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

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.