Ask HN - What Virtual PBX Do I Use

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199379

by strooltz • 16 years ago

23 24 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm looking to ditch Vonage VOIP in our small office (less than 10 employees). I'd like to migrate to a VOIP/Virtual PBX system. Grasshopper looks nice but we need to be able to send/rcv faxes from a "real" fax machine as well as have "real" phones ring (as opposed to cell phones, etc). Any recommendations?

jeebusroxors• 16 years ago

I would recommend asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/). Beware: it may be a bit overkill, and configuration is a bit in depth but it will have all the features want now, and could ever need (check out AGI scripting in your research).

You may also want to look into trixbox, which is an asterisk server with a bunch of addons, including full web based configuration already configured.

I do not have much experience with faxing but I'm pretty sure if you want to fax from a real machine over VOIP you may run into problems, but I believe there are options for email to fax.

As for real phones ringing you'll need ATAs, which can be picked up pretty cheap, or you can go with SIP phones (a bit more pricey but more functions) so the whole idea may be a bit more than you're looking to get into.

evgen• 16 years ago

This is a hard space to get real reviews that are not either PR puff pieces or providers stuffing in shill reviews. Are you working with phones that support a real SIP stack or will this be taking existing analog/POTS phones and attaching adapters? Are you willing/interested in dealing with the setup and maintenance costs of running your own PBX via Asterix? Two that I have had relatively good experiences with are Nextiva and Vocalocity and I have heard reasonably good things about Packet8 (those subtle qualifiers you see there are because there is always something you can complain about for any particular VOIP provider -- no one has reached the level of being "great" yet.) Nextiva has decent virtual fax services and can support a real fax machine with an adapter, but my adapter just shipped yesterday so I can't yet say whether or not it works as advertised or how well it integrates into the rest of their vFax system.

_b8r0• 16 years ago

Get a scanner, Efax (http://www.efax.com/) and VoIP provider (we use http://www.gradwell.com/ but are in the UK) and you're all set.

justinchen2• 16 years ago

Better than efax is RingCentral. You can get an 800 number with multiple voice mail boxes plus the number doubles as a fax number. It can also be used to receive or make calls, but that costs extra and I haven't used it yet.

danielmason• 16 years ago

I'm going to add a cautionary note about RingCentral. I hesitate to make my first post a negative one, but they've inspired me to feel strongly enough to break the lurker barrier. My experience with RingCentral has been almost unilaterally bad, and I'm now actively looking to switch away as quickly as possible.

We have had persistent bugs and inconsistencies. By itself, this wouldn't be a huge issue, but their level one support is untrained, powerless, and seemingly reluctant to help. In all my support calls to them, they have yet to put me on the phone with someone who understands my problem and has the power to fix it.

nixme2• 16 years ago

I asked a similar question sometime back and there were good responses: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865297

I ended up rolling FreeSwitch on a dedicated server on-site. I found it to be very extensible and reliable and I would almost always recommend it over Asterisk. Also deployed a couple Linksys SPA-3102 analog-to-IP gateway devices for existing lines - this is your best bet with faxes which transmit poorly over the public internet (unless you deal with T.38 and all that). I also use Flowroute (http://www.flowroute.com/) for all outgoing calls and for an extra incoming phone line (what's known as a DID). Their rates are reasonable and support is good, no problems so far. All extensions are using Polycom Soundpoint phones which sound great, have the best speakerphones I've heard, and are extremely customizable to boot. Although their XML config format was created by a madman :) Email me if you want more info about our setup.

Alternatively, check out Phonebooth, which I believe just launched the other day. They allow you to use Polycom phones too: http://www.phonebooth.com/ and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1194615

oomkiller• 16 years ago

Flowroute now supports inbound t.38, not sure about outbound support. Makes faxes work over ip!

simonk• 16 years ago

We use fuguphone.com but its Canada only. Its basically just hosted asterisk. I'd look for a local one that can transfer you numbers.

MichaelGG• 16 years ago

Unless you don't value your time much, I wouldn't bother dealing with any software setup yourself. (I've hacked a bit on the FreeSWITCH project, and I still would just buy a hosted solution from someone for my own PBX rather than deal with it myself.)

There's plenty of hosted PBX systems out there, but I've heard a lot of great things about RingCentral. (And no, I don't work for them. If anything, they're somewhat of a competitor.)

babar• 16 years ago

We just set up virtualpbx.com. The web ui is kind of clunky, and the automated text-to-voice for the message is terrible, but it had the options we needed: setting up out toll-free number to be routed to sales and support and send out emails if the call went to voicemail. We didn't care about setting up actual office phones at this point - everyone just uses their cells. We mostly wanted a way to avoid people having to give out their personal numbers or a single office number as a point of contact. This gives us the flexibility we need as we hire more people, reassign people, or have people leave.

tbgvi• 16 years ago

I'm in a similar boat right now. I haven't pulled the trigger on anything but I'm taking a good look at Fonality (http://pbxtra.fonality.com/products/standard).

