voip servers

[Rob Clark]

anyone have and familiararities with using a voip setup commercially ?
friend is migrating his business form a unit to his home and got mis sold a isdn line for phones.
basically needs decent net access
vrs system allowing redirecting to office / mobile1 / mobile 2
1 / 2 local office phones.

not sure how u port a normal landline number to a voip provider and what vrs server software / hardware is required.

 

[sn00p]

I use trixbox for our phone lines, I have migrated 3 BT lines to our VOIP provider which terminates on our trixbox server.

 

[Rob Clark]

analogue ? you happy with it / process ?

 

[sn00p]

analogue ? you happy with it / process ?

We did have analogue lines coming into it, but there's very little point in paying BT for them to terminate in that way, so I migrated most of our numbers to VOIP (fax/dsl excluded obviously).

Trixbox is very good and has all the options under the sun depending on how you want to configure it and what you want to achieve.

I set up an IVR on it and the number of junk calls dropped substantially.

 

[Longy]

SIP trunk is the future we are starting to do lots of these with PBX's but you can just get yourself a drytek router and use the voip feature and set up the SIP Trunk with an ISP.

So you get broadband internet and several voip lines other an analog line.

 

[Daz]

We installed Trixbox, running on Quad Core, 4GB RAM server.
It runs our 14 phones, with trunks down an ISDN30e (10 channel) and also a Sip trunk for calls to America.

It gets HEAVILY used.. someone or at least 2/3 people are on the phone most of the time.

We use Linksys SPA942 phones, which can be managed by the Endpoint Manager on Trixbox.

 

[Rob Clark]

Daz.
so your example has 10 lines via isdn (which are standard ?) and 1x sip trunk for voip ?

Im not 100% on the benefits / usage of isdn but was under the (possibly wrong) impression that voip could be used solely with enough bandwidth (read ~ 128kb per line a minimum which is usually the upload limiting factor on standard dsl / cable).

My own experience is on a single line via sipdiscount which seem fine for my use, but read some providers provide easier methods to port numbers to from bt - any suggestions on that front ? or literally any provider will do ?

For starters going to install asterisk / trixbox on a spare machine and play with it on a standard sip account. I intend to look at implementing this at my work too next month which is a larger scale than the initial example and has the awkwardness of existing hardware. Thanks for the advice so far

 

[sn00p]

We use voipfone for our incoming lines, outgoing calls go via another provider - although you can set up whatever rules you like and route outgoing calls through whatever trunk you want depending on rules you've configured, so US calls could go through a US VoIP provider, UK calls through a UK one etc.

I didn't have to do a whole lot to migrate the lines, just needed the telephone number, bt account number and full address where the line is located - faxed these across to voipfone and 7 days later the incoming numbers were coming in over VoIP.

Our hardware consists of a Quad Core 4GB machine which soley runs trixbox, it was fitted with FXS cards.

 

[Daz]

We use ISDN as our main lines - IMO, SIP Trunks over the internet aren't at the reliability level we needed - we NEED our phones and they get hammered - BT ISDN "just works".
We have a Sangoma card in ours for the ISDN termination... around £700 with the DSP board.. so not cheap.. but it works great with Trixbox.

You can use SIP only. You can use ISDN only. You can use analogue line if you wish... but, an ISDN30e with 10 channels was what we needed/went for.

We also use one of our DDIs on the ISDN to receive faxes.. they go into the Trixbox and get e-mailed out

 

[sn00p]

We use ISDN as our main lines - IMO, SIP Trunks over the internet aren't at the reliability level we needed - we NEED our phones and they get hammered - BT ISDN "just works".
We have a Sangoma card in ours for the ISDN termination... around £700 with the DSP board.. so not cheap.. but it works great with Trixbox.

You can use SIP only. You can use ISDN only. You can use analogue line if you wish... but, an ISDN30e with 10 channels was what we needed/went for.

We also use one of our DDIs on the ISDN to receive faxes.. they go into the Trixbox and get e-mailed out

For sure.

Although voipfone can be configured to provide automatic fallover to route calls to a landline should our PBX become unregistered from their servers, doesn't help mid call as it'd be dropped, but it does provide a bit of a backup if that's important.

So, to recap, trixbox rules.

(Although upgrading it is a PITA, my box is sort of semi-screwed from updating, a backup seems to take half of the UI from the previous version with it...and asterisk doesn't start up, I have to drop to a shell to start it manually..although if I wasn't being lazy i'd fix that in the init scripts)

 

[Longy]

We sell Pannasonic, Samsung and Avaya Phone Systems.

I'm a big fan of the Avaya stuff tbh - having all the IP handsets running on PoE is great.

We always use ISDN for the main lines, plus SIP for backup.

