VOIP companies: Difference between revisions
No edit summary |
m (Text replacement - "’" to "'") |
||
| Line 188: | Line 188: | ||
Fonality offers purpose-built VoIP business communication and contact center solutions for growing small and mid-sized companies. Fonality's unique software provides an extensive breadth of communication features at a fraction of the cost and complexity of outdated legacy providers. Fonality's unique communications application unifies messaging, email and phone features into one easy-to-use interface. | Fonality offers purpose-built VoIP business communication and contact center solutions for growing small and mid-sized companies. Fonality's unique software provides an extensive breadth of communication features at a fraction of the cost and complexity of outdated legacy providers. Fonality's unique communications application unifies messaging, email and phone features into one easy-to-use interface. | ||
Fonality's '''hybrid hosted solution''' provides a best of breed approach with the solution's hardware residing on the customers premise while the control panel (along with service, maintenance, and configuration) remains in the cloud. Infamous moves, adds, or changes (MACs) can be addressed in a matter of minutes, not days, and without the additional fees associated with 3rd party service. | |||
* Public Cloud / Hosted | * Public Cloud / Hosted | ||
| Line 350: | Line 350: | ||
# Sonicwall router | # Sonicwall router | ||
# Ethernet cables and connectors. | # Ethernet cables and connectors. | ||
# Some Linksys SPA941 handsets. Nine workstations in the Outer Darkness running [http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite.html | # Some Linksys SPA941 handsets. Nine workstations in the Outer Darkness running [http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite.html CounterPath's X-Lite softphone.] Extensions: 108, 111 (?), 200..207, 210. | ||
'''Q:''' How does the phone bank feed a ringing sound into the sound boards in Studio A and Studio B? That may be another feature that has to be rigged by hand for the fund drive. If possible, the extension that is used to feed the sound into the board should be first in line, so that the sound goes on the air before anyone in the fund drive group gets to hear it. The way it works now, people grab the calls so quickly that the ringing sound is not heard on the air as often as there are calls. | '''Q:''' How does the phone bank feed a ringing sound into the sound boards in Studio A and Studio B? That may be another feature that has to be rigged by hand for the fund drive. If possible, the extension that is used to feed the sound into the board should be first in line, so that the sound goes on the air before anyone in the fund drive group gets to hear it. The way it works now, people grab the calls so quickly that the ringing sound is not heard on the air as often as there are calls. | ||
Latest revision as of 11:21, 10 December 2022
Contact info
Jim Wright, President and CEO, (877) 888-6279, x101
Tom Zambito, Network Technician, (888) 340-3751
Holy Family Communications
The Station of the Cross Catholic Radio
6325 Sheridan Drive
Williamsville, NY 14221
- - Station of the Cross
- - (877) 888-6279 -- main office number--via Earthlink
- - (877) 511-5483 -- Calling All Catholics (feeds Studio A and Studio B)
- - (888) 711-6279 -- Fund drive (with VOIP provider now--PhonePower)
- - (716) 839-6117 -- office
- - (877) 711-8500 -- FAX
- - Orthodent
- - (716) 839-1900
- - (716) 839-9088 -- FAX
- - (800) 837-1552
- - EasyRX at Orthodent
- - (888) 340-3751 -- PhonePower
- - Local and FAX numbers shared with Orthodent.
- - Station of the Cross
Active contacts
These are the top candidates so far. I've moved the list of other VOIP providers off this page.
| company | contact | comments |
|---|---|---|
| Earth Link Hosted Voice, Hosted IP PBX |
Earthlink Business Sales Office
Ellicott Square Bldg EarthLink Business Sales: 1-877-355-1501 Josh Hoyle |
28 January 2012 What Earthlink does for us now:
|
| Voip Supply. |
80 Pineview Drive
Sweet Home and North French
|
Many brands. Lots of hardware.