Anyone else hear anything about it?

Edit: Now looking at FreePBX.org / Asterisk as well - thanks for the suggestions

viraptor3• 16 years ago

If you want anything more than just call forwarding, have a look at solutions not based on Asterisk. FreeSwitch and Yate are quite good. In my experience Ast. is like Windows - people complain about it, but continue to use it because most other people use it... and it's not that good compared to others. If you do want only forwarding, have a look at sip proxies instead (like Opensips) - that's more reliable and can save you one hop on the media path.

spamizbad• 16 years ago

I currently have a small office that depends on faxing. I'd ditch fax if I could, but my clients are funny in their ways.

Anyway, I'm using Asterisk 1.6.2 with FreePBX 2.0 and Broadvox is my SIP provider. My system is set up to receive faxes on the Asterisk PBX and email them to a mailing list of employees (this is configured through FreePBX). I also have a Grandstream GXW-4004 to provide FXS ports for the fax machine and analog phones that aren't important enough to replace with expensive VOIP handsets.

Note: I never got the analog fax machine to send and receive. Depending on how I set the fax detect on the Grandstream, I could do either-or, but not both. So my PBX receives faxes and my machine sends them. This is likely a PEBKAC matter, but I can't really be bothered to put forth the time to work this final gremlin out of my system.

My advice to anyone doing faxing over VoIP is the following:

1) If possible, don't.

2) Make sure your SIP provider supports VOIP faxing. Some don't with good reason: it's a bitch to support.

3) Make sure your SIP provider support G.711 with T.38.

4) Make sure your ISP does not strip QoS headers (In this case DiffServ EF)from IP packets. Your ISP will ignore them, obvious, but you definitely don't want them stripped or overwritten.

5) Make sure your VOIP packets have a DiffServ EF value in their headers.

6) Make sure any router(s) and switch(es) are configured properly to give top priority to your VOIP traffic. Failure to do so will likely result in jitter on your calls and you'll be unable to successfully send/receive faxes.

7a) If possible, don't run your primary PBX in a virtualized enivornment. Competition for system resources may create unwanted latency on your Asterisk VM resulting in jitter and failed faxes.

7b)With that said, I would definitely keep a cold or hot "spare" PBX running in a VM to spin up in the event of an outage.

Good luck!

strooltz• 16 years ago

thanks for all the great responses... phonebooth.com seems pretty close to perfect to what we need... next question - any recommendations on IP Phones?

viraptor3• 16 years ago

Snom / Linksys / Polycom / Yealink (which model depends on what you need from your phone). Cheaper products tend to crash, have bad audio quality, etc. Definitely try to stay away from Grandstreams...

gibsonf1• 16 years ago

I've been using PhonePower for a few years now and they are very impressive with very good customer service and great features.

kochbeck• 16 years ago

I've been curious what the real benefit is of an operation that needs an onsite (versus multisite) phone system for fewer than, eh... the size of a single 16-24 station line card to use VoIP in the first place? If you've got under 10 people, you might be able to get away with a used 3x8 Norstar which has the approximate maintenance overhead of a desk lamp. And in some areas, you could probably be even better off than getting a key system with good old Centrex.

Again, this is largely curiosity. But when you start getting into maintenance and UI and latency and encoding support and QoS from your ISP and whatever else you have to care about to make simple dialtone work, I wonder if maybe the problem is getting nerded to death for no good reason?

nixme2• 16 years ago

You're right, the complexity of these VOIP-based systems is much higher. But sometimes it's worth it for both cost and flexibility. I think each business needs to evaluate what's right for them.

For example, in the setup I described in my other comment, the business wanted to move away from a Lucent/Avaya Partner system they had been using for over a decade. They had 3 lines and about 15 extensions and were somewhat happy with it. The system for many years had, as you say, the "maintenance overhead of a desk lamp" but it was starting to drop voicemails randomly, the phones sucked, adding more lines meant buying one of those extension modules, etc. Plus the building was being renovated and running just CAT6 everywhere instead of separate ethernet and phone lines was very appealing.

