Small business VoIP phone system setup tutorial | Hacker News Reader

Small business VoIP phone system setup tutorial

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57 pointsamingilani30 comments

I'm currently evaluating this space for a mixed-use 100 employee company. We're an e-commerce company who deals with B2C customer service, B2C/B2B inside sales, and C2B where we purchase from the customer.

We currently have a cloud-based PBX system that is okay-ish. No onsite hardware outside of Polycom phones. But, it's not very flexible. Our sales and service teams could benefit greatly from having access to customer data before picking up the call. Easier api-based access to call logs and recordings would be amazing as well. Tighter integration with other messaging channels would be great as well.

Where I'm lost is making the leap from our traditional phone system to something better. Twilio Flex looks great, but I'm not sure if it's overkill. I admittedly haven't taken the time to understand the entire stack (SIP, softswitches, IP-PBX, etc..). Perhaps I'm missing something, but it feels like there's a gap in the market between the a la carte Twilio services and a traditional PBX.

Crosstalk Solutions also have an excellent YouTube series on how to install and configure FreePBX v14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTtql5lMeKk&list=PL1fn6oC5nd...

I’ve just built out a fairly complex PBX solution for a client using asterisk and Cisco SPA5xx series phones.

I have to admit that, coming from a non-telephony dev background, there was a bit of a learning curve.

Looking forward to watching this when time allows.

What did you use to bridge the knowledge gap?

I've been trying to figure out Asterisk since I was a teenager, but never found a great resource. They used to call themselves Apache for telephone around that time, but since then, I've become a full-stack dev and I still don't understand Asterisk. I suppose It's probably because I haven't been giving it enough time, myself.

There is a LOT of terminology specific to phone stuff, and I find that to be half the battle. Just because phones currently kind of look like IT doesn’t mean they actually follow IT conventions. You’re taking a 100 year old technology and layering it on top of IT, so many of the assumptions IT people have don’t always apply.

I did a bit of consulting around Asterisk when it was younger and one of the strengths was how easy it was to get started. There's a bit of terminology to it, and the dialplan language is arcane to put it mildly, but it's all very straightfoward. The comparison with Apache is apt, with equivalents to CGI and everything.

Bascially the best way to get started is to just install it and use asterisk.conf from the sample directory to get started (not the other files).

You'll probably be running SIP to both your phones and your uplink so create a new sip.conf. Read the corresponding wiki page at voip-info.org for syntax, and look at the sample file for reference (it's way too complicated to use as-is).

Then write a dialplan in extensions.conf. That's the description of how calls should be processed (something like "when a local phone dials 3xx, call a local phone by that name", "when a local phone dials a longer string, place an outgoing call"). Again, check the wiki and sample files for examples. Don't be put off by the language, which uses line numbers for code.

That's enough to get started. The O'Reilly book is really, really good should you wish to invest in it. There are one-click installers and web interfaces available too, I haven't used those but they're probably better should you wish to have something more product-like. There's not as much small scale consulting work in the PBX space as it used to be since mobile phones took over. Most work is around call centers but it can still be challenging and fun.

Yep, just do it. That said, if you want some abstraction, putting FreePBX in between you and Asterisk does give a lot of ease of install, and you can always read the conf files that FreePBX creates when it configures asterisk based on web commands.

On the uplink side, I push all my calls through voip.ms. I pay per minute inbound and outbound (I think it's about $0.01/min, which seems expensive, but then there's no crazy $30/mo crap). DIDs (aka inbound phone numbers) cost $2-4 month, depending if you need e911. Calls are handed off via Asterisk's IAX2 protocol, although SIP works too.

We use Polycom phone hardware, which has been really solid for over 10 years, and which has great call quality, given Polycom's experience in conference room phones.

If you want to get hardcore with digital lines from your telco, you can use a used cisco device as a media gateway for under $2k.

My PBX is just a VM on our infrastructure like any other.

Thank you! One more question: What kind of hardware would I require to connect my server to the plain old telephone system? In my country, we don't have VOIP gateways for consumer use.

So, assuming your phone network is compatible with the US POTS (Plain old telephone service) system, here's what you need. Analog interfaces for phones run in two modes: FXO or FXS. An FSX adapter, is a device that you connect a phone device to. It generates dial tone. That's not what you need.