29 January 2013 SIP program just starting They resell CloudSpan service. They would send us an Asterisk-based IP-PBX -- "Elastix". The cost of the appliance varies with configuration and hours of support. $600-$800. It is an "appliance" (hardware/software combination). Cost depends on whether there is a PSTN card in it, level of support, and extended warranty ($50 a year for three years).
An EdgeMonitor (EdgeMonitor?) is also required. About $524 for 10-call device. Can upgrade same device later just with license key.
Needs high-speed internet connection. Our Time Warner Business class will work. One line in from internet; one line out to "switch." (I call it a server. Same or different?) They usually just deliver hardware. May be able to provide on-site installation and configuration for a price. He will talk with his engineers and get back to me. Called back 6 February 2013 with rewritten quote. 10 SIP trunks (2 x 5). Can add extra trunks one-at-a-time. One trunk per phone call. |
| Great Lakes IT Services |
4955 Chestnut Ridge Road
Anastasia Hardy (205-978-3405)
|
Michael says they send people onsite. Cloud based. Router onsite for us. Breakout of locations. Seat count. Applications for the seats. Can your network support the bandwidth? May need two T1 lines. Will send engineers to go over the network. Get LOA: Letter of Authorization to allow folks to pull phone records from phone company to get CSR (Customer Service Record). Billing telephone number and any associated phone numbers with that account. ANO Additional Number .... DID Direct. Might have Centrex. Who knows? All the addresses for the locations. Call on Tuesday, 15 January 2013. Still wants LOA. Working Telephone Number (WTN). 800 numbers are phantom numbers. They point to WTNs. Can redirect them nearly instantaneously yourself from configuration software. 6 February Conference call with technician. Charlie. What is the bandwidth speed for Time Warner?
Network diagram. Deliver services. Someone would have to implement them onsite. Wants to visit with an engineer to do a site survey. Model numbers of the router(s) being used now? |
| Fonality Communications |
John McCormack (877-366-2548 x6730; jmccormack@fonality.com) called me Friday 11 Jan 2013. Headquarters
Fonality Inc. (Los Angeles, CA)
|
Fonality has ceased to support Trixbox Community Edition. They want everyone to upgrade to Fonality Pro. Fonality offers purpose-built VoIP business communication and contact center solutions for growing small and mid-sized companies. Fonality's unique software provides an extensive breadth of communication features at a fraction of the cost and complexity of outdated legacy providers. Fonality's unique communications application unifies messaging, email and phone features into one easy-to-use interface. Fonality's hybrid hosted solution provides a best of breed approach with the solution's hardware residing on the customers premise while the control panel (along with service, maintenance, and configuration) remains in the cloud. Infamous moves, adds, or changes (MACs) can be addressed in a matter of minutes, not days, and without the additional fees associated with 3rd party service.
Provides a basic IP phone with the contract. 1-877-366-2548
|
| Premcom (a Shortel partner) |
|
VAR. Systems integration.
Celino and Barnes, Brown and Chiari. BCO (small printing shop). "Rip and replace." Replace the guts of your system. New hardware. Buy or lease. Non-SIP. SIP trunks: no standard protocol. That's the problem with international lines. Recommends traditional PRIs or analogue lines that Time Warner, Earthlink, or fiber input. |
System requirements
- Keep current handsets (Linsys IP Phones) and the new Asus server.
- Keep Asterisk software.
- Replace Earthlink T1 analog service and Rhino channel bank with new VOIP service.
- Provide international service (Canada) for all toll-free numbers. PhonePower.com let us down during the last Fund Drive. Our Candian benefactors must be able to call the same number as our U.S. benefactors.
- - Station of the Cross
- - (877) 888-6279 -- main office number--with Earthlink? Time Warner?
- - (877) 511-5483 -- Calling All Catholics (feeds Studio A and Studio B)
- - (888) 711-6279 -- Fund drive (with VOIP provider now--PhonePower.com?)
