atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones VOIP Questions??

Hi i am new the VOIP world and need some info on it. It is my understanding there are PBX/IP systems for businesses that are run off a PC.

Is this true??

If not are there any VOIP systems that are run off a computer??

If there is systems that will run off a computer how hard are they to program/maintain/add telephones etc....?

There are many that run off a PC. Easy though is relative.

Yes, there are PBX's and KSU's that run off of PC's.

Yes, VoIP exists primarily because of computers, and there are a number of PBX's and KSU's the run VoIP over a computer.

Installation is relative to how familiar you are with computers and phones. They all have their quirks, some install easier, but program harder, some the other way. Features vary and programming them vary. I suggest you consult the Google and look for "IP Phone System". You will recieve a few hundred million hits.

What's the advantage to using a PC as a PBX? Doesn't a PBX make a pretty good ... PBX?
I have seen a ShoreTel system installed and it was pretty cool. I would say it's basically a PC. It did though have some shortcomings.

Depends on the size of the install. My break-point on systems I install is around 6 incoming and about 20 handsets. At that point it's easier and cheaper for me to use Asterisk then a commercial PBX.

The bigger and more complex it gets, the better it gets for me... Call Center's are a prime example of one such scenario.

What is the interface from a PC to a T1 for outside lines? Would it be a traditional T1/PRI?

T1 (PRI or RBS) and/or POTS... Some devices may employ gateways that take a T1 or POTS to SIP then dump it on the network.

There are cards available that go in the PC chassis that accept T1 or PRI interfaces from the carriers.

OK. Then the PC is a node on the network and all phones connect to a UTP data cable, usually with a pass-thru port to a PC?

They can be. You can either have dedicated run to the phone, or have it piggy-back the cable to the PC.

A lot of phones have a LAN and PC port on the back, and will do their own version of QoS by slowing the computer connection down if it sends too much traffic.

Would you say that a PC (voice server ?) would work best if connected to a switch(s) then to the IP phones, not on the data network? I'm thinking there would be less interference.

If the network is properly set-up with QoS Switches and distributed correctly then having voice and data traffic on the same network isn't much of a problem.

The bigger problem is most networks aren't set-up right or the people setting them up have no clue so it's easier to buy a second switch and segregate them then to figure it out.

So, a second network on a seperate wire? Like a TDM phone system? So, Kumba is saying TDM is better than VoIP? :toothy:

Of course if you're talking about $4,500.00+ for a Cisco 48-port POE switch that can get pricey. Not to mention the added cabling necessary.

I don't have experience with VoIP, but I wouldn't think bandwidth would be much of an issue on the local side if you've got 100Mbit connections to the desktop. Controlling the broadcast domains with VLANs is certainly good practice. Is QOS on the switch side really necessary?

There is a lot of hidden costs with VOIP like QOS,POE switches, other than that you have those nasty little power supplies to the phones. until it has real benefits having telephones on the network I still recommend pbx's with gateways or ip extension cards for off site equipment

Like plumbers say, "it rolls downhill". In this case, it needs to roll uphill. The proverbial "weakest link in the chain" thing. You can have everything high and tight on the premises, but if the service provider can't offer the same level of quality via their network, then you just threw four grand out the window for a fancy POE switch.

QoS is something that is easily managed for a price on-site. The problem is, once the call traffic leaves the premises, it's anyone's guess via the public Internet. A call from Boston to New York may pass through Prague and Cincinnati on the way through Moscow to get there. There are a lot of outside influences that need to be taken into account when considering VoIP.

It's not that the concept of VoIP is bad; it's just not "good" yet due to the outside influences.

I prefer the Netgear FS728TP or FS752TP POE Switches for IP Phones. Feel free to google for prices. They are about as close as I can get to an HP ProCurve and they hands down beat the Linksys SRW224P or any of the d-link/etc switches. They also feature the lifetime warranty like the ProCurve's. If you have a need for more switch then what that offers then you should look at something serious like an HP ProCurve or Foundry Networks. I am not a cisco fan as I find their products to be convoluted and over-priced for the feature set that they come with. This is my opinion and your mileage may vary.

Now back to the regularly scheduled post:

Even with VLan's you can still have a group of servers pounding all the bandwidth in the switch or it's up/down links. The QoS and traffic shaping/prioritization scheme's let you guarantee the VoIP traffic always makes it. You can make all this easier by selecting switches that are "Stackable" and "Centrally managed". This allows you to set the network environment for all switches as one big switch.

If you have a PoE Switch you will not need the Power Supplies.

VoIP is not the end all be all by any means, but it is no longer as costly as it was a year ago.

This is why I framed my questions toward a scenario using voice T1s not the internet for trunking. (Or at least I tried to, was I unclear about that?) The idea of sending business phone calls over the internet gives me the willies.

