Re: Cloud-based PBX service [telecom]

Could it be that there is a _very_ limited 'need' for pure *virtual* PBXes?

Without PSTN interconnectivity, a virtual PBX is of very limited usefulness. Add in the cost of self-contained VoIP phones, addressing complications if your phones are behind PAT/ NAT, and QOS issues on oversubscribed 'consumer grade' uplinks (especially where the 'last mile' provider is _also_ offering IP-based telephony -- e.g. most 'cable' companies), and you're looking at a very much 'niche' market.

When you can keep the 'inter-extension' traffic -local-, on a network you control, and can prioritize the network utilization based on functionality, VoIP makes good sense. You only have to maintain one wire plant, and expanding the number of 'end-points' in a particular area does _not_ require running additional wiring back to the 'head end'.

If an 'internal' call ties up _2x_ a voice channel worth of _external_ connectivity, has _twice_ the chances of being hit by QOS issues, etc., and has an additional half-dozen (or a dozen, or more!) possible 'points of failure', things start to look a lot less attractive.

Well, Bell sure sold a lot of them when they called them Centrex....

Sure, but PSTN interconnectivity is now very, very cheap.

--scott

Indeed, but that was back when a PBX was couple of racks of noisy equipment that needed a dedicated maintenance guy. Now that a quite usable PBX can be a couple of cards in a PC, the arithmetic is quite different.

These days, I'd think the main market for a virtual PBX would be virtual companies where everyone works in a home office, so the location of the PBX is arbitrary anyway.

Agreed. If you pay 1 cpm for outgoing VoIP to the US, that's a lot.

R's, John

Yes Bell did, *BUT* what they were selling was remotely-located, managed, physical PBX service, with hard-wire trunk circuits and dedicated wire-pairs to the customer equipment.

"Not Exactly" applies. A physical presence/termination is required in _every_ rate center where you wish to offer LNP (possibly requiring inter- connect with multiple IXCs at each site), plus backhaul to the location(s) where the PBX(s) live, plus ...

That was centrex-CO. Most Bell centrexes were CU (on customer premises). The first one I know of that was served directly out of the C.O. was for Bartlesville, Okla., for the Phillips Petroleum Company headquarters. I caused quite a stir because of the physical plant required, but Phiilips was only a block from the C.O., and a study showed it would be cheaper to serve it out of the C.O., which was already all 5XB. Phillips requirements would have required another 5XB on their premises to handle their needs.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

I've thought about using a virtual PBX in the past, but the costs of the SIP-capable phones always put me off. I'd like to have a "business" line, and the usual auto-attendant features, but I don't want to spend a month's worth of income to get it.

Are there other options now?

Bill

You can find perfectly usable SIP phones on eBay for $30, sometimes for under $20.

I like the picture showing how easy to use this one is:

SIP phone costs have come down a lot in recent years. Alternatively, use an existing analog phone and a separate ATA (analog telephone adapter)... the latter can be had for around $50.

You can put a very credible Asterisk server (with automated voice attendant, voicemail, multiple local phones, multiple inbound DIDs from one or more providers, multiple outbound providers if you wish) on almost any PC you can buy today or any used PC made in the last quite-a-few years. You can buy embedded-Linux boxes these days which are fanless and low-power, or could go with a mini-ITX Atom-based motherboard and a small solid-state disk, if you want something with more expansion capability. If you're running a server almost anywhere, with good Internet capability, you could add Asterisk to it without much difficulty, I would think.

My own home firewall/router runs Asterisk, as well as Apache and a bunch of other stuff, on a single-core Atom board. No strain at all.

Thanks for the link. This is a good example of the uncertainty I have while deciding on these phones and/or systems. The ad says that this phone "Can Not Direct Use On SKYPE", but the picture shows the phone connected to a "Skype SIP Server", and I'm not clear on who provides that or what it costs.

The Quick Setup Guide shows "sip.org" on one of the phone's screens, and the sip.org splash page says that they're in the business of providing skype-to-sip connectivity via a "hipsip" offer, but details and pricing are scarce: clicking the "hipsip" link takes me to the kind of page you get when a domain is for sale.

The user manual lists some SIP providers, but two of them have ".tw" domains, and one of the ".com" domains goes to a site written in an oriental language. So, I'm left to wonder if every call I make using one of those services will be making two trips to the Clarke belt - once to Taiwan, once to Skype (presumably in the U.S.), plus whatever delays apply to the connection from Skype to whomever I'm calling.

The other possibility is a "VoIPStunt" company, which shows it's price list in Euros by default, and says that it works with ATA adapters but doesn't mention SIP phones, and wants me to download an executable file just to sign up. I don't get a lot of "warm fuzzy" feeling there.

So, in a nutshell, this phone looks like a cobbled-together offering from a start-up company, and I wonder (pun intended) who I'm going to call if I drop it, where the "pbx" is, and how reliable the service is going to be.

I did a search for "SIP phone" on ebay, and came up with Cisco phones in the $120 range, and some under-$100 offerings, but one of them claims the phone is "unlocked", which makes me afraid that buying a SIP-capable phone might result in a shotgun marriage with a service provider I know nothing about.

I'd appreciate hearing from those who have used SIP phones for connection to these and other VoIP services, with or without Skype connectivity. TIA.

Bill

Thanks for the info: like most things related to SIP and VoIP, every data point branches into another set of questions.

The analog cards available from Digium are too high for me to consider, and the knock-offs come with vague warranties and not-that-much better prices. That leaves SIP phones, and/or ATA units for my "2500" sets: either way, I'd have to maintain an always-available server that needs updates, backups, and maintenance. It all adds up to me looking for online services, but (as I wrote in another reply), I'm concerned about just how much depth the companies offering SIP connectivity have.

