@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:

Simple scenarios...

Internet Sucks or Fails: Your phones are down. Just gone. What can you do but start a porting process? Nothing. How long does it take? Weeks, months? There is nothing you can do, your phones are just "gone". Doesn't matter why, there is no option to short term protect against ISP failure, and no way to protect against long term vendor extortion. As long as you maintain the bundle, you have a massive business risk that would cripple any CEO with fear of customers believing that the business had failed.

I get what you're saying here but in my experience, limited as it is, I'm more concerned about the stability of the SIP provider than I am about Centurylinks network service. At our locations over the last 12 years that I've been here, we've had DSL, T1s and fiber service from them for our networking needs and have had essentially zero problems and the few we have had have been fixed quickly.

Is there any reason to be concerned about the stability of the SIP providers such as voip.ms, skyetel or others in that space? Are these companies profitable with little chance of disappearing? I know centurylink isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe that's true of the pure SIP providers as well but I don't have a good feel for that. That's another concern I have about moving to them, porting our numbers to a provider such as voip.ms and then having them disappear with no good way for us to get our numbers to another carrier. How much of a risk do you see in that area?

@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:

How will Centurylink's SIP be delivered? is it actually just an IP you point to?

Yes, it is IP based. We already have fiber service from Centurylink and that would be the interface.

Cox Communication for example is nothing like getting service from VOIP.ms. Cox must deliver service via a cable they run to my location. This is a requirement of theirs. This means I can't effectively use a hosted VPS solution like Vultr with Cox. It also means, even if I did have an onsite PBX, if my building burns down... I can't just spin up another PBX in another location - I'm stuck waiting for Cox to deliver service to whatever new location I get up and running - when they get to it.

@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:

@BraswellJay said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:

To be sure one thing I don't like is that it is not metered in that it is a flat fee for a fixed number of concurrent calls but based on my usage calculations the cost will be in line with what I would have expected on metered service at voip.ms.

How is this different from what you have today other than it's simply cheaper.

It's not different other than price, you're correct.

Is the number of concurrent calls enough? - to many?

I think it is a little high only because under this model I need to plan for max concurrent even though that will not be needed regularly. It seems to me that this model forces at least some oversubscription just to handle the max case. That's my primary reason to not like it.

Once nice thing about pure per min charges is they generally allow a near infinite number of concurrent calls (you do have to ask them to open the flood gates though - they are limited to cut down on fraud) - yet you only pay for what you actually use.

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:

CenturyLink is not someone that I would trust. Being "almost the same price" would be a terrible business reason to go with a poor carrier compared to a good one. Also, have you compared ML pricing from Skyetel which should be a bit less than voip.ms? If price is that much of a concern, that's the more competitive one. voip.ms is great, we use them for our secondary lines and international lines. But just getting the price more in line does nothing to address CenturyLink lock in risks, carrier risks, or support issues. Plus what you have found... documentation is going to be lean for obvious reasons, none of us work with carriers like that, there's no business case for it.

These are all very good points many of which I have considered. The one benefit that I can see to using their SIP service is that they are who we have our fiber service with and it would seem that would remove any finger pointing between ISP and SIP provider should we have issues. That being said, I will concede that the testing I have done with voip.ms has been flawless which would indicate that would be a small benefit.

Why do you not trust centurylink? We've not had any issues with them from either phone nor ISP service. Service has been very stable and the few issues we've had over the years have been resolved quickly.

So I got the go ahead to switch our centurylink PRI over to a SIP solution. I had been testing with voip.ms and everything has been really good with their service and that was who I intended to go with. My manager though asked about continuing with Centurylink as the provider so I told him I would get quote expecting it to not be very competitive price wise. To my surprise though the quote is competitive.

To be sure one thing I don't like is that it is not metered in that it is a flat fee for a fixed number of concurrent calls but based on my usage calculations the cost will be in line with what I would have expected on metered service at voip.ms.

One thing that does concern me though is that their doesn't appear to be a lot of information on setting up FreePBX with Centurylink SIP and that which I have found leads me to believe it is not as straightforward as some other providers.

See:

https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FPG/Setup+Centurylink+SIP+IQ+trunks ; and
https://www.savelono.com/linux/how-to-setup-a-centurylink-iq-sip-trunk-for-asterisk.html

Has anyone successfully used Centurylink IQ SIP service with FreePBX?

@FATeknollogee said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

Honestly, this is just one of things (to steal a Nike phrase) "Just Do It".
The SIP vs PRI (insert your fav term) debate, that ship sailed a long time ago...

