QUESTION Helping friend get migrated to VOIP

[kameleon]

I am currently helping a friend of mine move his company phone system to a VOIP solution. The last I dealt with anything VOIP related was almost 10 years ago when I helped setup the asterisk box at my employer then. So I am a little rusty but have been doing tons of reading. I need some clarification and pointers on a few things though.

Currently they have Comcast phone service going into an old Nortel PBX. We are planning on ditching all that and going straight VOIP phones on the desks. I picked up some Obi1022 phones to place at each desk as I wanted to get them something that would work with just about everythign under the sun including Google Voice.I also picked up a obi202 ata so I could use google voice partially or in full as per one of nerdvittles recent posts.

They have 3 phone lines currently:

• Main line/incoming number
• Secondary line/mostly used for outgoing calls
• Fax line.

We are trying to keep the monthly fees to a minimum so I was wanting to utilize Google Voice as much as possible with some fail over. Is the GV/obi202/PIAF solution solid enough for a small business (5 users)?

I am probably going to ditch the second/outgoing line as it is basically useless in this setup. However I need to figure out the fax part. They do still use a fax machine to send/receive faxes as they still have clients that mandate that usage. Any ideas here? Could I use the second port of the obi202 for this functionality or is there a way to move it to the PIAF server and make it all digital?

I know I have a few more questions but that is a good start.

 

[dghundt]

I use t38fax.com for our outgoing faxes with a grandstream fxs gateway. It connects to t38 directly, not thru our pbx. Works perfectly. They list 'certified' devices and the device settings to use .
We use a cloud inbound fax server, but it should work both ways. I tried a Obi fax gateway, but it always failed with one retail pharmacy.
Good luck chasing Google voice. It's fine for home hobby, but for a business it's not worth the hassle.
Get wards Vitelity 4 inbound did special. Have your primary roll over if busy to Vitelity.

 

[atsak]

Just be super careful with the fax. It doesn't work reliably in my experience, though others say it's note a problem (Ward included). You can use the fax service from t38fax.com, or vitelity has a service as well called Fax enable which works decently for a few dollars a month.

 

[kameleon]

Good luck chasing Google voice. It's fine for home hobby, but for a business it's not worth the hassle.
Get wards Vitelity 4 inbound did special. Have your primary roll over if busy to Vitelity.

I was actually thinking of porting their main number to GV and just have it set as a number forwarder similar to how I have it on my cellphone, someone calls my GV # and it is forwarded to whatever I want including my cell. In this case I would have it ring to a few different DIDs for redundancy. Sound about right? That way in the future they won't have to worry about number portability and all that jazz.

 

[dicko]

The trouble with faxing is the network path, some VSP's do a fair job doing fax over g711 (Vitelity and FlowRoute come to mind) BUT, g711 is a horrible transport protocol over any network connection that is not either a POTS or a T! (PRI or T1 TDM circuit) .

T38 is a good answer, but Asterisk as yet does a lousy job of T38 it has a rudimentary connector to a tif file (both ways) but any failure is mortal.

Hylafax and FreeSwitch have much better T38 termination, if you are using debian then

apt-get install t38modem

and then RTFM, you are less lucky with RedHat based OS's

Then Hylafax will gracefully handle faile faxes, email to fax , fax to email or printer or pretty much anything you can dreamup.

In Summary,


FAX over VOIP is a pain, and ASterisk is probably your worst choice,.
FAX over T38 is robust but needs some manual configurartion
FAX over GV might or might not work now or very soon.

 

[islandtech]

Take a look at faxsipit.com
setup the account
configure the ata
connect to the lan
connect fax machine
done

 

[kameleon]

Take a look at faxsipit.com
setup the account
configure the ata
connect to the lan
connect fax machine
done

Looks interesting but no mention of a price anywhere. About what is the cost associated with this service?

 

[islandtech]

Not sure of current price for the ata
around $10 p/month/did
about $0.04 /min outbound
3000 min inbound $0.00

 

[atsak]

Take a look at faxsipit.com
setup the account
configure the ata
connect to the lan
connect fax machine
done

FaxSIPit is whitelabled as Vitelity's Fax Enable I believe. The Vitelity service is $120 for the ATA, and .03 cents a minute, and $2.99 a month for the DID.

 

[phinphan]

We have all of our fax lines through vitelity and it just works. I have never had a fax that would not go through on their fax service.