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nitrobass24

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - December 2009
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Hi all this is a little out of my area of expertise, so I am hoping you can provide some insight and direction.

Recently, I have not been traveling for work, which is great, but I dont have an office and taking all my call on my cell phone is a PITA. Most importantly its not that reliable and if I am running a conf call and my line drops, it will kill the call for everyone. Thus, the need for a land line.

I realize i could go to ATT, Vonage, etc. But what is the fun in that?

I would like to get one of the cool Cisco or Avaya phones for my home office.

What i have:
Two HA ESX boxes using shared storage, so i throw a PBX vm/CUCM on.
HP 181-24g (unmanaged mode right now)
Cat5e ran to my office

What I dont have:
VLANs setup for VOIP (do I need this for 1 phone?)
Phone Hardware
Phone Backend
Phone Service

I read some older threads that I could run CUCM without a license for a small setup, is this still true?
Also i dont know if this is possible on a "Home" budget, but my client has this feature where he is on a call on his cell phone and can pick it up on his desk and vice versa. If I have any feature request this is it.

I would really appreciate everyone's thoughts and insight on this matter.
 
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I use asterisk (spun my own in centos) on ESX with a cisco 7940 phone. voip.ms for the back end service. Vary rarely if ever drop a call. Without a cisco switch, there's no voip vlan and the phone will take longer to initialize.
 
If quality and call integrity is critical, then go with a copper line from AT&T. Having voip services delivered over the internet introduces too many variables in to the equation. I always recommend against it for anything other than hobby or home use.
 
Xor - I hear ya on that, but anything is better than my cell phone. And for ATT, only option in my building, it would cost me nearly $60/mo all said and done, plus installation fees.

Looking for something more in the middle.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Xor - I hear ya on that, but anything is better than my cell phone. And for ATT, only option in my building, it would cost me nearly $60/mo all said and done, plus installation fees.

Looking for something more in the middle.
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I get ya. But don't forget, that 60/month is a tax write off.

:D
 
I've got the following setup that I migrated to from an AT&T landline that I was paying nearly $40/month for for next to no usage:

ESXi host with FreePBX guest
Anveo as my provider, Personal Unlimited rate plan on the Free subscription plan
Snom 821 + Snom 870 handsets

The whole thing pretty much runs itself. Voice quality is stellar, and I haven't had any outages that weren't my own fault. Monthly "fixed" costs are $2.80/month for Anveo's service plus $0.01/minute for outbound calling as needed, plus my internet service.

Total sunk costs were the cost of the phones themselves. Everything else was pretty much spare parts I had laying around, and all the software was free.

It was a learning experience for sure, but it really wasn't terribly hard to get going. Plus, it's expandable for when I decide I need more.

Regarding your VLAN question... only reason you might consider it is for QoS for your phones. If you constantly saturate your network or ISP bandwidth, then you're going to want to set up QoS rules to reserve some bandwidth for your VOIP channels so they don't get smothered.
 
VoIP is definitely not relegated to hobby status. YMMV on reliability and quality, but much can be done to address any issues. The savings and added features win most of my customers over. Good Data service is a must.
I use and recommend Polycom phones- their VVX series is a great deal. If you only have one phone at one location, I would just register it directly to your ITSP (such as VoIP.ms) and forego the PBX. I wouldn't even bother with a separate VLAN for a single phone. Everyone's threshold for using a separate VLAN is different. Using a separate VLAN won't hurt anything and can make provisioning phones easier. I understand your setup may be more about learning than practicality, so whatever floats your boat.

Virtualizing PBX software can have wildly varying results. I'd read any developer notes and user experience on your desired software. For testing, it's a no-brainer- do whatever you want. I've messed around with it and get better results with dedicated hardware. I am trying something new- pfSense and sipXecs in esx on an AMD E-350. Not sure how that is going to turn out.

My preferred PBX software is sipXecs- it easily scales from 1-2 phones to tens of thousands, with multiple locations, servers, HA, and good support options.

