sundance-communications.com Forums Telephony Discussion Phone & VoIP Systems Comdial Telephones & Systems Comdial Digitech + VOIP = Success!

In case anybody's interested...

I was able to successfully install my Digitech G1632 to VOIP service. It works great!

I initially had some VOIP issues, not related to the Comdial.

My VOIP worked fine for incoming and outgoing calls, but after about 10 minutes, it would not allow incoming calls. The caller would dial my number, then get silence-- no ringback, no tones, no message, just dead air!

It turns out that my Verizon FiOS Internet service was blocking the UDP ports necessary for my VOIP to work. I called Verizon "support" but was told that opening ports was "unsupported and non-standard use of our service."

Huh? OH! I get it! I need to order POTS lines from you! That must be a supported service?

Well, I figured out how to get it working on my own (funny, but the Verizon tech who "promised" me she would find a solution and call me back never did. I'm still waiting...).

Once this VOIP problem was solved, I fired up the Digitech, connected the VOIP line to it, and it worked fine! We used the system with only one line for a week or so, then I got another VOIP number activated, and it works OK too.

I'm using a Linksys 2-port VOIP adapter. It seems funny to have a Cat5 Net cable running to my phone system, and no Verizon lines...

I haven't experienced any issues with interaction between the VOIP service and the Comdial, so it seems we're OK.

Next I'm planning to add a few more VOIP adapters, and up the incoming lines.

My VOIP service has no monthly fee, unlimited incoming calls, and 60 minutes free outgoing calls per month.

Now, if I could only program the Digitech to always first select the outgoing line that still has free minutes left...

see if you can get it to work with voicemail. Just getting the lines to work has been done for a long time. Voicemail presents some new challenges, but we have been successful a few times.

See if you can set the digitech up to do a round-robin outgoing dialing... should give you pretty close to a good base spread...

Hi Mark:

Right now, voicemail isn't an issue for us. The VoIP service allows us to ring the phone for a user-specified number of rings, then do something else, if no answer. The "something else" can be to ring another phone, or go to voicemail, etc. So we now have it go to voicemail.

I have read some posts here, and assume that the problem with VoIP and voicemail has something to do with the supervisory signals being different than POTS lines.

I'll play around with that someday (I still haven't gotten my KeyVoice system hooked up), but I'm guessing that some tweaking of the VoIP parameters could overcome the problem.

Then again, it may be that there would need to be some low-level parameter changes to the Dialogic board. Those boards have some extremely detailed configurations that the "normal" user never gets to see. I would think that the combination of VoIP tuning and Dialogic tuning could overcome the problem.

Don't know yet, but haven't tried yet either!

At this point, I haven't gotten any specifics from anyone about what problems they've had with VoIP + Voicemail, so I'm not really sure what I'll bump into.

Basically, I think you said it all when you said it "presents some new challenges." Not impossible, just challenging!

Hi Kumba:

Thanks for the tip on "round-robin" dialing. I don't recall that I've ever tried that in the past. And I'm not sure what it is, exactly!

I guess I'll have to dig around the Comdial manual and see if I can see anything about it... A quick look didn't come up with anything that sounds like "round" or "robin"

If you can point me in the direction, I'd appreciate it!

There is a direction, but not in a Comdial DSU.

The "round-robin" dialing probably refers to circular hunt. Unfortunately the only circular hunting you get in Comdial is Intercom, ie Stations only. Trunks just get first idle.

We do this on PBX's to distribute usage among lines in a trunk group...like the ones connected to VoIP.

Carl