Phones new location
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@JaredBusch said:
@coliver said:
I was going to look at that for my house, looks interesting. Although Schmooze has done a good job with the most recent FreePBX release.
Do not misunderstand that I think the FreePBX platform is suddenly bad. It is a great platform. But they are also no longer an independent company. Sangoma may stay hands off or they may tweak things to not be so freely workable.
No that wasn't my impression at all. Isn't FreePBX released under the GNU Public license? If Sangoma were to change things for the worse someone would probably fork the distro and fix it.
I tried the Asterisk @Home platform like 6 years ago (I think) and it was obviously an abandoned branch as switchvox had been out for a couple years by this point.
Never tried Asterisk @Home, it just seems like Asterisk is a great solution for a home phone system. Especially since I can setup a SIP client on my fiance's iPad so she can walk around the house with it. Although wireless SIP device really aren't that expensive either.
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FreePBX is open source, yes. But forking it is a big pain. I think someone would move past it and make a competitor rather than forking it. It just isn't good enough to fork
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@coliver said:
Never tried Asterisk @Home...
That's a product name, not a reference to using it at home.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
Never tried Asterisk @Home...
That's a product name, not a reference to using it at home.
Yep, I got that.
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I use Asterisk at home and have for years. It has been great. And because we use an IVR to get to us, it blocks ALL spam calling. No auto-dialer gets through to us.
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Pretty cool that everyone in the house gets their own voicemail too. So you don't leave voicemail for the house, but for a person in the house.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I use Asterisk at home and have for years. It has been great. And because we use an IVR to get to us, it blocks ALL spam calling. No auto-dialer gets through to us.
I dabbled with it a bit, but never got into "production". It was just a fun project to work on. Though it seems like having a home phone would be a good idea.... since we just use our cell phones now.
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Yeah, we don't like being without a home phone. We use VoicePulse and get four lines for the house (which is overkill.) You can do a little cheaper with voip.ms too. It's such a cheap thing to do and such good IT skill development. It's a great project. And you can run in house or do it cheaply on a cloud provider and get important experience there too.
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It's important for us because we will be living abroad and people will still get unlimited calling to us using a US phone number. They don't have to worry about where we are or what number we are currently using.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's important for us because we will be living abroad and people will still get unlimited calling to us using a US phone number. They don't have to worry about where we are or what number we are currently using.
In that event do you hook a client up to your cell phones too? In the event that you are out of the house?
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Yes, I have a client on my cell phone. Although in Europe we are unlikely to have good data plans on our cell phones.
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Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
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@Dashrender said:
Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
For me at home? I run through NTG's infrastructure, no reason not too. We need people testing constantly so using it for my home "production" is a very good test compared to an idle test environment.
If you were doing it on your own, no support and no need for special services you could get down to around $30 / month for everything, with four lines like I have. That includes a hosted VM plus the trunks.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
For me at home? I run through NTG's infrastructure, no reason not too. We need people testing constantly so using it for my home "production" is a very good test compared to an idle test environment.
If you were doing it on your own, no support and no need for special services you could get down to around $30 / month for everything, with four lines like I have. That includes a hosted VM plus the trunks.
who would you host through?
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I'm sure that Amazon and Azure are great, but it is Rackspace that I have tested the most and know works really well.
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Unless you have a significant amount of inbound calling, VoIP.ms would be cheaper than VoicePulse for most.
They also have more POPS in more locations than VoicePulse.
I use both at clients and find VoIP.ms to be the better solution.
$0.99 - $1.50 per month for a DID.
$1.50 per month if you want e911.
All US calling inbound and outbound is $0.01 per minute.
There is no limit to the number of concurrent calls.VoicePulse is $11.00 per month with unlimited inbound calls
All outbound is $0.01 per minute.
I do not recall what their e911 costs are.
You may only have 4 concurrent calls.
Extra concurrent calls are $20 each.
Additional DID are $20 each. -
Also home users can setup GoogleVoice as a trunk in an Asterisk based system.
Using this, you can have unlimited outbound calling to the US for free, but restricted to one call at a time.
You can also take inbound calls with this number but who wants to be tied to a single concurrent call?
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@JaredBusch said:
Unless you have a significant amount of inbound calling, VoIP.ms would be cheaper than VoicePulse for most.
They also have more POPS in more locations than VoicePulse.
I use both at clients and find VoIP.ms to be the better solution.
$0.99 - $1.50 per month for a DID.
$1.50 per month if you want e911.
All US calling inbound and outbound is $0.01 per minute.
There is no limit to the number of concurrent calls.VoicePulse is $11.00 per month with unlimited inbound calls
All outbound is $0.01 per minute.
I do not recall what their e911 costs are.
You may only have 4 concurrent calls.
Extra concurrent calls are $20 each.
Additional DID are $20 each.VOIP.ms being 1 cent per min seems cheap, but I have no clue currently how many mins we use of local calling, our carrier doesn't include that on the bill. I'd say 60-70% of our calling is inbound, so $11.00 a month could be a huge savings there.
Thanks for the information though!
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@JaredBusch said:
VoIP.ms
There is no limit to the number of concurrent calls.A complaint that we receive today is that we have more lines coming into our office then we can handle. Basically the operators can see that there are 5+ callers on hold in the queue and this really just makes them have a nervous tick, don't ask me why other than they just don't really want to be operators answering calls all day long.
Would I assume correctly with the unlimited number of incoming calls that the inbound callers would just continue to stack up until my programming forced them to do something, for example, force to leave a message or hangup?
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Well with VoIP you control how calls are handled. You can send them to people, put them on hold, send them to voicemail, drop them, block them.... whatever you want. Even send them to people at home.