Do you have experience with "Virtual PBX" providers in the US or Canada? I'd like to have something with less than 250 ms of round-trip latency, which leaves out satellite connections.

Bill

:Do you have experience with "Virtual PBX" providers in the US or Canada? :I'd like to have something with less than 250 ms of round-trip latency, :which leaves out satellite connections.

Unless you or they are in the middle of the Pacific or rural alaska, there aren't going to be any satellite hops in the link. Satellite is just too slow -- too high latency, too low bandwidth -- for data links. It's expensive, and hosting VOIP requires lots of bandwidth, so they're going to put it somewhere where that's cheap.

Having said that, I don't have a current hosted provider recommendation. If you've got the technical chops to run a server your self, but just don't want to deal with it in your house, it's quite possible to run an asterisk installation on a virtual server hosted by someone else.

Yup. There are places for both approaches... "owned" servers vs. hosted services. It really depends on what you need and what you are comfortable with.

FWIW, I've heard of people running Asterisk successfully right on their consumer-grade WiFi router (e.g. WRT54GS, or a higher-end model with some attached storage).

Some of the better-known names in SIP phones these days include Cisco (of course... but probably not my first choice), Snom, Grandstream, Aastra, and Yealink. Some of these make SIP/DECT wireless phones in addition to SIP desk phones.

I don't have any direct experience with these companies... I got into this by playing around with my own installation, and prefer to keep as much as possible in my own hands. That way, I know who to blame if the stupid programmer gets something messed up... me!

Based on what I see on the comparison sites, there are a good number of virtual-PBX companies offering plans that are generally quite similar in features and cost. I suspect that most of them are based on Asterisk, with some sort of easier-to-use UI for setup and management.

Some of these companies may be both deep and robust... others may be Johnnie-come-lately with poor capitalization / support / staying power. I'd probably want to look for one with at least a few years of stable operation... and be prepared to jump ship as quickly as possible if there are problems. As with most things, cheap can end up being very expensive.

How the costs work out... well, I expect that's a matter of matching the plan you buy to your actual needs, just as with cellphone plans. Basic plans seem to run $10-15/month, with a limited number of minutes. On these plans, overage-minutes run at around a nickel per minute, which is about 5x what you'd pay for direct DID or outdial VoIP service from a residential- or small-business SIP provider. You'll still need either a SIP phone, analog phone + ATA, or a standard landline or cellphone to access and be called by the PBX, so the cost of those must be included in your calculations.

Obviously, a dedicated Centrex on customer premises would not be considered a 'virtual' PBX by any rational meaning of the word, either. *grin*

A word of caution on that one... some Asterisk functions require fairly tight timing control (low latency and fairly high timing accuracy) on the server. Audio-conference mixing seems to be one of these. Many virtual-server setups do not guarantee sufficiently tight timing to the virtualized clients for this to work well, and audio quality can suffer.

Asterisk will run on d*mn near any old 386 box you have sitting around. Reasonably featured SIP phones can be found, new, for around $60 (Polycom Soundpoint IP 320 or 321), and a refurb 4-line Linksys is just over $70. And you can find used phones on eBay for much less. Beyond that, you can use POTS phones with Asterisk, either with 'line cards' in the PC -- with access to any 'advanced' features you want via '*" codes (possibly with a switch-hook 'flash' required) -- or an external analog telephone adapter. I see 1-4 port cards on eBay for around $25/port, in various combinations of FXS or FXO ports.

A SIP phone with -all- the bells-and-whistles you could possibly want is the Aastra 57i, circa $300 list, but readily available under $200.

See for a "near plug-and-play" Asterisk package, It's a Centos Linux distribution, with Asterisk and your choice of scads of add-ons for it, all in a single install.

They've even got a add-on module specifically for configuring the Aastra phone into the system.

There are also 'soft phones' e.g. Bria* for about that price, assuming that you already have a computer with speaker and microphone.

• DISCLAIMER: I have Bria on my laptop and it seems to work, but I don't use it much and this is definitely not to be taken as an endorsement or recommendation of the product.

I'm uncomfortable with the idea that using a laptop for phone calls makes it into a "soft" phone: I think it makes a very expensive telephone instrument with a built-in analog-to-digital adapter.

It's not that I don't understand the appeal of saving the cost of a dedicated instrument - far from it. What worries me are the ways in which my PC's power and my investment in internet connectivity can be turned to other uses that aren't possible with a dedicated instrument: some VoIP services demand that users endure pop-up ads and DNS redirections, and they don't allow users to port numbers in or out of the "service" they have subscribed to.

I'd rather price a system with dedicated devices, and *then* consider what, if anything, I can save by using a PC in place of one or more of the dedicated devices.

Bill Horne Moderator

Well, I *did* say "assuming that you already have a computer with speaker and microphone." I wouldn't recommend getting a PC just to turn it into a soft client... after all, I was suggesting the soft client as a way to save money, not to spend more of it.

While that may be true it should scare you away from the provider and not all soft clients. I mentioned Bria because it doesn't do anything bad, it's not tied to any provider, it tags along with the laptop that I drag almost everywhere anyway, brings my phone service wherever my laptop has an internet conenction, and is less expensive than a physical Nortel, Cisco or an Aastra IP phone. It does seem to have an issue with connecting to my VoIP provider's proxy when I'm behind a firewall with a SIP application gateway - that seems to be a common issue with soft SIP clients - so it may be wise to try before you buy.

Exactly. In my case the service was ordered with SIP phones, but we could have saved money and had an acceptable result if we ordered the same service with Bria (or any number of similar products) in stead of the phone.