I agree we're way behind on this and I suspect the cost savings alone will be enough to convince them to approve the move. I just want to try and anticipate though in case they do raise any other issues

@Dashrender said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

@BraswellJay said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

• No internet - no phones : this is an issue in that we don't have redundancy on our network link, but there has not been any network outage since the fiber was installed at this particular site several years ago. Not sure what I can do on this short of say we could keep a POTS line or two for emergencies but that of course starts to eat into the cost savings some also.

How are you handling this now on with your PRI? do you have a redundant PRI from a different carrier in case your main one goes down? or other POTS lines?

IF not, this really isn't any different than that. Of course management might say - well, the PRI has never gone down, and I hear about internet outages all the time - it's up to you to tell them how many times TDM has gone down, and it's just another service like any other. There's nothing special about it.

That's a great point and I hadn't really thought about it from that perspective. I think there is just a bias to feel that the phone network is somehow more stable or resilient when the reality is that it's not offering anything special in that regard.

You could also always get another ISP in there, and failover to that if you really need that protection.

I think as @Skyetel mentioned above, the ability to failover to a cell or other number if necessary is probably all that we need, at least that is how I think I will present it.

@Skyetel said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

I'm obviously biased, but I can make some suggestions about this :).

1. Stability - Most of the providers you listed have a good record of uptime. Most will likely be as good as or better than any TDM carrier that delivers you service over a PRI or Copper lines. This is especially true as many TDM carriers and Cable companies are already using SIP on the backend and just delivering you the last leg over TDM. For financial stability - there are laws around how utility companies have to go out of business gracefully. It would be a pain (you would have to port your numbers to a new provider in a hurry), but you have to be given notice by law.

2. E911 is super important. You can read how we do it here. Just make sure whatever provider you use allows 933 for test 911 calls. That way you can test it once a year or so to make sure something weird didn't break.

3. If you have fiber, you are probably fine. Some of the carriers you listed (including us) allow you to failover inbound calls to cell phones if your PBX goes offline.

If you office views calls as super critical, I'd suggest setting up VoipSpear to measure the QOS of your call. If you do decide to give us a try, we offer that for free.

I hope thats helpful

Thank you that is very helpful.

I am planning to present the case for switching from our PRI service to a voip solution and want to get the pros and cons together.

From a cost perspective it's really a no brainer. I've pulled call logs and bills from the last several months and we should go from ~$750/mo to ~$200/mo. and this is the primary selling point.

I created an account with voip.ms and have been routing our outbound LD calls that way for the last few weeks and we've not had any significant issues. I ran the test for one week without telling anyone and no one complained and then the last two weeks I announced we were doing it as a test and asked for folks to report if they had any issues and no one has said anything.

I'm trying to come up with a list of other concerns that I may encounter so I can be ready for them. This is what I have come up with:

• Provider stability : Is there any reason to be concerned over the stability of voip.ms or any of the other providers that get discussed frequently (Twilio, Flowroute, Skytel, Vitelity, others? ). Would they be considered big enough that even if they did run into financial issues that they would likely be taken over by someone with bigger pockets who could keep them running?

• 911 : Plan to discuss with them info primarily from the voip.ms wiki here : https://wiki.voip.ms/article/E911

• No internet - no phones : this is an issue in that we don't have redundancy on our network link, but there has not been any network outage since the fiber was installed at this particular site several years ago. Not sure what I can do on this short of say we could keep a POTS line or two for emergencies but that of course starts to eat into the cost savings some also.

Are there other objections that anyone has heard when making this transition?

@DustinB3403 said in FreePBX / Queue Login/out state on BLF key ...:

Looks like your question was answered here from last year.

https://community.freepbx.org/t/solved-queue-blf-hints/49665

Thanks, this did it.

I had put an extra * between the toggle code and the extension. Which interestingly enough still worked to allow an agent to login/out but didn't work with the BLF hints apparently. Once I changed as per the link you referenced it worked as expected.

For those that are interested I changed the BLF value in the EPM definition to :

*45__line1Ext__*730

(no * between *45 and the extension number):

Now a core show hints displays :

*45250*730@ext-queue: Custom:QUEUE250*730   State:Idle            Presence:not_set         Watchers  1

@JaredBusch said in FreePBX Ring Group / Remove CID Name Prefix on Transfer ?:

To my knowledge, there is nothing you can do to get rid of it without custom dial plan.

This process simply prepends the text to the existing variable.

Ok, Thanks.

Can a BLF key be configured to show login state for agents of a queue?

Endpoints are yealink t42s and are configured using the FreePBX EPM.

I configured the BLF key in the EPM with the following value :

*45*__line1Ext__*730

where 730 is the queue number as assigned in our system.

This works in that pressing the BLF key will toggle the logon state for the agent correctly, but the key itself doesn't change color as I was expecting to indicate whether the endpoint is currently logged off or on.