What you need is an FXO device (sometimes called a channel bank). That is a device that emulates a phone device, and which consumes dial tone. Many devices sold as FXO gateways are expensive. If you have a real server, you can get an FXO PCI card from Digium for some hundreds of dollars, but that's expensive too.

Some cheap FXS devices can also operate in FXO mode. The cheapest one appears to be the Grandtream HT813 for $89: https://www.voipsupply.com/grandtream-ht813-gateway-ata

Thank you so much! I've already gotten started installing Asterisk and playing around. This has been most helpful!

Just install the ISO, connect two phones (or softphones) and play around with it a bit. It's a lot of fun, and it's useful IRL.

For example, inbound queues (+QueueMetrics for monitoring) are very useful to share work on the basis of "what" instead of "who", even if you have a just a few people on the system.

AGI scripts + Google TTS are a no-brainer to use and get you nice voice messages.

Voicemail to e-mail is simple to set up and you can add transcription as well.

There is a lot you can hack on and everything can be set up as needed.

Blink is an excellent softphone, too!

http://icanblink.com/

Gotta love Rossman.

A very atypical video series for him, yet still so enlightening.

I agree. I feel as though VoIP and phone system setup for small business isn't as popular as it should be. I for one am very interested in running a private SIP server for my home use on something like a Raspberry Pi.

As am Twilio as the backend with Linphone as softphone client to get started. Easy enough to set up and seems to work fine. Only problem is the lack of push notifications on iOS, inbound phone calls only work when Linphone is the foreground app. Android even has a build in SIP client.

If you want to pay $0.99 a month, Bria support push notification for SIP accounts on iOS.

Acrobits Softphone[1] and Groundwire[2] support iOS push notifications. I have found they work much better than Bria[3].

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acrobits-softphone/id314192799

[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acrobits-groundwire/id37850308...

[3]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bria-mobile-voip-softphone/id1...

Thanks. Linephone does support push notifications, problem is I don't have a way to tell Twilio to send push notifications since it's not "their" mobile client. Any idea if you can send push notification to an iOS app that isn't yours? As in: Twilio receives a call, how does it (or my server) send a push notification to to, say, Groundwire?

Acrobits registers the SIP account(s) through their server when push notifications are enabled.

I tried Acrobits Softphone today and it works! Thanks for the help!

What existing startups have made this a one-click solution? Are there any?

You could argue that any cloud PBX does this. Ringcentral, 8x8 etc. You just download their softphone preconfigured and login, or use the web one.

The problem is, all of these services upsell you on "unlimited" calls for $20/mo, when all you really make is $10/mo in calls. The profit that runs their business is right there.

Isn’t your time worth more than $10/hr?

I don't understand what you're asking. Of course it is. If you just want cheap telephone service in your home, or even a somewhat featureful VOIP PBX for your 1-2 employee small business, then the cloud solutions are best.

If your goal is to learn VOIP, or you have a larger business, you're now looking at $200+/month for 10+ users. That starts being real money.

Even if it's just a personal setup, and it takes you say 4 hours to setup a per-minute voice setup, $10 less per month is $120/year, and a setup like this could easily last 3 years, now you're looking at $360 savings for 4 hours work. Not too bad at an hourly rate, and that's valuing the learning and fun of setting up such a system at $0.

I've been working on a webbased (WebRTC) softphone with Asterisk PBX support. Just opensourced it(WIP): https://github.com/garage11/ca11

Have a look at 3cx! Free for basic usage, great mobile apps and very easy deployments.

Alternatively to connect the company, you could have a shared contact list synced up with Exchange or Gmail with everyone's numbers and use WhatsApp voice calling or if you are feeling generous give everyone an iPhone and use FaceTime Audio....boom that way you reduce setup time by immense amounts...

Some companies (the smart ones) don’t want to turn over all their internal data to giant companies who’s primary business model is to collect and sell data.

Also, the solution you propose would be a nightmare to manage.

Does Microsoft collect and sell data for their Exchange product?

It's just one option for a small business. If there's less than 10 of you, it would be an easy option with minimal fuss as along as you can have a couple of tech-savy admins. Agreed that when you get large it be harder to manage.

To be honest, I felt like you read my comment and intrepreted it in the most critical way you could. For different situations there are different appropriate solutions. I was just mentioning a narrow use case. Horses for courses.

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