- - (716) 839-6117 -- office
- - (877) 711-8500 -- FAX
- - Orthodent
- - (716) 839-1900
- - (716) 839-1900
- - (716) 839-9088 -- FAX
- - (800) 837-1552
- - EasyRX at Orthodent
- - (888) 340-3751
- - Any other numbers?
- - _____________________________
- - Station of the Cross
- Analog (FXS/FXO) IO to mixers in Studio A and Studio B.
- Work with current fund-drive system.
- Act as PBX for 9 office phones; phone bank for fund-drives; phone in conference room (?).
- Fault tolerant.
- Good support.
- Documentation: passwords, URLs, IP addresses, documentation needed to make everything work.
- For future consideration: consolidating all telephone service to all the affiliates into a VOIP IP-PBX.
Post mortem
- Talk with PhonePower.com? What went wrong? Has it been fixed? Can it be fixed?
Present setup
Jim P. is taking all of his customers off of his service. Put them on Amazon. We won't be competing with them for bandwidth. He is changing his entire Exchange server to Gmail. That will be gone in two weeks.
Speed test: 33 Mbs 27.5 Mbs.
Two different phone service providers: Earthlink (T1, analog) and PhonePower (VOIP).
Two different data line providers: Earthlink (Telos lines to Rochester and Boston?) and Time Warner (PhonePower VOIP and all of the transmitters). BRIC-Links connect the station to the towers via the internet.
Airespring provides internet services to Oil City, PA, and Syracuse, NY. Each local antenna and office have local ISPs like this.
Six transmitter locations, seven antennas, seven streams:
- Buffalo, NY
- Rochester, NY (AM and FM)
- Elmira, NY (shares Rochester stream)
- Syracuse, NY
- Boston, MA
- Oil City, PA
iCatholicRadio is another "transmitter," in terms of calculating bandwidth requirements. It is a unique programming stream.
Internet traffic carried on Time Warner optical line:
- iCatholicRadio stream to some retransmitter.
- iCatolicoRadio stream.
- Live stream retransmitter for five unique broadcast streams (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Oil City, Boston).
- BRIC-Links to seven antennas.
- BCS traffic.
- Office computers (SotC and OD).
Each stream is the equivalent of a phone channel.
Websites for each station are at Dreamhost.
I believe each of the local offices also has a telephone number and, I presume, a telephone bill to go with it. It should be possible to incorporate all of them into the WAN/VOIP system. That might result in some savings.
Any BCS server traffic for SotC or Orthodent has to pass through our Sonicwall switch.
All traffic must go through another switch in BCS.
Station of the Cross and Orthodent handsets
A call to these numbers follows this route to a handset:
- Public switched telephone network
- Earthlink
- T1 line with 24 pairs of analog lines
- Rhino T1 Channel Bank FXS/FXO with Data
- Trixbox
- Virtual private network (VPN) server creates a Wide Area Network (WAN)
- Sonicwall router.
- Ethernet cables and connectors.
- Linksys IP Phone SPA941.
PolyCom handset in the Conference room
Q: Who owns and runs this?
- - BCS
CAC
A call to 877-511-5483 follows this route to a handset:
- Public switched telephone network.
- Earthlink T1 analog line.
- MUX--multiplexer.
- T1 Terminal block.
- T1 cable.
- Rhino T1 Channel Bank FXS/FXO with Data.
- Trixbox software.
- Ethernet cable to computer on rack.
- Card in computer provides 4 analog lines for Comrex/Telos boxes that provide telephone I/O for the mixers.
- Virtual private network (VPN) server creates a Wide Area Network (WAN) or Local Area Network (LAN).
- Router
- The calls are switched by software from digital circuits to a card in a computer that provides analog IO for the Telos box
- Flash Operator Panel--hosted where?
- CAC phone server (?)-- analog IO on RJ11 modular connectors (?).
- Telos: two single-pair lines in; four (?) four-pair lines out
- Parking extensions: 60, 61, 62, 63. These play the outbound audio from the mixer to calls on hold. Audio output only; no audio input.