Trying to debug I think this may be related to how the hints are setup. When I do a core show hints I do see the following :

*45*250*730@ext-queu:                       State:Unavailable     Presence:not_set         Watchers  2

but I'm not sure how to interpret this. What does a Presense value of not_set indicate? Do I need to do anything to initialize it?

Is there any good documentation on how BLF hints in general work in FreePBX?

I have defined a CID Name prefix ("RG :") on our primary ring group so that members can tell when a call came from the ring group or from someone dialing their extension. That part is working fine.

If a member of the ring group answers a call and then subsequently transfers the call to another extension, the CID name prefix is sticking with the transferred call and being displayed on the display of the extension that the call was transferred to.

Is there any way to remove the name prefix once any member of the ring group has picked up the call so that future transfers will not display the prefix?

I thought maybe I could do this by using the Change External CID Configuration setting but I've not been able to make this work, it still preserves the prefix.

@JaredBusch said in Unifi AP AC EDU with FreePBX ...:

@BraswellJay Step back. What is your actual problem?

If the unit registers as an extension, it can be a member of a page group.

Multicast is not a requirement for paging.

We have a freepbx install with 23 current extensions, all yealink t42s endpoints except for one which is a cp960 conf phone. We have no speaker or anyway for anyone to page on the plant floor and warehouse areas. Our HR director wants to be able to page these areas in case of emergency to be able to let folks know to vacate etc ...

A separate project is we're wanting to add wireless capability to this same area in preparation for adding an inventory management system, so I was looking at the AP-EDU to cover both cases.

I knew that multicast wasn't required but I thought it was the recommended way to do it for more than a handful of extensions to cut down on number of channels that FreePBX had to create but perhaps that is bad info on my part.

@JaredBusch said in Unifi AP AC EDU with FreePBX ...:

@BraswellJay I have no idea how the UAP-AC-EDU works. I have not has the opportunity to buy one.

I'm a bit shocked it does not do multicast. What kind of connection does hte speaker even have?

As far as I can tell you can register it as a SIP endpoint but it doesn't listen on multicast addresses though.

See https://youtu.be/K7wYg69Sv5c?t=91 for a look at the configuration screen.

I did see that the paging pro commercial module will allow a paging group to perform a multicast broadcast page so that may be an option for me to consider as well. I think I could set the Unifi AC EDU as a SIP endpoint, add it to a page group and then also assign that page group a multicast address.

I'm not sure if the page pro module allows a paging group to page to both multicast and also to a set of separate non multicast extensions though. I need to figure that out.

@BraswellJay said in Unifi AP AC EDU with FreePBX ...:

Has anyone successfully used the paging capability of the Unifi AP EDU with FreePBX.

https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-edu/

This would be ideal for a situation we have where we want to add wireless and paging to a warehouse area of our building.

It looks like it was designed to be used with a phone app but has anyone used it to receive a multicast page from phones on a freePBX system?

Looks like there is no multicast option at the moment.

I found several suggestions for them to add it on the new ideas forum (e.g. https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Feature-Requests/MULTICAST-PAGING-FOR-UAP-AC-EDU/idc-p/2752198#M19132)

Has anyone successfully used the paging capability of the Unifi AP EDU with FreePBX.

https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-edu/

This would be ideal for a situation we have where we want to add wireless and paging to a warehouse area of our building.

It looks like it was designed to be used with a phone app but has anyone used it to receive a multicast page from phones on a freePBX system?

@JaredBusch said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@BraswellJay said in FreePBX hardening ...:

It appears that as currently set up, our FreePBX instance would suffer from this same kind of attack.

I would love it if you can prove this.

Because this was patched 3 years ago.

Just to follow up, I guess I effed up. I thought I had successfully done this but as you said it is not possible.

We're planning to go live with our first FreePBX instance this weekend at one of our sites. I was reviewing to see if there was anything we may have missed and I came upon some questions related to hardening of the system, in particular where toll fraud issues are concerned.

I found this thread in the FreePBX forums from a few years ago that discusses an attack where abuse of attended transfer resulted in fraudulent calls.

https://community.freepbx.org/t/hacker-makes-international-calls-through-my-freepbx-ivr/34334/9

It appears that as currently set up, our FreePBX instance would suffer from this same kind of attack.

What are best practices or things to consider regarding preventing this kind of abuse?

Thanks

@JaredBusch said in FreePBX / Yealink t42s / call park configuration best practice ...:

The best use of parking is simply blind transfer via DSS key directly to a specific slot.

No one wants to waste time and a button with a park key that you then need to wait for an announcement to know where the call went.

That makes much more sense. I think I put the blinders on and focused too much on replicating the old system without thinking if there was a better way.