Voip system
- Thread starter hel123
- Start date
Our work number is a VoIP system from XinixWorld. It means I can answer our geographic number anywhere in the world.
- Location
- North Norfolk
We have gone with Ring Central, as recommended by PC Pro magazine. Takes a little setting up for the different extensions we have, but very pleased with it. Helpline is from the Phillipines, very understandable and very helpful. We have 5 fixed phones, and there is an app which can take calls anywhere, or make them. You can choose a geographic number. We used to use Vonage before we got fttp for one line, the other on conventional landline, pleased with the move to Ring Central
Cowabunga
Member
- Location
- Ceredigion,Wales
I had a consultant for BT on the phone the other day. A genuine one. He said that the aim was to end copper cables to cabinets within five years nationwide and therefore all calls would be VOIP, which is, as I understand it and for those that don't, Voice over Internet Protocol. Something like Skype. So calls would effectively be free, bundled with the internet data package.
- Location
- Wiltshire
I have fttp going in today Starting voip with bt purely because I want to know everything works before I start getting fancy. Using BT still gives me a saving over my current copper and broadband costs.
I am not holding my breath, with the reliability of the copper lines here I am not convinced Openreach will be able to stick to their timescale.
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I am not holding my breath, with the reliability of the copper lines here I am not convinced Openreach will be able to stick to their timescale.
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Steevo
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
Pheasant Surprise
Member
- Location
- Woodbridge, Suffolk
Voice over IP can be as simple/cheap as you like or more customised. Depending on what you want....
1. Simple - “one line, one base”
If you want a totally hassle free way of doing it I would suggest you buy something like a Siemens N300 based wireless DECT base and then use wireless DeCT handsets. You can have half a dozen handsets around the house and DECT is a good wirleees technology for range and battery life on the handsets. The base can connect to your network/broadband for VoIP/SIP services and also has an RJ11 jack for BT/analog voice.
Another way of doing the same sort of thing is with a VOIP “soft client” on a smartphone, laptop or pc. Done the soft client thing, but not really my first choice for a permanent solution.
2. Customised - multiple lines, more business features - think your own PBX system.
You can download several free packages that basically use Asterisk as the engine. The one I would recommend would be FreePBX. The other good one used to be PBX in a Flash. Although I haven’t played with that in a good few years. You can almost do these as an un-attended install, they have become pretty slick and easy
....or if you prefer the hard way!!! I basically hand crafted my own VoIP system. It runs FreePBX / Asterisk software on a little Foxconn mini PC. It runs all the IP phones in the house, office. These are a mix of Cisco phones and Siemens DECT handhelds. At one stage when we still had copper BT landline(s) I had actual copper landline patched into it via an analog telephone adaptor (ATA).
First got it tweaked and running in 2012 and has been running nonstop since then. Had a solid state drive fail, about three years in, but recovered from a backup. I just patch the box every so often (it runs the Linux CentOS operating system) and run the updates although the version of FreePBX/Asterisk I’m running is officially out of support. I probably need to build a new box someday...
We have five virtual landines (basically these are “SIP” connections - which is a trunk connection to your SiP voice provider) a mixture of local 01473 numbers, and a couple of 020 numbers. I use one as a dedicate conference number, one as the home line, two as main numbers for biz and one for my wife’s biz. These all run fine over my broadband connection which just happens to be a 4G service. Hopefully as of Monday our FTTP fibre service gets lit up and we hopefully power on with that.
All these are run using SIPgate as our SIP provider. They are prett cheap and very reliable. Only pay for outbound calls and no monthly fees on their domestic service. They do other services etc. @Farma Parma uses them too and gets on well
- Location
- Northumberlandia
10/10 for sipgate... VOIP is the way to go on a true fast internet link deffo.
Line Rental for a Phone Service.... i think not
Pheasant Surprise
Member
- Location
- Woodbridge, Suffolk
As a long as you’ve got a viable alternative - rural WiFi, fibre, or 4G (satellite is sh!t for voice...) you’d dump paying for a copper line asap.
- Location
- North Norfolk
It's good to have a backup. We have a method of putting the BT 4G backup dongle on top of the digester, and the router as it does not work on a USB extension. That is the only place we can find a decent 4G signal. Rather than take mains up into a near-ATEX zone, using PoE with a PoE splitter to power the hub.
We needed the backup when the fibre link from pole to office failed.
Pheasant Surprise
Member
- Location
- Woodbridge, Suffolk
Too right. One of my worries given we have around 33 spans of overhead pole to pole cable before the fibre goes underground then overhead again.
The main 4G service will become back-up here as of Monday afternoon (hopefully) when the fibre goes live.
In actual fact I have two 4G services running in parallel through the router - the one labelled Vodafone is a bit of a special as it’s a fixed/private IP address SIM that I use for remote access and for access into my other biz network. The one labelled EE is actually now Virgin Mobile (although they use EE masts).
It will be joined by the new FTTP service as the primary broadband connection.
- Location
- Northumberlandia
Yes indeed correct & in my case Rural Hi speed Fibre Sourced WiFi.
280-300mb source of which i have access to 95mb most of the time. Speedtests to follow standby
- Location
- Northumberlandia
- Location
- Wiltshire
This is my speed now. Was about 9 this morning so my upload is twice what my download was. 300 meg is available but as I don’t have children who online game I didn’t bother with it.
