Bend in the Weather

Well it's coming up to the end of financial year, and like many businesses we needed to make a few purchases. (That or pay more corporate tax -- hmmm let me think.. more toys or more tax? )
Generally we don't make many purchases throughout the year and then buy up large near the end of the financial year. (well unless something fails!)

As such we decided to get a decent VOIP phone. We currently use a LinkSys SPA3102 with our cordless phone, but wanted to get a phone with a decent headset so we could talk hands free easily.

We spoke to a few people, did the research and settled on a Snom VOIP phone. In particular, we elected the Snom-300 as the phone of choice for us. Whilst it claims it's the 'base phone', unless you're mega-boss or a telemarketing guru I doubt the snom-320 or snom-360 phones are really required. (They basically have a lot of additional buttons and few features added to the base functionality).

You can configure the phone via the LCD menu system, or use the built in web based configuration. The web-based configuration is very well laid out and easy to navigate and locate what you need.

Upgrading the phones firmware is extremely easy and quite painless. You can watch the progress of the phone being flashed, and it's quite novel to see items like chroot, mount appear on your phones LCD.

Chroot, mount you say?! Yup, at the heart of every Snom is a Linux kernel. Whilst this wasn't the sole reason for buying the device, it's handy to know that with a bit of time I could in theory hack the phone.

I unfortunately get stuck is long boring teleconferences far too often, so I wanted to ensure I also had a phone that was able to plugin in a headset. Not all IP VOIP phones we looked at seemed to have that feature.

The Snom phones do, however they use an RJ-11 headset connection instead of a 2.5mm or 3.5mm jack that people are most familar with. (Many cordless phones also use the 2.5/3.5mm jacks).

As such, we decided to purchase them. They don't come cheap but are worth it. It's a much better solution than getting 'neck cramp' attempting to hold the phone under your chin, or even speaker phone (which seems to pickup more background noise), which can annoy anyone else within earshot.

With the headset, I'm able to easily keep working on my computer; punching away on the keyboard, and those on the other end are none the wiser! (Well besides being too distracted to really keep up with the conversation; dang! I think I just let my secret out....and to think -- people just thought I was vague on the phone!)

Our current setup has me registering both the ATA and the Snoms devices registering directly to our VOIP provider. This works fine, and allows multiple out going calls at the same time, but means only our ATA rings for incoming calls (we have two DIDs).

It makes sense, as the ATA picks up the incoming request and responds... well before the Snoms do. How to resolve?

Easily -- Asterisk to the rescue!

I can setup Asterisk as our local PBX (or PABX for those in Australia!), and have all devices register to it. Then the Asterisk server registers with our Voice Provider.

A bit of Asterisk config and I should be able to get all the phones to ring. In addition, it will allow me to use T.38, add MOH, and voice mail. I also like the ability to have local extensions so we can forward calls between various devices. Currently both Pauline and I share an office, but in our new house we'll be up other ends of the house. So call transfers make sense. I think it would be great to also create an IVR application that puts telemarketers into a loop of endless questions. (randomly generated of course -- so they aren't aware!) Though I think Paul Dwerryhouse's idea is probably the solution.

I'm a newbie to Asterisk (though I've been aware of it for a while -- I just haven't had a need for it)... so I imagine it might take me some time to configure it all up as we desire.

Once done, the only thing Telstra will be getting out of us will be the cheapest line rental we can pay. (They overcharge for that as well!) Though, there is not much getting around it whilst stuck on an ADSL1 connection.

Another purchase we made for the upcoming house was a nice 48-port managed Gigabit switch that contains 12 POE (Power over Ethernet) ports. These will be used to power our phones in the future, saving the need for the current power-pack.

The switch we went for is a D-Link DGS-3100-48P. Like most large switches it's full of fans and sounds like a DC-7 taking off. As a result, it's safely packed back in it's box and will be used after the house move!

We also purchased to UPSes (the old ones had dead batteries) -- strangely it's cheaper buying new UPSes than batteries.
So we ended up with 1 x 1500VA UPS and a 1 x 2200VA UPS.
It appears we'll probably need one more 1500VA.
I went with Powerware UPSes as their is reasonably good local support (and hopefully battery replacements!), and nut seems to work well.

All in all it's been a good month for hardware toys to play with.
Shame a fair bit of this new gear is a few months off until we get into the new house!

Now if only those Intel 8-core Xeons were out.... (my desired replacement server that will consolidate everything down!) If you wish to view a demo of what's coming.. take a look at the Intel demonstration.