Kumba,
Have any downtime last year? I'm thinking about it because I just did a survey and that question came up. We had 0 downtime on our Avaya G3r. Data servers have all had some kind of of service interupting downtime. The PBX NEVER has to be rebooted. AUDIX voice mail does every 60 to 90 days. I think it is Linux or some variant of Linux. Pretty reliable though overall.

I did a hop trace on a public call from my office to Florida on an IP phone across the public network...San Antonio to Dallas to LA to Honolulu to Hong Kong to God only knows where finally terminating in Sarasota. Pretty amazing... something about the shortest distance between two points is a straight line goes out the door in unmanaged VoIP world.

I dont recommend VoIP for trunks. If you want to use VoIP I would recommend a blended scheme like 80/20 or maybe at the most 60/40 (PSTN/VoIP). Use the VoIP for the most exspensive calls (as the per minute is usually cheaper) and the PSTN for the bulk domestic/toll-free/inbound stuff. If I install VoIP for someone that is how I like to approach the trunk side of things.

What I have been using lately that i've liked is an option from XO called XOptions Flex. This is where they install 2, 3, or 4 T1's bonded together and deliver one large data pipe. They then park an IAD on the other end of it that takes the T1's in and spits out PRI/POTS/Internet. The T1's they deliver are on their privatized network and only go as far as the Sonus switch in their CO, of which they enforce the SLA to 5-9's and latency at a max of 65ms. At that point the Voice hops onto the PSTN, and the Internet hops onto the Internet.

The Link between me and the CO is all data and bonded, which means if I loose 1 T1, that the pipe halfs, yet I still maintain Internet and Voice service but just at a reduced capacity. The Voice services also takes priority over the Data and I will loose ~87K of data bandwidth for every active voice channel. Here is one example of where VoIP makes good practical and reliable sense. The cost of using this is about 60% the cost of having a seperate T1/PRI and seperate T1/Data installed, without any redundancy or fail-over. The downside of this is that if I have 2 T1's and all 23 channels are blasting on it, I will only have about 1.1mbps of internet available. If I use that remaining 1.1mbps for VoIp, then I can only squeeze about another 11~12 calls out before I run out of bandwidth.

That means that as far as downtime I have where I have absolutely NO lines is virtually none. Last year they did have an outage that stemmed from a backhoe plowing through some fiber, but it also knocked out everything south of tennessee and east of the mississippi river.

Now I have had issues with 1 T1 going down every so often (maybe once every 3 months) but I just call XO and verizon usually responds with their best in 4 to 8 hours. This is par for the course and not much you can do about it around here.

I have used VoIP far more for remote user extensions then anything else. In general it "appears" to work better to the decision makers/check writers because people are not always on the phone, like on an incoming trunk. You also split the concentration on the internet, which means the path to one extensions may be fubar, but the other 20 that are in different places/routes are fine. With trunking you ususally have 1 origination and 1 termination point, and if the internet burps somewhere in between, everything is down.

If you are referring to downtime on IP Phones and PoE switches then no, I very rarely have ANY downtime. The biggest cause of downtime is lightning/power surges not completely getting caught by the UPS and locking the switch up or rebooting the computer. This happens once, maybe twice a year, and the fix is a quick power-cycle if it doesn't do it automatically.

All my servers are self-managing servers and they will send me e-mails when they are too hot, CPU overheat, are having hard-drives issues, or are experiencing fan failures (from what the bios can see for fans). At this point the best practices for the IT guys need to take over. You should be using quality components, redundant hard-drives (highest rate of failure for any other component), Quality power supply (second most likely component to fail), spares for the two aforementioned things, and about once a year you should take the server down for 30 minutes to check fans and clean dust bunnies/filters. If the server is mounted in a way you can open the case without disconnecting it then you can use a shopvac for dust removal and have no downtime. A Dual-Core CPU helps maintain uptime as if one CPU locks or bugs the other CPU will run and the OS will free it up (or should). redundant power supplies are another option but the hard-drives are almost always going to be what fails first and fastest. I also log into them from anywhere I draw an IP and make whatever changes I need to.

An IP system does not lend itself to being small. They work better the bigger, and more distributed, you become. My break-point is a 6x20. 9 times out of 10 if someone wants a smaller system I will tell them upfront that I will not be cheaper then what a traditional KSU/PBX would cost.

My situation is also different compared to essentially any other commercial IP PBX out there. View my opinions with a grain of salt because they will most likely not apply to the Cisco/Avaya/Nortel/Nec/Vodavi/Shoretel/etc IP PBX guys. Some of them are locked into proprietary hardware and licensing structures that I dont have.

The bottom line is this: If you want something to act like a simple KSU, then buy a simple KSU. Dont take a cannon and try to shoot a mosquito, you will just end up shooting holes in your house.

