Small office phone setup
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@ajstringham said:
@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.
It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.
I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.
You could probably get away with it if it is just 3 calls... but again if someone starts listening to Pandora while another person is sending some sort of attachment you may run into issues.
I'll kill pandora and all other streaming services at the sonicwall.
Good luck I would have a riot on my hands if we attempted to do that here...
Why not just QoS it? Once you get this setup, allocate SIP traffic as highest priority on the network and then filter down from there, with sites like Spotify and Pandora having lowest priority.
That would work, I've had iffy results with some QoS at the firewall though, it may just be the Astaro that I was using.
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@ajstringham said:
@Dashrender said:
@ajstringham said:
@Dashrender even if you do have to buy a scanner, those are a couple hundred dollars. I assume people have to scan stuff in at least sometimes now as it is, no? e-Fax is more about receiving faxes than the sending.
You would be incorrect, they do not scan - our EHR supports uploads, true, but they prefer to have barcoded fax pages sent into their system, and this is what we do.
Wow. That's really weird...well, all in all, it might be easiest to spend the little bit of money it takes for a POTS line to maintain it just for the fax.
This won't be an issue since we already pay for 3 lines, we'll probably reduce costs by trading two POTS for 2 SIP trunks.
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@Dashrender One of the other things that I ran into is to ensure that you can get service from a SIP trunk provider that isn't your ISP. I am in a very rural part of NY and there is only one entity that services our area.
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@coliver said:
@Dashrender One of the other things that I ran into is to ensure that you can get service from a SIP trunk provider that isn't your ISP. I am in a very rural part of NY and there is only one entity that services our area.
Say again? Do you mean you simply couldn't get a local number for your area? I recall @scottalanmiller saying something about some backward system in NY some time ago that allowed them to limit who could provide local services up there.
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@Dashrender Yep, that is exactly what I am referring to.
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
@Dashrender One of the other things that I ran into is to ensure that you can get service from a SIP trunk provider that isn't your ISP. I am in a very rural part of NY and there is only one entity that services our area.
Say again? Do you mean you simply couldn't get a local number for your area? I recall @scottalanmiller saying something about some backward system in NY some time ago that allowed them to limit who could provide local services up there.
Different areas are serviced by different providers, that's for sure. Not really any different than any other part of the country though.
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What do you recommend for a PC for this setup? spec wise.
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Also, you can port your current phone numbers in, but I've been told that can take months at times...
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@Dashrender said:
What do you recommend for a PC for this setup? spec wise.
A virtual machine.... if you can't do that basically any old thing will work for this. @NetworkNerd walked me through that a couple of weeks ago.
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@Dashrender said:
What do you recommend for a PC for this setup? spec wise.
It's a very lightweight system. 2GB of RAM, which is probably way overkill. Single vCPU, 20GB of HDD. That'd be plenty.
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@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
What do you recommend for a PC for this setup? spec wise.
A virtual machine.... if you can't do that basically any old thing will work for this. @NetworkNerd walked me through that a couple of weeks ago.
Exactly.
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@ajstringham said:
@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
What do you recommend for a PC for this setup? spec wise.
A virtual machine.... if you can't do that basically any old thing will work for this. @NetworkNerd walked me through that a couple of weeks ago.
Exactly.
Although obviously, if this is your phone system, throwing it on some old desktop might be less than ideal...
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@ajstringham The FCC has requirements of number portability for both landline and wireless phones but the clause was that the providers had to be in the same service area. There are some service areas in the nation that are only serviced by one telephone company/provider.
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Any box you got can do it since you have no VM infrastructure at that site. I would honestly host it though for 10 phones and only 2-3 simultaneous calls.
The bandwidth usage will be the same and you will have it in a location that does not fail (generally speaking). So even if your internet went out, the PBX would still take calls and route them to voicemail.
You could easily log in and create a new route and send all calls to the main office temporarily when something happens.
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@coliver said:
@ajstringham The FCC has requirements of number portability for both landline and wireless phones but the clause was that the providers had to be in the same service area. There are some service areas in the nation that are only serviced by one telephone company/provider.
Ah, interesting...
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@JaredBusch said:
Any box you got can do it since you have no VM infrastructure at that site. I would honestly host it though for 10 phones and only 2-3 simultaneous calls.
The bandwidth usage will be the same and you will have it in a location that does not fail (generally speaking). So even if your internet went out, the PBX would still take calls and route them to voicemail.
You could easily log in and create a new route and send all calls to the main office temporarily when something happens.
Agreed, although remember that every call is at this point is an external call. So it would count twice as far as bandwidth is concerned.
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@JaredBusch said:
Any box you got can do it since you have no VM infrastructure at that site. I would honestly host it though for 10 phones and only 2-3 simultaneous calls.
The bandwidth usage will be the same and you will have it in a location that does not fail (generally speaking). So even if your internet went out, the PBX would still take calls and route them to voicemail.
You could easily log in and create a new route and send all calls to the main office temporarily when something happens.
This would also be a good solution. If you have no existing server in-place on-site, a hosted solution through NTG on something like Rackspace would be an excellent option.
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@coliver said:
@JaredBusch said:
Any box you got can do it since you have no VM infrastructure at that site. I would honestly host it though for 10 phones and only 2-3 simultaneous calls.
The bandwidth usage will be the same and you will have it in a location that does not fail (generally speaking). So even if your internet went out, the PBX would still take calls and route them to voicemail.
You could easily log in and create a new route and send all calls to the main office temporarily when something happens.
Agreed, although remember that every call is at this point is an external call. So it would count twice as far as bandwidth is concerned.
The latency difference really isn't noticeable. NTG hosts their PBX out of Toronto and I used it both from Upstate NY and Dallas and didn't have issues either time.
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@coliver said:
Agreed, although remember that every call is at this point is an external call. So it would count twice as far as bandwidth is concerned.
Every call is external, but with only 10 phones how many in house calls are happening? Those are the only ones that take double bandwidth.
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@JaredBusch said:
@coliver said:
Agreed, although remember that every call is at this point is an external call. So it would count twice as far as bandwidth is concerned.
Every call is external, but with only 10 phones how many in house calls are happening? Those are the only ones that take double bandwidth.
Exactly. With that few of people, the chances of lots of intra-office calls taking place is slim.
