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Home VOIP setup

goodcooper said:
i went through several grandstreams in my testing phase and they were very cheaply put together, all around seemed buggy and chintsy...

just couldn't bring myself to run them... maybe things have changed

my list of acceptable handsets: cisco, aastra, polycom, yealink.... and i guess the digium handsets are pretty nice now too, but i've not personally used one... i run a couple DECT panasonics and siemens gigaset, but ever since yealink has come out with their DECT i've been buying those...



yes, the model is just T26 the P on the end, i believe is just to denote it comes with a power adapter iirc... not needed if you have PoE switch

i had the s on the end to show plurality, sorry
Click to expand...

I have installed a lot of aastra phones, they are good phones, reliable, but they feel soooooooo cheap, like, really really cheap, crappy keypads, speakerphone kind of sucks etc...

polycom feels nicer and speakerphone works amazing, cisco feels awesome and speaker phone works just a little less amazing than polycom but they are a pain to setup
 
FLECOM said:
I have installed a lot of aastra phones, they are good phones, reliable, but they feel soooooooo cheap, like, really really cheap, crappy keypads, speakerphone kind of sucks etc...

polycom feels nicer and speakerphone works amazing, cisco feels awesome and speaker phone works just a little less amazing than polycom but they are a pain to setup
Click to expand...

this is very much my thoughts as well...

the thing with aastra phones is that the value just isn't there... because they aren't cheap phones... just feel old/crappy....

at least the grandstreams feel cheap and actually ARE cheap...

i've found that polycom and cisco are great phones and agree that the ciscos can be a huge pain to configure...

this is why i went with the yealinks, awesome value, awesome quality, great to configure, a lot of features... really hard to find the downside to them.... they even have openvpn clients built in, for remote extensions.... that's awesome... works great too
 
FLECOM said:
yep, it's actually very capable, can handle about 10 concurrent calls, handles TFTP serving for the cisco XML config files... all with no moving parts or fans, small, low power, low cost, makes an awesome small office PBX and stupid simple to setup

also I have it not so much for traffic reduction as much as the cisco's don't work through nat properly
Click to expand...

what distro do you use for that?

also, nat and phone systems don't play well at all, but once you learn the ins and outs, they should do what you want them to do....
 
FLECOM said:
yep, it's actually very capable, can handle about 10 concurrent calls, handles TFTP serving for the cisco XML config files... all with no moving parts or fans, small, low power, low cost, makes an awesome small office PBX and stupid simple to setup

also I have it not so much for traffic reduction as much as the cisco's don't work through nat properly
Click to expand...

Nice. I have freepbx running in a VM, but it might be nice to have a dedicated small device. This would just be for the house, so probably around 3-5 phones max. Sounds like the PI or beaglbone would be a good option
 
goodcooper said:
what distro do you use for that?

also, nat and phone systems don't play well at all, but once you learn the ins and outs, they should do what you want them to do....
Click to expand...

I have managed to work around most issues with NAT and VoIP, but the cisco phones just won't play ball *at all*, but the raspberry pi has been a great solution

I use

http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/

you literally burn it onto an SD card, it get's dhcp and off you go
 
goodcooper said:
this is very much my thoughts as well...

the thing with aastra phones is that the value just isn't there... because they aren't cheap phones... just feel old/crappy....

at least the grandstreams feel cheap and actually ARE cheap...

i've found that polycom and cisco are great phones and agree that the ciscos can be a huge pain to configure...

this is why i went with the yealinks, awesome value, awesome quality, great to configure, a lot of features... really hard to find the downside to them.... they even have openvpn clients built in, for remote extensions.... that's awesome... works great too
Click to expand...

^ This right here. I cut my VOIP teeth on Cisco 79X0's and Asterisk, don't miss those days :D. I also used to be a BIG Aastra fan and then they essentially got sued out of existence over the visual voicemail part of their Asterisk scripts. Incredible functionality released for free. Once that tool became unsupported, the Aastra phones were useless to me. Physically nice, but not near as easy to use and/or provision as some of the others. The Yealinks have been cheap, reliable and cake to configure on both Asterisk and 3CX, and then sound good too. I've got a few of their DECT setups out in the field as well and they've been bulletproof so far.

Like, FLECOM, a colleague in town has been deploying Pi's with Asterisk as a small cheap phone system for his clients to connect to his Voip.ms reseller account. His testing mirrors FLECOM, up to about 10 Concurrent calls. Less than $100 for a Pi, SD card and case. Myself, I've got everything for my clients running as a VM. Easier to manage/backup/restore that way.
 
I have to ask; what about fax lines? Do any of these services support that?
 
wra18th said:
I have to ask; what about fax lines? Do any of these services support that?
Click to expand...

FlowRoute does. Its a common feature, so the others probably do as well. I know a lot of people just switch to a cheap email-to-fax and fax-to-email service to simplify things.
 
wizdum said:
FlowRoute does. Its a common feature, so the others probably do as well. I know a lot of people just switch to a cheap email-to-fax and fax-to-email service to simplify things.
Click to expand...
I live with 2 people that are less than capable to "handle" using e-fax. And they drive me insane with their inability to comprehend the simplest of instructions. They can, however, work a fax machine. win/win for me.:D
 
I don't see any options with Flowroute for an IVR, looks like I would need to run a PBX at home for this functionality?
 
Corporal79 said:
I don't see any options with Flowroute for an IVR, looks like I would need to run a PBX at home for this functionality?
Click to expand...

Right, FlowRoute just gives you the SIP trunks, you need a PBX to use it. They do give you a nice configuration file that you can just copy and paste into the PBX that you use.
 
Very nice, OP. Thank you for the link. I'm looking to do the same.
 
Looking at voip.ms.

The pricing looks decent for light use. But if you're running a busy call setup, it can get expensive FAST.
 
Try http://nerdvittles.com/

Ive been running a nerdvittles/pbxinaflash PBX for 3 years and i have had zero issues. (Except when the SATA backplane went up in flames at 2am...)
For hardware i have a Intel atom D510 desktop board mounted in a old 2U server case. It has no fans and use very little power.
Tried a raspberry pi, but it could not do the G711 to G729 conversion.
22 phones currently registrared in 4 countries (DMVPN)

For SIP DID/DOD I use Vatality and GVoice.

And Faxes work fine (Fax to Fax -- fax to PDF -- FAX to storage for later use)
Just make sure you use G711 and not G729 codec.

It works great when i fax my hotel and trip receipts to my extension and get them converted to PDF then sent to my email, plus i have them stored on my NAS for archive.
(Screw you finance guy, I have all my receipts!)
 
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Chas said:
Looking at voip.ms.

The pricing looks decent for light use. But if you're running a busy call setup, it can get expensive FAST.
Click to expand...

That's where either PRI or "Virtual PRI" agreements come into play from either terrestrial or ITSPs. With Voip.ms it's $20/voice channel unlimited use and it drops at 10 channels IIRC. Voip.ms actually has some of the cheapest metered pricing out there.

They've also got a basic re-seller portal as well, that's worked pretty well for me so far.
 
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