- Studio A: extension 130 and 131. Caller audio input volume controlled by sliders. No effect on audio output to the caller.
- Studio B: extension 132 and 133. Caller audio input volume controlled by sliders. No effect on audio output to the caller.
Fund Drive
A call to the Fund Drive phone number follows this route to the phone bank (nine workstations in the Outer Darkness as well as some or all (?) of the handsets in the offices):
- Public switched telephone network
- PhonePower
- Time Warner fiber-optic cable (?)
- Trixbox
- Virtual private network (VPN) server creates a Wide Area Network (WAN)
- Sonicwall router
- Ethernet cables and connectors.
- Some Linksys SPA941 handsets. Nine workstations in the Outer Darkness running CounterPath's X-Lite softphone. Extensions: 108, 111 (?), 200..207, 210.
Q: How does the phone bank feed a ringing sound into the sound boards in Studio A and Studio B? That may be another feature that has to be rigged by hand for the fund drive. If possible, the extension that is used to feed the sound into the board should be first in line, so that the sound goes on the air before anyone in the fund drive group gets to hear it. The way it works now, people grab the calls so quickly that the ringing sound is not heard on the air as often as there are calls.
- - ________________________
EasyRx
- Public switched telephone network
- PhonePower
- Time Warner fiber-optic cable (?)
- Trixbox
- Virtual private network (VPN) server creates a Wide Area Network (WAN)
- Sonicwall
- Ethernet cables and connectors.
- ?????? _______________________
Earthlink
An analog T1 line comes into the machine room. A multiplexer splits the feed into 24 channels. They in turn are fed into the Rhino T1 Channel Bank (FXS/FXO with Data).
- Local telephone
- Long Distance
- Data and internet
- Local usage
- On-net local usage
- Domestic interstate
- Domestic intrastate
- Inbound Toll Free (421 calls)
- 18 x EUCL -- "End User Common Line" charge
- 18 x Local number portability
- 18 x Telephone Line
- 18 x PILD -- Presubscribed Inter-exchange Long Distance charge.
- 4 x Toll Free Number
- 4 x Toll Free Call Pack 1000
Telos v.35 interfaces that run T1 DSUs. Using one channel. Full T1 point-to-point, using one channel.
56K line just shifted over to fiber within the last year. Point to point that goes to channel 49 in Colesville for WLOF antenna. Smart jack in computer room. Picks up somewhere in fiber box.
T1 point-to-point service to Rochester. Telos at both ends?
Time Warner Optical Fiber (TWOF)
Time Warner broadband service is provided by an optical fiber connection in the machine room.
- Time Warner Business Class Dedicated Internet Access
- 10 Mbps guaranteed, but getting 19 Mbps up and down
- Optical Dedicated Internet Access is IP over IEEE 802.3 based Full Duplex non-circuit switched services provisioned on dedicated fiber optic facilities from the customer premises to the Time Warner Cable hub-site rate limited at the Ethernet Aggregation switch from 5 Mbps to 1 Gbps.
We split this service with Buffalo Computer Solutions (BCS). The optical fiber enters the utility room and runs into BCS. From BCS there is a Cat 5 cable that re-enters the utility room.
BCS pays half the cost of this service. Our router is in the utility room. Five port router. Replaced another computer that had been a proxy server.
50 static IP addresses. Bill has a list of the addresses being used at present for the BRIC-Link connections.
PhonePower
Comes in on TWOF.
PhonePower is used for the Fund Drive and for EasyRx.
Airespring
Provides some kind of service to Oil City and Syracuse.
Virtual Private Network (VPN) server
Sonicwall with 4 VPN client licenses. It is not clear whether it is the edge device that sits between the building and the rest of the world. It appears to do some firewalling and some NAT in addition to being a VPN server.
- Tom Zambito
- It is a Sonicwall TZ 100. Its public address is 208.125.229.99, which is one of several public addresses I've seen around. Another is 208.125.229.101, which was the EasyRx development virtual machine.