I don't like Cisco's SIP implementations on their phones, and I am all about SIP standards (as is Polycom and sipXecs- they both are usually 100% compliant with SIP standards)

For flat-out call quality, my SIP and PBX implementations beats any POTS/Cellular implementation and most other carrier grade VoIP (Vonage/Comcast Phone/ATT VoIP/Cox Phone). Reliability is affected by your ISP and ITSP, which can be mitigated with ISP fail-over, Multiple ITSPs, and even fail-over to cell phones. I wont say VoIP is better than POTS or vice-versa; they are just tools and different ways to address a need.

As far as Tax Deductions go- I'll take more money staying in my pocket vs. a marginal deduction on taxes. I think you don't understand taxes if you think you'll get any business expense refunded 100%- that is a tax credit. A tax deduction simply provides a discount on businesses expenses. Spending less still means more money in your pocket.
 
RocketTech said:
VoIP is definitely not relegated to hobby status.
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That's not what I said; I said "Having voip services delivered over the internet introduces too many variables in to the equation. I always recommend against it for anything other than hobby or home use.". By all means, patch it into an onpremise voip system once it's been delivered, I just have no faith in internet-delivered dialtone. Too many bad experiences.
Virtualizing PBX software can have wildly varying results. I'd read any developer notes and user experience on your desired software.
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All of my clients have asterisk systems virtualized ( esxi ). Never had an issue. Just make sure the underlying linux is vm-aware, you should be golden ( which shouldn't be an issue with asterisk as you should be using a RH distro with it ).
As far as Tax Deductions go- I'll take more money staying in my pocket vs. a marginal deduction on taxes. I think you don't understand taxes if you think you'll get any business expense refunded 100%- that is a tax credit. A tax deduction simply provides a discount on businesses expenses. Spending less still means more money in your pocket.
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Right. Hopefully no one got the wrong idea from what I posted. However, I would add that there are times you want to get your deductions up. Business spending doesn't follow logical sense. I've seen a few businesses where their drive to reduce costs ended up screwing them come tax season.

It's always best to consult with your local tax expert.
 
XOR != OR said:
However, I would add that there are times you want to get your deductions up. Business spending doesn't follow logical sense. I've seen a few businesses where their drive to reduce costs ended up screwing them come tax season.

It's always best to consult with your local tax expert.
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Consulting with a Tax Expert is good advice. There is a difference in purchasing no-equity services as a tax deduction and making a capital investment to reduce no-equity expenses.
 
Installed FreePBX and SipXecs. I think im going to go with SipXecs, its interface is way more intuitive.
I signed up for Flowroute, because they give a .25 credit for testing. Will get this setup and working with a 3CX softphone, then buy some hardware and move over to anevo and voip.ms.
 
I actually prefer flowroute over voip.ms- flowroute is more stable and solid for me, and better support. Voip.ms has a ton of users and examples out there and are just shy of actively promoted for testing with sipXecs.

I would strongly suggest Polycom phones with the sipXecs setup, as they are the 'partner' phone for that system. You can pick-up a SoundPoint IP 335 for under $100 if you look, or a VVX for about twice that or less.
I would suggest the VVX series for any multi-phone deployment.
 
Yea i havent looked into the Polycoms, I was looking at Yealink for hardware. Looks to have really good features for the $$
 
RocketTech said:
I actually prefer flowroute over voip.ms- flowroute is more stable and solid for me, and better support. Voip.ms has a ton of users and examples out there and are just shy of actively promoted for testing with sipXecs.

I would strongly suggest Polycom phones with the sipXecs setup, as they are the 'partner' phone for that system. You can pick-up a SoundPoint IP 335 for under $100 if you look, or a VVX for about twice that or less.
I would suggest the VVX series for any multi-phone deployment.
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I haven't tried flowroute, but I have toyed with voip.ms a bit. It seemed to me that voip.ms seems to have more outages than usual, and their call quality for some reason seemed sub par. I don't know whether their routing was just poor or what. I just was never really satisfied with them.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Also i dont know if this is possible on a "Home" budget, but my client has this feature where he is on a call on his cell phone and can pick it up on his desk and vice versa. If I have any feature request this is it.
Click to expand...

Google Voice is probably your best option here. Setup up a Google Voice number to forward to both your cell phone and your new land line number.

edit- after re-reading your feature request, this solution will not work. It will however ring both lines, which could be a step in the right direction.
 
