VOIP in the small business – update… 3
Mar2
Phones are boring, until they don’t work or get GPS or something. If you’re not interested in the crazy way the phone systems are changing in regard to calling over the Internet skip this post and come back from something more exciting (baby pictures?) soon.
After my post in November last year on the successful upgrade of a Asterisk PBX at Wanaka Wastebusters a lot has happened.
The reason I installed a local Trixbox server in the first place was to take advantage of cheaper calling, have more lines and to make administration of the system easier. At the time the local Voip Trunk providers (who all seem to resell the 2talk service) did not have a good multi extension feature. Our trial with Kiwilink never gave us a solid way of transferring calls.
Our Trixbox setup was good, but I was not happy with the possibility of failure with the laptop it was running on. So we invested in a IP01 embedded box from Nicegear. This solution worked ok but we had repetitive problems with incoming calls dropping. I’m sure one of the 200,000+ settings in Asterisk could have been tweeked but damned if I could find which one.
Soooo…in the meantime 2talk had a better implementation of their line manager and I decided if we could manage all our lines and features from one login a hosted service was the way forward – into the cloud we went. I decided to invest in a bunch of Linksys SPA942 deskphones to get some continuity in our endpoints, set them all up and sat back with fingers crossed sweating.
I should mentioned I also doubled up our broadband connection with 1 x wan through hd.co.nz and one through netspeed.co.nz with a fail over at the router level. I figured the extra $60 a month would pay itself back easily through saved calling costs.
The result has been, so far, excellent. We’ve had failures on both internet connection, fortunately not at the same time so nobody but me know. Perfect. Calling has been of high quality and transfers, auto attendant and voicemail to email have all been seamless.
The only comment I have is that the 2talk web interface for the line manager is buggy and badly designed. I couldn’t change the caller id for the lines from it and the email for voicemail setting there didn’t seem to work. I’d love the job of redesigning the interface – actually I’d like to do the 2degrees one as well, but that is another story :-)
Clients
12:43 pm on March 25th, 2011
I was interested when you set up the laptop acting as a VOIP server/handler. In my experience with weather stations, any PC with windows, Linux or Mac will fall over if left on 24/7. That’s because they are multi-functioning devices that share resources with doing other things including running the OS. Murphy’s Law always kicks in and the PC will crash at the worst possible time. Dedicated, stand-alone, uni-tasking boxes are always better than PCs. Another option would be get an old slimline rack server which would be more stable than a laptop.
Good idea to get the embedded box and to have two broadband connections so if one falls over, service continues.
Well done!!!
1:11 pm on March 25th, 2011
Thanks Will :-) I figured that as well – that the laptop would be less reliable. It did run for 3 months without a problem though. The only annoying thing was after a power cycle (power cuts being rife in Wanaka for some reason) it had to be restarted – the embedded box just comes up again.
Anyway – the cloud solution is better than both imho..