- The Sonicwall packet filter has a rule to route traffic between what is ostensibly a Trixbox and PhonePower. That Trixbox has the address 192.168.3.210. The Trixbox I have access to has the address 192.168.3.134, which gives weight your speculation that the Asus box on the floor is a second Asterisk box.
- I can't find reliable traffic data on the Sonicwall device.
- Is the same server running the Spark Chat software? _____
- Also connecting the workstations to the accounting software (Denarius?) during the fund drive? _____
NT Server?
The WAN or LAN also provides some shared drives among the office computers running Windows XP. Is there an NT server in the system somewhere? Where is the data on drive Z: held? By what route do individual workstations access the networked drive(s)?
- - ________________________
Trixbox
Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8 GHz and somewhere between 768 MB and 1 GB of memory. It is not the same physical hardware as the VPN. It is running Trixbox CE, which is merely a bundle of the following open source software: CentOS, Asterisk, FreePBX, and Flash Operator Panel (FOP).
Trixbox CE has been discontinued, so an upgrade to would mean installing each of those separately. There are newer versions of Asterisk and FOP.
Fonality is offering Trixbox Pro. The software can be downloaded from Fonality before it is purchased or activated. I imagine this means that it can be tested within the LAN to see that it works, but that is just a guess.
FreePBX is an easy to use GUI (graphical user interface) that controls and manages Asterisk, the world's most popular open source telephony engine software. FreePBX has been developed and hardened by thousands of volunteers over tens of thousands man hours. FreePBX has been downloaded over 5,000,000 times and estimates over 500,000 active phone systems.
There is a very reasonably priced endpoint manager that works with FreePBX. $25 per server.
Flash Operator Panel (FOP)
IP address: 192.168.3.134
| ext | assignment |
|---|---|
| 101..107 | Station of the Cross office extensions |
| 108 | Fund Drive (inactive?) |
| 109..110 | Station of the Cross office extensions |
| 111 | Donation line |
| 112 | Testimonial (not accessible?) |
| 113 | Signal Quality |
| 115..118 | CAC Operator 1..4 |
| 130..131 | Studio A1 and A2 |
| 132..133 | Studio B1 and B2 |
| 140 | Tickets |
| 150..153 | Orthodent office handsets |
| 154 | ODL Gen1 (inactive?) |
| 155..156 | ODL Gen2..Gen3 |
| 157 | ODL Lab (inactive?) |
| 189 | ODL PA (broken?) |
| 200..207 | Fund1..Fund8 |
| 210 | Fund10 |
- Queues
- - FundRaiser
- - wloftickets
- - test
- - CAC60
- - CAC61
- - CAC62
- - CAC63
- Trunks
- - Zap 5..22: 18 lines from Earthlink, I imagine.
Buffalo Computing Solutions
- Jim Papafagos
- Buffalo Computing Solutions -- (716) 853-8255
- BCS uses Broadvox as its VOIP provider.
Cost/Benefit Analysis
Current costs
- Earthlink telephone service (Station plus Orthodent).
- Earthlink dedicated data lines for Rochester and Boston (Telos (sp?) connection).
- Time Warner business class optical fiber broadband service.
- PhonePower (Station plus EasyRx).
- Airespring.
- Affiliate telephone and internet bills.
Cost of consolidation
- Setup charges.
- Purchase of new equipment.
- New lines in?
- Cost of transferring custody of phone numbers from old provider to new.
- Writing and circulating documentation.
- Training staff.
- Recurrent monthly bill for services.
- Occasional charges for support.
Tom's research
- Time Warner VOIP--consolidate with them?
- AT&T, 877-542-8666
- Sprint, 866-653-1056.
- Verizon, 800-201-1452.
Mr. Wright
Calls in to:
- Earthlink
- Time Warner
- Broadvox
- PhonePower (test fund drive phone number)