actually have multiple settings that could be considered part of the dial plan. There is the “DigitMap” and the “OutboundCallRoute” and the “CallReturnDigitMaps” for each phone port. In addition, there’s a separate “DigitMap” setting for the Line port (on an OBi110 device), and for each service provider, for the OBiTALK network, for the AutoAttendant, for each Gateway and Trunk Group, etc. (and on each of the previous that allow incoming calls, there’s also a InboundCallRoute setting). This makes the devices extremely configurable, but to a mere user, these setting are hopelessly complex.
FORTUNATELY, most users never have to deal with any of these settings. The OBiTALK portal makes it easy to configure an Obihai device for most common configurations. Want to just connect a phone and use it with Google Voice, or one of the commercial service providers supported by Obihai? VERY easy, just set it up using the OBiTALK portal and in five minutes or less you’ll be done, without ever needing to know about any of the settings I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Just enter some very basic account information in the portal and that’s all you need to worry about – it configures your Obihai device for you.
UNFORTUNATELY (for Obihai), many humans tend to be a little more creative than that. Once you realize a device can do more than just the basics, you feel like you want to expand its limits. For example, because Google Voice does not provide 911 service, there are many people who’ve wanted to set up an Obihai device so that if someone does pick up the attached phone and dial 911 by mistake, the call will at least go somewhere useful (perhaps an alternate number that connects to the local 911 center, which is available in some communities). That’s just a minor example, but the point is that in order to do it, you’ll need to modify the Obihai dial plan. And while it’s easy enough to do that using the Expert Configuration mode of the OBiTALK portal, it’s not something a typical user will be able to accomplish without some help.
Which brings me to the topic of the OBiTALK forum. Now, setting up an online user community may seem like a good idea for any company that doesn’t wish to burden their paid technical staff with repetitive and easily-answered questions. The theory is, just set up a forum and let the users help each other. And while that can work, it’s like stepping into a minefield, because people tend to be opinionated bastards. What typically happens is that one guy thinks he’s a little smarter than everybody else, and it goes to his head. Pretty soon, in his mind he’s the “resident guru”, and all the non-techies are happy he’s there because he’s answering questions they have no clue how to answer. But he can really piss off the other technically-minded folks, particularly if they have different ideas of how things should be done. Worse yet, such a guy may feel no particular loyalty to the company, so when he sees something he doesn’t like about the product, he may just step outside the company’s forum to complain. Or, he may even do it in the company’s own forum, thinking that he is such a valuable commodity to the community that the company wouldn’t dare censor him or kick him off the forum. If he leaves, other users may blame the company, or the other technically-minded folks who called him out when he was spouting bullshit.
Something very much like what I have described happened in the OBiTALK forum – not exactly as I described in the previous paragraph (that was more of a generic template), but similar, in my opinion. There was a guy on the OBiTALK forum that, over time, became something of an “expert” in Obihai dial plans. But he was also VERY opinionated, and I felt that at times he was more abrasive than he should have been to other forum users. I’m not going to go into the entire history, because it’s irrelevant, and besides with my fading memory I might get some details wrong. When he left, several people blamed me, and took the opportunity to hate on me because they thought that I had told Obihai to kick him off the forum, and that Obihai might actually have done that just because I said so, or else just because I was rather open about pointing out some of his bullshit. Well, as far as I am concerned, such people can hate until they have an ulcer, but I would not have done anything differently.
The fact is, although very early on in his participation in the forum I saw that his attitudes were going to cause problems and warned Obihai about that (because I’ve seen it happen in other forums), they didn’t listen to me. By the time he actually left, my attitude toward him had changed somewhat. I didn’t necessarily want him to leave the Obihai forum, because he was in fact helping many people, but I did want him to stop “talking trash” (and mostly nonsense at that) about Obihai in another online VoIP forum, while still trying to play the role of “resident expert” in the Obihai forum, and also to stop trying to discourage people from using the OBiTALK portal (which was VERY bad advice for most new users). However, I had always suspected that one day he would “pick up his ball and go home”, because I’ve seen other guys do it in other forums, and it sure appears that’s exactly what happened — and if so, he left without even the courtesy of posting a farewell message. I’m pretty sure he’s not incapacitated because he’s logged into his account on that other VoIP forum I mentioned since he stopped posting on the OBiTALK forum (registered users can see the last access date of other users).
All that said, Obihai has a problem and they are not, as far as I can tell, doing anything to solve it. The problem is that it is hard for even educated users to understand how their dial plans work and how they interact with each other. Some have suggested that the aforementioned “resident expert” understood Obihai dial plans better than the Obihai creators themselves, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s untrue. The thing is, you shouldn’t need a doctorate in computer programming to understand how to configure a device. One obvious solution would be to make the OBiTALK portal more flexible. For example, they could have a way for people to enter specific dial patterns and then specify which service provider (or gateway/trunk group, etc.) such calls should be routed to. Another possibility would be to rewrite the sections of the OBi Device Administration Guide that deals with Call Routing and Digit Map, Inbound Call Route Configuration, Outbound Call Route Configuration, Digit Map Configuration, etc. in plain English so that people (not just programmers) could understand it, with actual real-life examples (not the overly-complicated ones often found in the “resident expert’s” forum posts, however).