C'mon Kumba is that all you have to say about that? LOL. Agree with all except the XOptions Flex.

I have had that for years in house. Saturday morning at 9:00 AM a customer calls me on my cell to say he can't reach my office emergency dispatch box. I call in and find " Your call can't be completed at this time..all circuits are busy." I'm 200 miles away so I send a tech to the office. NIU and PRI card looks good so we called XO. They say they will forward by main number to my cell immediately and call me with the status. 3 hours of crickets chirping followed by nothing starts to piss me off. I call again. Oh at&t has a DS3 down and we'll keep you informed. What about my forwarding? They say the switch (XO) is returning errors and they will forward ASAP. 9:00 PM they forward. OK so the last mile carrier has issues..I can deal with that.

Sunday 10:00 AM...call from XO to my cell voice mail (too busy to answer the cell :shhh: ) and I get a guy clearing the ticket as the DS3 has been restored. Still all circuits busy and no DID calls. I call and say don't clear fix it.

50 miles away at my small farm and they call saying the PBX and IAD need resetting. I did that before I left town but I send a guy over to do it...no go.

I finally get someone on the phone and I'm assured that a tech will call me ASAP. 4 hours later nothing. I drive in to the office and call again. A tech will call you right back. 1 hour later no call. By now I am torqued beyond belief. I hate when customers call my office raising Hell for service but my wife says "you need to blow their hair back."

I call and let the fury of Hell blow through and in 3 minutes a call comes to the cell and the B channels are released and all is fine.

Down 2 days is inexcusable.

XO support sucks so bad they can change weather patterns.

Your mileage may vary but I doubt it.

XO isn't the only option for that bonded T1 service tho.

I have had more problems with Verizon's last mile here then I have had with XO.

All I can say is that i've had XO, Qwest, Nuvox, and Level3, and XO was the best experience I had here. Verizon is twice as much and supposively the service/quality is better but what bean counter wants to pay twice for something when this other quote has the same bulletpoints.

I also don't call into the XO helpdesk. I usually just call my guy over there who has been around with them back before they were XO and he usually gets me handled.

Kumba,
Sounds like you're building your own boxes.(?) What operating system?

I can see why. At a quarter (or less) the price of the Cisco model, they're definitely budget-friendly.

Functionally they do everything I need them to do in a VoIP/mixed install. They are technically not a Layer-3 switch so they are often called Layer 2.5 or "Smart" switches. The Linksys SRW224p is another example of such a style of switch.

As far as quality I have never had a netgear ProSafe switch go bad. I have had a Linksys burn up PoE ports before.

I use Slackware Linux distribution. This is not very newbie friendly. I would suggest you start with something easier like Ubuntu to kind of get into linux and then graduate into the more "Utilitarian" distro's like Slack.

Kumba,
I think you answered my question... Linux on a PC. How robust does it have to be?

Wouldn't someone be smart to make a "phone system/voice mail" app for a PC? Can't believe Microsoft has not done it. Throw in a few cards for trunking and off ya go. Make it a part of the Office Suite. Maybe it's been done and I missed it.

It's been done many times. There are some offerings on Ebay from resellers with voice, mail, UM, CRM, Call Center, etc etc etc for very reasonable costs if someone should desire to play with them. Linux is forgiving and will work on PCs that would choke with Windows.

Ah, I figured I was walking into that one. Ok, I look like an ignorant doofus once again. :bang:

I bet there are a bunch of squirrely packages available. Any good ones?

I've played with a couple. I like them for a small 5-10 man shop that wants bleeding edge technology. Alot of the offerings are open source like Open Office and Sugar CRM and they pack a pretty good bang for the buck. Where the sweet spot is in this mix is that people like Kumba are able to custom build apps. I hate writing code but enjoy trying to think of custom apps and love trying to break others products. I'll load and play with any IP app but alas always fall back to the tried but true hybrid...works fine and lasts a long time.

Well, I don't mean to cut everyones throat to suggest the mom and pop store, small offices, churches, etc should bypass the local phone system installer, but, who wants to pay $60 every time you make a simple move, add, change? Just seems like a small office should be able to easily install a voice server and maintain it themselves.

*richard hesitates... is this wise? Hey, run it up the pole and lets see who salutes...*

95% of small mom and pops, churches, offices have little to any MAC action. They call when a line is dead, they can't turn off a message lite, calls cutoff during voice mail, etc. Small TDM systems are complicated enough without having to ask about Kernel errors, partition errors, and PC questions that make their eyes glass over. Now every data shop charges more per hour than I do...so why would they subject themselves to a problematic solution they can't begin to understand and also pay more for it on a service basis? Bad economics.