 

[Rob Clark]

hmm so neither of you have faith in sip to run the whole system on it then. is that because of internet reliability / bandwidth or sip server issues ?
Seeing as the example im currently looking at is small scale 1 incoming audio + fax to be routed by a menu system is 'should' be ok but is why im setting up a test system currently.

 

[sn00p]

hmm so neither of you have faith in sip to run the whole system on it then. is that because of internet reliability / bandwidth or sip server issues ?
Seeing as the example im currently looking at is small scale 1 incoming audio + fax to be routed by a menu system is 'should' be ok but is why im setting up a test system currently.

We use SIP only, we have the capability at our providers end to handle failover to PSTN, but we don't bother - our DSL goes down very rarely, infact we've been SIP only for about 2 years now. If our phone lines were "mission critical" then it wouldn't really be advisable, but they're not and it means we don't pay BT a large wadge of money for nothing.

I've had at least 4 simultaneous calls on the DSL line without problem too, you'd be surprised at what you can do with your bandwidth!

 

[Rob Clark]

right, trixbox is up and running (eventually) on a spare box. got it running on 3 extensions via softfone and my nokia n82 via wireless.
Looks a good bit of kit tbh and very impressed with it.

Recommendations pls for voip providers, specifically for use porting number from bt ?

 

[sn00p]

we use voipfone for our incoming lines.

 

[Daz]

I'd be careful with using just VoIP but that's me. It does depend on how much you rely on it all though.

Like b00st has said, Voipfone would get my vote also.

Gradwell seem to do good trunks, though, too.

 

[PinkoCommie]

I haven't actually dealt with coice ov VoIP servers or SIP providers, but having had to troubleshoot VoIP and SIP connectivity on a firewall level I can agree with everyone who says don't rely on it.

So often we have customers who come to us for support where their their VoIP connectivity through their firewall with just go mental. There's just to many variables between every different system combination for it to be 100% reliable. Basically because VoIP hates NAT.

 

[Longy]

I haven't actually dealt with coice ov VoIP servers or SIP providers, but having had to troubleshoot VoIP and SIP connectivity on a firewall level I can agree with everyone who says don't rely on it.

So often we have customers who come to us for support where their their VoIP connectivity through their firewall with just go mental. There's just to many variables between every different system combination for it to be 100% reliable. Basically because VoIP hates NAT.

Aye I'm having a nightware with an Avaya System at the moment Can contact STUN server's but can't get connected although the SIP account works on x-lite.

 

[sn00p]

I haven't actually dealt with coice ov VoIP servers or SIP providers, but having had to troubleshoot VoIP and SIP connectivity on a firewall level I can agree with everyone who says don't rely on it.

So often we have customers who come to us for support where their their VoIP connectivity through their firewall with just go mental. There's just to many variables between every different system combination for it to be 100% reliable. Basically because VoIP hates NAT.

Use IAX between you and your VoIP provider and you only need a single port open. Asterisk bloody rocks.

 

[PinkoCommie]

Aye I'm having a nightware with an Avaya System at the moment Can contact STUN server's but can't get connected although the SIP account works on x-lite.

My current nightmare is a Mitel system in conjunction with external SIP trunk calls where they only have trunks into their main site and want to hand off SIP calls to VPN's.

I can get it to work, but getting it to work securely is the problem. I dislike putting rules that involve things like "all high ports". Getting no help from Mitel doesn't help, I've had to learn how the system hands off calls through the use of packet captures and google :dead:

 

[ChrisR]

No idea what our systme is lol, helpful I know.

BT provided it, think it's all nortel stuff (meridian switches ring a bell??), with nortel phones.

 

[Rob Clark]

interesting with those using voipfone as ive setup an account with them but from a commercial viewpoint is seems a pain in the arse to top up via credit card as and when required. Would much prefer something which uses monthly billing or similar.
edit - altho reading back it seems voipfone are great for incoming as gives landline fallback if required and use whoever for outgoing calls

 

[The Hoff]

Mittel kit here, best of those we looked at. Nearly went Cisco, but as ever, from an admin POV they were lacking. Nortel were ridiculously expensive, no wonder they're on the rocks, and Avaya were in the running but their handsets are the ugly...

 

[sn00p]

interesting with those using voipfone as ive setup an account with them but from a commercial viewpoint is seems a pain in the arse to top up via credit card as and when required. Would much prefer something which uses monthly billing or similar.
edit - altho reading back it seems voipfone are great for incoming as gives landline fallback if required and use whoever for outgoing calls

We use voipfone only for incoming lines, our outgoing lines go through another provider.

 

[Longy]

Mittel kit here, best of those we looked at. Nearly went Cisco, but as ever, from an admin POV they were lacking. Nortel were ridiculously expensive, no wonder they're on the rocks, and Avaya were in the running but their handsets are the ugly...

I like the Avaya digital handsets I think they look great all most sounds like '24' ring tone on internal calls Although I agree the IP Handsets are UGLY.