SunnyD said:
I haven't tried flowroute, but I have toyed with voip.ms a bit. It seemed to me that voip.ms seems to have more outages than usual, and their call quality for some reason seemed sub par. I don't know whether their routing was just poor or what. I just was never really satisfied with them.
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+1.
 
XOR != OR said:
If quality and call integrity is critical, then go with a copper line from AT&T. Having voip services delivered over the internet introduces too many variables in to the equation. I always recommend against it for anything other than hobby or home use.
Click to expand...

This. SIP trunking across the net requires strict QoS or you will likely run in to call quality issues - "when" is really the question.
 
Seem to be having some trouble with SipXecs. Cannot seem to get my 3CX softphone to register.

I have created two users 200 & 201
I am using the 3cx windows softphone and the 3cx iphone.
I configure using the extension, userid (extension), and the password (not the pin).
I set the server using my internal IP Address (no NAT, no Firewall).
It attempts to connect/register, but ultimately gives me a "Not Connected" with no further information.

I am a little lost at this point, and not knowing much about SIP or SipXecs I wanted to get some input prior to messing with settings.
 
Did you ever figure this out? Now I'm curious and want to start planning.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Also i dont know if this is possible on a "Home" budget, but my client has this feature where he is on a call on his cell phone and can pick it up on his desk and vice versa. If I have any feature request this is it.
Click to expand...

Just saw this feature in action at a friend's private sector job, and was pretty impressed with the simplicity. I see the usefulness in the home environment too.
 
I know with SIP you can tranfer a call to a cell phone- even one that does not have a SIP application. I think you would need to have a SIP soft phone registered with the PBX in order to transfer calls back and forth between office and mobile phones.

For specific help using/registering phones with sipXecs, there is some decent documentation here (under Hardware and Interoperability) and the [e]Book "Building Enterprise Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs 4.0" is a great resource, although a little dated with the latest 4.6 release.

POTS is going away- even LTE implementations use VoIP (VoLTE). I'm not contesting that poor quality has been experienced in the past or even in the present, but quality and reliability are growing by leaps and bounds almost daily, along with more PoPs and PoPs at major internet Hubs.
 
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RocketTech said:
VoIP is definitely not relegated to hobby status. YMMV on reliability and quality, but much can be done to address any issues. The savings and added features win most of my customers over. Good Data service is a must.
Click to expand...

This.

Virtualizing PBX software can have wildly varying results. I'd read any developer notes and user experience on your desired software.
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This.

As much fun as I had running FreePBX and CUCM9 at home I eventually threw in the towel. Keep in mind CUCM9 can't handle phone trunks directly like FreePBX can so you will need a FreePBX + CUCM9 VM or a CUCM9 VM w/ Cisco hardware that handles the trunking aspects.

Having to run VMs to make a phone call on a network of ONE phone was silly. I eventually went to Skype/SkypeIn.
 
And/or if it's just one phone, most common SIP phones can connect directly to a SIP trunk provider. As share91 mentioned, a full PBX just for 1 phone (outside of a lab/learning environment) is kinda nuts. If you're just looking for a set and forget scenario for a single phone, pick up a cheap VOIP.ms account, configure your phone to register directly and setup QOS on your gateway and be done.

This being said, I've have no issues running PIAF under both ESXi and Hyper-V. With Hyper-V being more work to setup in the first place due to the Linux Integration components.
 
Nate7311 said:
And/or if it's just one phone, most common SIP phones can connect directly to a SIP trunk provider. As share91 mentioned, a full PBX just for 1 phone (outside of a lab/learning environment) is kinda nuts. If you're just looking for a set and forget scenario for a single phone, pick up a cheap VOIP.ms account, configure your phone to register directly and setup QOS on your gateway and be done.

This being said, I've have no issues running PIAF under both ESXi and Hyper-V. With Hyper-V being more work to setup in the first place due to the Linux Integration components.
Click to expand...

Yup, good point. You can actually register multiple phones with voip.ms (~cloud pbx). I never had great success with multiple phones, but a single phone or ATA is pretty simple.
 
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