If they don’t want to do that, another possibility would be to set up a Wiki. I think a Wiki would be a much better method of getting this type of information out because it tends to enforce a more organized flow of information, plus anyone (or a least a number of trusted users) can edit it. It would be best if Obihai set this up, although if they don’t want to, someone else could, or for that matter a section for Obihai devices could probably be maintained on the voip-info.org wiki (there is already a minimal page on Obihai there, but more could be added). The thing about a Wiki is that the information tends to be better organized and more permanent than random forum posts or blog posts, yet a Wiki still has the advantage of being primarily user-created (if that’s what you want).
The point is that if Obihai had done things differently early on — perhaps set up a moderation policy for their forums and stuck to it, perhaps had their customer support folks play a more active role in the forum, or perhaps set up a Wiki and encouraged people to post frequently-asked (and answered) questions there — things might have flowed more smoothly. But Obihai probably felt they just couldn’t spare any employees taking time away from other duties to take a more active role in the forum. Since they are a small company (at least when compared to the tech giants) and since they probably didn’t anticipate this kind of issue I’m certainly not going to chastise them in hindsight, but for future reference, it is ALWAYS dangerous to let a non-employee essentially “take over” your company’s forum. Always. If you let it happen, eventually it will come back to bite you in the butt in one way or another.
Strangely, after all the above happened, someone suggested that I was trying to take over as “resident expert”, because I had (in their mind) singlehandedly driven the “resident expert” away, even though there is no evidence he ever listened to a word I said. I actually think he might have blacklisted me at some point or something, but if not, he appeared to make it a point not to reply publicly or privately to anything I posted. In any case, I was very taken aback by that comment because frankly my track record with helping people with Obihai-related issues wasn’t all that great. Whenever I took a guess at what someone’s problem might be, more often than not it turned out I had guessed wrong, and I never really understood Obihai dial plans that well (certainly nowhere near as well as the aforementioned “expert”). But given some of the hostility toward me, I decided it was best if I just stopped posting there altogether.
And that, in a roundabout way, got me to thinking about my overall attitudes toward some of the things I used to enjoy or be supportive of. Frankly, I think technology has made a U-Turn. Whereas, in about 2004-2005 everything still mostly worked, after that things started going back downhill. The Obihai devices are actually about the only exception to that, provided you (speaking of the average user here) only want to do the simple, “normal” stuff and not get too deeply into trying to figure out how the dial plans work. Oh, and XBMC runs better than it used to, although I still get unexplained pauses on occasion when it plays a video. But Asterisk? Not impressed with new versions. FreePBX? Wish I’d never heard of it. FreeSWITCH? Still no decent “plug and play” GUI’s (though I suspect it’s getting closer). Ubuntu? HATE, HATE, HATE with a passion the new Unity interface (at least someone please figure out a way to get the damn buttons off the side of the screen and down at the bottom where they belong)! Macintosh/OS X? It’s better than Windows, maybe, but I detest the Apple corporation, and the way they are trying to rope us into only using software they have blessed. Broadband? They keep trying to figure out new ways to gouge us with usage caps and other shit. And so it goes…
In other words, my attitude toward technology in general has changed over the last few years, and especially the last couple of years. So what business do I have writing a blog such as this one? I’m sure you didn’t come here to constantly hear me piss and moan about this and that, and it depresses me to even write those kinds of articles. And when I do write about the stuff I actually feel somewhat passionate about, no one actually reads it, because that kind of article doesn’t “fit” in with the original theme of this blog. And even writing those kinds of articles often depresses me, and even moreso when I perceive that they aren’t doing a bit of good.
If I ever do resume blogging — and at the moment I do not feel there is a high probability that will ever happen, since I no longer enjoy it nor do I feel that it’s doing anyone any good — it probably won’t be on this blog, nor will if be about anything having to do with technology. I happen to think that the only way technology will ever begin to really advance again is if we do two things as a society, neither of which I see happening in my lifetime (which I very often hope is mercifully short*, unless there is some major change coming). One is to completely abolish the ridiculous fiction of “intellectual property” and let people be creative without having to worry about stepping on someone’s patent or copyright (when will people understand that all ideas and thoughts really come from the same source, and for us to claim ownership of them is about as stupid as trying to claim ownership of certain molecules of water in a lake and hold onto them, just because we think we saw them first). The other is to completely abolish the ridiculous fiction that corporations are the same as people (really super-people, and evil ones at that, because of all the money and resources at their disposal). Until those two things happen, things are just going to get worse, and we will be more and more enslaved by the technology we have created.
* Don’t let my comment in that last paragraph worry you; I’m not contemplating suicide. Besides the fact that I believe it really messes up your next (re)incarnation, it would make too many of my “haters” happy, and I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction! 