Buying an inexpensive Dell rack server, Polycom phones, and a couple Linksys analog gateways was much cheaper than the initial investment they spent a decade ago. Since they kept the analog lines, which are useful for fax machines and security systems, there was no need to really worry about QoS initially since internal network bandwidth was plentiful. This alone fixed the problems of the aging system and they got voicemails and faxes delivered via email, shared directories browsable directly from phones, proper call parking, and a ton of other small features.

The cost benefit came when we added an external VOIP provider later. Now they could have unlimited simultaneous inbound and outbound calls for a single DID/caller ID and just pay a flat-rate per minute. At their usage, this came out much cheaper (4x) than the deals negotiated with Verizon locally. And the concept of individual lines that could be busy just melted away. The system is still configured to fallback on the couple analog lines if the internet goes out, but the rate plans have been reduced to the bare minimum so that incoming calls stay free.

EDIT: Almost forgot, another key benefit of a software switch is the easy integration it allows with your backend apps. For our internal rails-based order processing app, I implemented dial-on-click (ala Google Voice) and call history logs for all our vendors and customers (see librevox and mod_xml_cdr for FreeSwitch if you want to do something similar) in a day.

But viraptor is right, ensuring all the fallbacks work correctly and are tested takes time, and it might not be the wisest way to spend time if you don't understand what you're getting into.

blubb• 16 years ago

I'm not in the US so I can't recommend any particular provider. http://www.voip-info.org/ has a lot of information about both providers and equipment.

- For hosting the PBX yourself without learning Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, I can recommend Askozia PBX, which is based on m0n0wall: http://www.askozia.com/

I've also used FreePBX-based systems like TrixBox CE, which are more full-featured and more customizable, but might take more effort to upgrade.

- For reliable faxing, make sure your VoIP provider supports the T.38 protocol and get an ATA (analogue adapter) that supports it. You can then set up T.38 passthrough in your PBX.

- For equipment, I'd recommend going with one of the "known" brands. I've used Linksys SPA9xx and Snom phones, but read forums to see what people recommend for the PBX you choose. Keep in mind that a lot of the buttons and features on the phone might not work "out of the box", depending on the PBX you choose. I'd stay away from no-name brands unless you have tried them yourself or have very good recommendations.

viraptor3• 16 years ago

Disclaimer: I work for a hosted PBX provider, but not in US, so won't recommend anyone anyways.

If you value your mental health and don't want to hire an onsite, on-call VoIP specialist do not try to setup your own PBX. Sure - sometimes it works and you can do a lot of crazy stuff with a software PBX; in reality you want it to be up 24/7 and ensuring the quality of pstn termination, local network and configuration of such setup is at least one additional full-time job for the first couple of months. In reality if you have a problem with some "prepared" solution like freepbx / trixbox / whatever and have no support contract, you're left on your own with a system you don't understand and with no telephony - not a good option. Unless you need some very special functionality, just pay for the service. Do not be fooled by "simplicity" of solutions like trixbox - if something doesn't work, you still have to learn the whole stack to know how to fix it.

Solutions like grasshopper are cool and that's the kind of service I'd recommend. What you should look for is: how do they handle faxes (only T.38 is reliable), can you setup a divert number (like a mobile) for situations when your network is down, how much will it cost to get additional internal and external numbers. Bonus point - do they support wideband codecs? It might seem stupid, but the quality difference is amazing (only for internal calls).

If you're an MS-based shop, you might want to look at hosted OCS offers. Phones supporting it are a bit more expensive, but the ability to integrate with your emails, calendar, voicemail, etc. over the phone is really cool if you travel a lot. If you have a high volume of calls, you might also look for solutions that provide reception with a virtual switchboard apps - they're a bit more comfortable for a lot of call transfers than looking up numbers.

cpr• 16 years ago

We have been using phonebooth.net for our 4 geographically distributed work-at-home offices (Pittsburgh, Dallas, Austin and Denver), and it's worked pretty well so far. They worked (and are working) hard with us to get out the little glitches, and we got to deal with their actual developers, since it was (still is?) a beta test situation.

They don't handle faxes, though.

Pretty good deal, though: $20/month/line, 5 line minimum. Cheaper than POTS, and much more flexible.

(I just dragged my Polycom IP phone out to our farm and plugged it in for the first time, and I'm up and running with my phone line with no obvious issues.)

s3graham• 16 years ago

Wow, reading through all these comments, it seems like pretty much a no-brainer what the Google Voice team is up to. :) I didn't realize this space was such a disaster.

John123• 16 years ago

Hi This is John Smith I suggest you to signup and go through the features.

http://www.pbxplus.com - offers speech recognition, faxing, extensions, voicemail transcription, trees - visual drag and drop designer. Free US number with 50 mins. Can't get better.

Ask HN - What Virtual PBX Do I Use

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