Biggest problem with the installation was the engineer having to use a 1m long drill bit to get through the wall.
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Pheasant Surprise
Member
- Location
- Woodbridge, Suffolk
BBC
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
Replaced five different landlines with VoIP using Voipfone (https://www.voipfone.co.uk/) and very pleased. Call clarity far better but also far cheaper, call costs are negligible. Was easy to set up and transfer our old BT numbers over. No negatives and definitely the way to go.
I have been trying to get a voip set up for our house and Caravan site without much success so I am looking for a reliable reseller to install it for us. We have fttp and a wifi network but we want mobility around the park and we are finding the wifi or 4g (we have tried both) unreliable. Wondering whether we should go for deck voip phones. Also the phone app was not brilliant as we want to run a hunt group so if calls are not answered by one person they get bounced onto someone else but they then appeared as a missed call on person one (who had failed to answer it) even if person two had answered it and dealt with the query, this led to confusion as person one would not know and would ring back the "missed call". If someone can suggest a company that can set it all up for us I would be very grateful!
- Location
- Burton on trent
Hi Prees,
On the farm we are not blessed with decent internet(probably never will be), thus VoIP is never going to be any use to us. Because once someone uses the internet for anything the latency on the VoIP call makes it useless.
Tried tested, useless, end of.
I have tested various things:
I have a standard phone line in the farm office, which doesn't get used much. But wanted a line in my CHP engine room, since mobile coverage was crap etc.
I already have ethernet covering the 2 areas concerned.
So I bought a VoIP ATA and a few VoIP phones off eBay (2nd hand for not a lot)
Using a raspberry pi as an IP PBX system, I can use the VoIP phone in the engine room to pickup the phone line in the office (the ATA is on this phone line) just by dialing 7# , then dial the outside line as normal.
Should an incoming call come in, on the phone line(in the office), it rings in the office and is routed via the IP PBX to the engine room's VoIP phone, so I can answer it in either place.
Since it's all running on local ethernet, there is no latency. Pleased with this... Perfect etc.
However, I thought I'd take this further:
using SIP calling and registering our mobile phones on the IP PBX(raspberry Pi) the VoIP ethernet phones and the mobile phones (using WIFI) can call each other internally.
So calling internally between the VoIP ethernet phones is perfect, no latency clear etc. However, due to Wifi latency calling between the mobiles is horrible.
Latency on Wifi is awful, and if you are calling between 2 mobiles both on the wifi, the latency doubles up.
I think this is just generally how Wifi is, ie very laggy. (try pinging a mobile from a PC, better yet try a ping from mobile to mobile, terrible latency)
I know that WiFi 6 or ax as it's called (when it comes out shortly) is going to try and reduce this latency and this might fix the issue.
However in the meantime I personally think that VoIP via wifi is just too laggy to be much good. It does work, but the experience isn't good.
However, using a VoIP DECT would get around the Wifi issue, but then you'd need DECT coverage in the areas your working in.
Chris
On the farm we are not blessed with decent internet(probably never will be), thus VoIP is never going to be any use to us. Because once someone uses the internet for anything the latency on the VoIP call makes it useless.
Tried tested, useless, end of.
I have tested various things:
I have a standard phone line in the farm office, which doesn't get used much. But wanted a line in my CHP engine room, since mobile coverage was crap etc.
I already have ethernet covering the 2 areas concerned.
So I bought a VoIP ATA and a few VoIP phones off eBay (2nd hand for not a lot)
Using a raspberry pi as an IP PBX system, I can use the VoIP phone in the engine room to pickup the phone line in the office (the ATA is on this phone line) just by dialing 7# , then dial the outside line as normal.
Should an incoming call come in, on the phone line(in the office), it rings in the office and is routed via the IP PBX to the engine room's VoIP phone, so I can answer it in either place.
Since it's all running on local ethernet, there is no latency. Pleased with this... Perfect etc.
However, I thought I'd take this further:
using SIP calling and registering our mobile phones on the IP PBX(raspberry Pi) the VoIP ethernet phones and the mobile phones (using WIFI) can call each other internally.
So calling internally between the VoIP ethernet phones is perfect, no latency clear etc. However, due to Wifi latency calling between the mobiles is horrible.
Latency on Wifi is awful, and if you are calling between 2 mobiles both on the wifi, the latency doubles up.
I think this is just generally how Wifi is, ie very laggy. (try pinging a mobile from a PC, better yet try a ping from mobile to mobile, terrible latency)
I know that WiFi 6 or ax as it's called (when it comes out shortly) is going to try and reduce this latency and this might fix the issue.
However in the meantime I personally think that VoIP via wifi is just too laggy to be much good. It does work, but the experience isn't good.
However, using a VoIP DECT would get around the Wifi issue, but then you'd need DECT coverage in the areas your working in.
Chris
- Location
- West Kent
Pheasant Surprise
Member
- Location
- Woodbridge, Suffolk
I'm sure I did say about 18 months ago to look at DECT
Forgot smartphone VoIP apps, they are rubbish. What you want is long range DECT or a similar technology.
I'd speak to some local companies that specialise in PBX Communications - preferably that have experience in outdoor and events type solutions.
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- satellite
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BPR is not just a farming issue, it affects ALL business, it removes incentive to invest for growth
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