Small office phone setup
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@JaredBusch said:
@ajstringham said:
@Dashrender said:
Something else to mention - my carrier currently forwards all calls that would overflow the two lines back to my main office. Can SIP trunks do that?
Yeah, that's doable.
Actually no, a SIP trunk does not do that. A provider may have an add on service, but a trunk does not do that.
All the providers I have worked with only send calls to the fail over number when the trunk is unreachable. Not when the trunk has reach a concurrent call limit. There may be a provider that does it, but I do not know of one.
The issue here is your call flow not the SIP trunk. You only have 2 phones available to answer a call, but what about call waiting or having multiple lines programmed on the phone to allow more than one inbound call at a time?
You need to think differently. Using a trunk from VoIP.ms has no realistic limit to concurrent calls. You send the calls in to a ring group and have the fail for that ring group be to send the call to your main office.
Oops. Misread that. You're right.
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@ajstringham said:
Yeah, the up is the only potential problem. If someone is on the phone and tries sending a large email attachment, you could have issues. Is this a DSL connection at that location?
2Mb/s is easy to saturate. But QoS on the router will fix that. Just make sure that RTP traffic has priority and that's not really an issue. It is ingress (incoming) that is the issue but there is tons more of that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham said:
The latency difference really isn't noticeable. NTG hosts their PBX out of Toronto and I used it both from Upstate NY and Dallas and didn't have issues either time.
We did. More recently we moved it to Chicago.
Oh, news to me.
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@ajstringham not like we make a huge public announcement
When we first built the Toronto platform we were not doing PBX hosting. Eventually it didn't make sense to run our own PBX when we had a standard hosting platform for clients. So we moved into the same datacenter on the same platform as most of our PBX clients. Now we are identical to them just running on the most bleeding edge version of the product so that we see issues before anyone else (we hope.) -
@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham not like we make a huge public announcement
When we first built the Toronto platform we were not doing PBX hosting. Eventually it didn't make sense to run our own PBX when we had a standard hosting platform for clients. So we moved into the same datacenter on the same platform as most of our PBX clients. Now we are identical to them just running on the most bleeding edge version of the product so that we see issues before anyone else (we hope.)Yeah, I heard you guys moved to FreePBX a couple months ago.
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@Dashrender said:
Something else to mention - my carrier currently forwards all calls that would overflow the two lines back to my main office. Can SIP trunks do that?
Sure, but even better is getting the ability to go over two lines. It's really easy to get unlimited lines with SIP, or at least many lines.
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@ajstringham said:
Yeah, I heard you guys moved to FreePBX a couple months ago.
Yes we did, but the moves were separate. Elastix in Toronto to Elastix in Chicago to FreePBX in Chicago.
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@JaredBusch said:
@coliver said:
Good point, just thought it would be something to be made aware of.
Also, calculating calls on 100kb per call means you have at most 10 active calls * 100 kbps = 1 mbps with QoS on your router, there should not be any problems.
Key in on the word "should" there. Sometimes Sonicwalls do not play nice with SIP. It depends on the model as to whether QoS is even available if I remember correctly.
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@NetworkNerd it's always an issue that you might have a router without working QoS.
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@NetworkNerd said:
Key in on the word "should" there. Sometimes Sonicwalls do not play nice with SIP. It depends on the model as to whether QoS is even available if I remember correctly.
Missed the fact that it is a sonicwall. simply hate them because they cause so many problems with SIP. Prior to SIP use being so common, they were a great platform that I would recommend.
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@JaredBusch said:
@NetworkNerd said:
Key in on the word "should" there. Sometimes Sonicwalls do not play nice with SIP. It depends on the model as to whether QoS is even available if I remember correctly.
Missed the fact that it is a sonicwall. simply hate them because they cause so many problems with SIP. Prior to SIP use being so common, they were a great platform that I would recommend.
I remember having to turn on SIP inspection (or SIP transformations as they call it) on one Sonicwall in particular to avoid one-way audio. And I think there was a community post made by @DonutDetroyer about having to do that with a Fonality system as well.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham said:
Yeah, I heard you guys moved to FreePBX a couple months ago.
Yes we did, but the moves were separate. Elastix in Toronto to Elastix in Chicago to FreePBX in Chicago.
Which makes sense.
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@JaredBusch said:
Missed the fact that it is a sonicwall. simply hate them because they cause so many problems with SIP. Prior to SIP use being so common, they were a great platform that I would recommend.
One of my least favourite security devices. Too expensive and too low quality.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
Missed the fact that it is a sonicwall. simply hate them because they cause so many problems with SIP. Prior to SIP use being so common, they were a great platform that I would recommend.
One of my least favourite security devices. Too expensive and too low quality.
I picked up the SonicWalls nearly 3 years ago - I even had a thread about it on SW before deciding. It came down to SonicWall vs Barracuda. I went with SonicWall.
Everyone is talking about Ubiquiti devices now - Considering their price I can definitely try one (assuming it will create a VPN P2P with a SonicWall).
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i've got one here (i think you've got one too) but if you want we can setup a test VPN just to check it out.
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@Hubtech said:
i've got one here (i think you've got one too) but if you want we can setup a test VPN just to check it out.
LOL - You know that I personally purchased a Ubiquiti. Thanks though.
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How about hosting my own PBX in my datacenter?
All of the above still qualifies (100Kb/s) etc, do I need to have VPN's to all of my sites?
What if I want to use a hard phone at my home as part of the system, let's assume I don't have a VPNing firewall at home.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Something else to mention - my carrier currently forwards all calls that would overflow the two lines back to my main office. Can SIP trunks do that?
Sure, but even better is getting the ability to go over two lines. It's really easy to get unlimited lines with SIP, or at least many lines.
I only have two people at this location that can answer the phone - I want the rest of the calls to go to my main office so they can be handled immediately. Most calls don't need to be handled directly by the location in question.
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@Dashrender said:
I only have two people at this location that can answer the phone - I want the rest of the calls to go to my main office so they can be handled immediately. Most calls don't need to be handled directly by the location in question.
With VoIP you aren't dealing with "these lines to here and these lines to there" anymore. It's a pool of capacity and everyone can use it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I only have two people at this location that can answer the phone - I want the rest of the calls to go to my main office so they can be handled immediately. Most calls don't need to be handled directly by the location in question.
With VoIP you aren't dealing with "these lines to here and these lines to there" anymore. It's a pool of capacity and everyone can use it.
Sure, once the whole system is SIP - but it won't be, not for quite some time.
My current phone vendor will only support certified SIP providers (AKA - ones that pay them
)