$60 bucks is less than half of what most companies charge in this neck of the woods. A typical small shop isn't going to have someone on-staff who is technically capable of such an activity. Our systems offer a simple six-digit entry on keypad of the phone to swap extensions, yet they still can't get it right. Exactly how many times would this even be an issue anyway in a typical small shop?

I don't think that anyone's going to argue that people should be able to "do it themselves". Home improvement (key word HOME) stores have been preaching this for decades. As you know, there are entire TV networks and hundreds of web sites that encourage people to avoid that "horrible" service technician. Somehow, they seem to treat gas and electricity a little more responsibly. "Phones are simple, it's just four 'wores'" Yeah, OK.

When you have someone who barely understands how to load paper into the copier in charge of the phones "because it is so easy" is where the fault lies. All of this is easy to those who are somewhat educated, but therein lies the problem. Most companies place their least-intelligent persons in charge of their phones and other office equipment. The $8.00 per hour receptionist who is too busy fighting with her boyfriend via text messaging on her prepaid cell phone during training is the first person to proclaim "this system doesn't work".

It can be TDM, 1A2, VOIP or anything else. Until companies start taking their phone systems seriously, there's not much that we the professionals can do. I love my customers, I really do and I make sure that we bend over backward to support them. We try, try and then try again, but it doesn't make much sense for us to sell systems that are easily self-managed if nobody wants to, well for lack of a better term "self-manage" them. It seems as if all they are looking at is the thousands of dollars saved on cabling or long distance charges. There is just so much more to this equation than that.....

To be continued.

Thats right Ed, anyway in my experience if there is a point there in the first place they will just use it until they want a move to somewhere there is no cable and then ask " O while you are there can you change the name on that phone as she moved last month".

I had a customer ring me and asked me to dial in and change the name on ext 220 because that person hads left and when the new person rings reception from that extensions she gets confused because the name is wrong. :shrug:

Good points RATHER BE FISHING, Ed, and OBT.

microsoft is getting into the voip business ...

have a look

https://www.microsoft.com/responsepoint/default.mspx

Yes, the dreaded 800 pound gorilla is now going to reach out and touch someone... Joy!

$60/hr is pretty cheap rate around here as well.

About half the customers I have are "Break-Fix" meaning they never call until the phones are acting up like RBF said. If they want me to give them the keys to the castle on Asterisk I will more then happily hand them over, but as Ed mentioned before, these are the people who ask "How do I answer the phone" right after the system is installed. Most of the calls I get aren't about the phones acting up but people wanting to change things that wouldn't be covered as part of the user's job anyways. Things like adding a queue, changing the AA, moving the hunt group/queue order, putting different on-hold music on it, etc. About the only real call I get about the phones acting up is sometimes the MWI will stay blinking even tho they have no voicemail. This usually corrects itself in 5 hours so I tell them to just ignore it and call me tomorrow if it's still doing it.

I do know what you mean about calling the vendor everytime you wanted to do something, that's how I originally got into Asterisk, from the fall-out of a Toshiba Strata DK40i and a vendor that refused to supply me with user manual's (and no, I didn't ask for programming guides). All I really wanted to do was be able to change the name on the display and make all the buttons map the same on all the phones. The combination of a bad vendor and a phone system that was sold to do X things but could only do Y is when I decided I would just program my own.

If a phone system is robust enough, has enough forethought put into the programming, and sold with the correct features they really need, then they shouldn't need to call you every week to look at it.

This also means that if you sold them a VoIP system that will be traversing the public internet that you did your own due diligence at time of sale and thoroughly advised them of the shortcomings of the internet, and that service outages are possible.

Bad Vendor's is why people want to avoid the dreaded service tech, not because a skilled professional isn't worth his going rate.

Can you guys point me to some of the software used for Using VOIP on a Computer. I have found one it is called Axon. I don't know if this is the right kind of software though. Also what is your Guys preference for IP phones. Quality but still at a decent price.

Why do Ed and Kumba now look like the same person?

Aww, man, poor Ed. He just got told he looks like an IT guy.

Now he can raise his rates

I would lock your doors, Richard. Ed wil be knocking soon. Calling him an IT guy, the shame, the horror.

Kumba, the guys around here sometimes jump on you kinda hard, but after reading this thread I must say, I am impressed with your knowledge. You have expressed your views quite well, and the common sense approach you have is refreshing. Most IT guys don't take the time to see both sides of the communication story.

Have you used Trixbox at all? Or Fonality? Same company.

Sorry for the delayed reply, somehow this thread slipped off my radar.

Yes, I have installed Trixbox and played around with it. It is designed for the small mom-and-pop shop that wants all the little bells and whistles that bigger phone systems either dont need or cant properly use.

If you were trying to learn Asterisk, then Trixbox would be a good place to start. It will get you introduced to some of the concepts behind it before you attempt to get to the real "Core" of things.