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Comment by gamedna | Hacker News Reader

Having gone down this road many times with freepbx, asterisk, etc.. I ultimately settled on just using voip.ms and connecting phones/sip clients directly to their internal sub-accounts with voicemail. They have enough features for most users so you don't need to worry about running your own PBX.

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I have been using voip.ms since 2015 for my phone service. Multiple numbers (DIDs) pointing to an IVR where callers must press 1 to connect to me (totally avoids robocalls). Plus voicemail (transcribed and emailed to me).

One issue with voip on mobile (iOS in my case) is that I would often miss calls due to late push notifications and timing out. So recently I set up a calling queue that rings/pushes my phone a few times instead of just once (queue timeout to 30 seconds before hitting voicemail).

Basically, if you want the control FreeSwitch and Asterisk offer but don't want to self-host, voip.ms is the best way to go.

What app do you use on iOS with voip.ms?

Bria ($1/mo subscription). Works as well as a voip client could work on iOS.

Same here. 3 businesses, only 1 problem in 10 years.

The only thing I have to add: if you need to make telephone calls, the call quality using a SIP phone is much better than using a softphone.

This isn't necessarily true, a computer can speak SIP too, with a good headset it's just as good.

Yeah, I would second this. In SIP a UA is a UA. So long as your softphone is good and your microphone is as well, there shouldn't be any difference. Although I would suspect the general experience may be that people with softphones more often will have terrible microphones for their PC...

I disagree. Yes, in theory, an agent is an agent, but in practice I have never in my life at any point seen computer hardware that comes anywhere close to the usability of a Polycom device.

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