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Posted on 5 Aug 2008 at 11:08

Jon Honeyball believes Analogue telecom is a thing of the past. so get more value from your computing infrastructure and switch to Voip. Here's how.

Do you get the picture? VoIP, like the rest of the telecoms biz, is awash with jargon, buzzwords and meaningless drivel, and each of these impenetrable settings has the ability to ruin your day. Fortunately, 3CX has spotted this problem and the devices that it supports come with a full, point-by-point setup and configuration help file on the website, detailing every step to take. If you do this, you'll realise that 99% of those settings really are complete gibberish and not relevant to you at all. They only matter in the global WAN of some giant pharmaceutical corporation, or else work only on a Thursday.

Having set up two phones according to the instructions, I went to the status screen in the 3CX software, only for it to tell me that I'd got it all wrong and that nothing would work because the phones weren't logging in. Ten minutes later, I realised the server IP address was 10.101.50.1, and not the 10.101.0.115 that I'd been gaily typing into the phone configuration web screens. A few more clicks and phone reboots, and suddenly I had a working two-phone switch.

The next step was to get some outside lines wired in. Since I have four analog phone lines, the Grandstream 4104 gateway seemed to be a good idea, and this, too, proved easy to set up once you've swallowed a handful of brave pills and ignored the thousand-and-one gibberish settings put there to confuse you. I did the work order the wrong way round here by configuring the 4104 gateway first, then setting up the outside lines in 3CX, but it didn't seem to matter - shortly afterwards, the 4104 was logged into the 3CX. Time to make a call! I picked up a phone and triumphantly dialled my iPhone, but all I got was a plaintive "wrong number" error from BT.

Aha, I had seen this somewhere... something to do with stripping off the first digit. Putting a spare 0 in front of my mobile number proved the point, as it rang and connected just fine. Now to find out where this setting was in the 3CX software. A few moments of head-scratching and I found it in the outgoing rules engine. So there I was, after about half an hour of fiddling I'd successfully set up a two-extension, one-line VoIP-based phone system. Adding more extensions was a simple matter - just do more of the same for the other Grandstream 2000 phones that I'd bought. For those analog phones I wished to keep, I used a small interface box on each phone that converts an analog phone into a SIP phone.

This is just the start, and tomorrow I'll get the other three external lines wired in, then I can really start to play. I can even put a SIP phone into the kitchens of my two sisters who live in nearby villages, and tunnel them back to the 3CX software in my rack - then they can become part of my WAN phone system. If I wanted to get really clever, I could get some phone numbers from a SIP phone gateway provider and run my phone calls out over my ADSL connection to their servers. However, for the time being, I'm just going to soak-test this system over time to see how good it really is. So far nothing has broken, and it has all worked just fine.

Money matters

Now for the financials: if you want to try out the free version, the 3CX software comes at no cost. For a small office, this will probably do everything you need. It supports a "Digital Dorothy" for incoming calls, and you can have a maximum of eight simultaneous calls going on. There's no limit on the number of extensions supported, but the free version comes without technical support access other than the website and forums. Above this there are three paid-for versions of the software, which cost €375 for the small business edition, plus €125 for one-year support and €99 for one-year upgrade insurance. The Pro Edition runs to €795, plus €125/€150 as before. The Enterprise Edition is €1,150, plus €150/€200.

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