VoIP – was it worth the switch?

Last year, I documented parts of the process of switching my phones over from a BT ISDN2e line to a VoIP service, using the 3CX software PBX. So, now I’ve been using VoIP for just over a year, has it been worth the work in switching over? And how much money have I saved?

Costs

As far as costs go, it’s a bit tricky to work out the exact figures, because obviously I don’t make the same calls all the time, but broadly speaking, I don’t think there’s been any significant change in my calling patterns – I’ve not suddenly acquired a need to speak more to friends and family abroad, and I’m doing roughly the same amount of work as I was before.

There are also some minor complications in terms of working out exactly comparable figures for billing, with VAT at three different rates in the two years concerned.

All that said, the costs have turned out dramatically lower. BT’s ISDN2e service is, in my view, massively overpriced, and you pay for just about every little extra – customer controlled call forwarding, caller ID, and for each of the extra numbers allocated to the line. The lowest recent bill I ever had was for £147 a quarter, the vast bulk of which was line rental and service fees. By comparison, switching to the SIP trunk from Gamma Telecom (provided via my ISP, Wizards) means I pay just £10 per month, plus VAT. That gives me two channels, which is what I had with ISDN, and there are no additional monthly fees for the numbers – which were all ported over – or for things like call diversion, and caller ID, which can all be handled by the 3CX software PBX in any case.

Compare that with the BT bill that I have for April 2010. Line rental and other ‘basic’ charges were £151.41 plus VAT for a quarter. £9.90 of that was for BT’s ‘Total Care’ package, which I took out after their mind-boggling incompetence caused me various losses of service in the past.

Even stripping that out, the rental of an ISDN2e line on its own is £103.41 per quarter; the basic two numbers numbers allocated to the line were an extra £2.40, plus an additional £19.20 for the next eight. Plus £8.25 each for caller ID and call forwarding. That’s £141.51 per quarter, or £47.17 per month. So, I’m now paying just 21% of what I was paying BT, for a broadly equivalent service.

In terms of call charges, that same BT bill showed calls costing £24.96 plus VAT; in the first year of using the Gamma SIP trunks, my total call costs have been £75.46, so I can estimate a saving of around a quarter, depending on call patterns.

Of course, I still need broadband to provide the SIP trunks, but I had that anyway, so I’ve not factored that cost in to these calculations.

Roughly, I’m probably saving about £470 a year, plus VAT, even after ignoring the fees for BT care, and the £9 a quarter they have the nerve to charge people who don’t give them permission to dip into their bank accounts. That’s easily enough to have paid for a brand new PC to run the 3CX software and a couple of VoIP phones, if I didn’t have them lying around.

Reliability

What of reliability? That, of course, depends on the broadband, and I have had a couple of outages over the year, which naturally left me out of contact by phone too, for a few hours at a time. Depending on your point of view, that may or may not be critical. But I can live with the level of service I’ve received, especially since I’ve had problems with the ISDN line in the past that have left me with no service there – sometimes due to BT and at the end, due to a complete hardware failure of my ISDN PBX. So, broadly speaking, at the moment, I’d say things are pretty evenly split.

I’m certainly glad to have seen the back of BT’s over-priced ISDN2e service at last and all told, around £500 a year better off, too.

Multitasking on the iPod touch

I have recently bought an iPod Touch, to replace an old iPod that got dropped in water. One of the reasons for choosing the Touch was the ability to run apps, including the 3CX softphone, allowing it to be used as an extension to my phone system.

I know this will not be a popular post with some people, but I have to say that my experience of multi-taking on the iPod Touch is horrible, and it’s certainly ensured that I won’t consider an iPhone when I next look for a new mobile. Apple makes some great products, and I just can’t understand how they came up with an implementation of multi-tasking that is so clunky, and actually makes Symbian S60 look like a shining example of good UI design.

3CX phone allows me to use an iPod touch as an extension to my phone system

This is the 3CX phone in action. It works pretty well, and means that I can effectively use the iPod Touch to replace my DECT cordless phone, when I’m around the house or in the back garden. Pretty neat; as I’ve mentioned before, my phone system is all VoIP now.

Of course, for a soft phone to be useful, it has to be running, and 3CX goes into multi-tasking mode. That’s fine – I don’t want it to suddenly disconnect from the phone system and miss calls as a result. But what happens when an app is multi-tasking? You get a big red pulsing bar at the top of the iPod screen, that’s what. It looks like this:

When an app is multitasking, this red bar appears at the top of the screen

In a way this is useful, as it lets me know the application is running, and I haven’t accidentally quit it, but I can’t help thinking it could have been a little more subtle, perhaps? Just turn the title bar red, maybe? That’s particularly important, because not all apps appear clever enough to know about this, and in some of them, if the red bar is at the top of the screen, the labels for some buttons disappear off the bottom. Oh dear.

Now, let’s see what happens when you double click the button on the Touch, to see the app list.

In the list of apps, there's no context to say 3cx is different

This is the task switcher / list of recent apps. First, it seems to be essentially doing two things – allowing me to either close a running app, or remove something from the recent list. That’s fine, but there’s absolutely no context here. If the way that 3CX is running is significant enough to merit that pulsing red bar elsewhere, why isn’t it indicated here in some way too? If the app is multi-tasking, then closing it from here will stop it doing so and that might be important – in the case of 3CX, it means you won’t get your phone calls.

So, why can’t there be something to indicate that?

The other bugbear I have about this is that it all seems a hell of a palaver; I’m used to Symbian, and I know it’s fashionable to knock it, but if I wanted to kill an app, I’d hold down the menu key, pick it from the list, and press the C/Delete key to kill it. Job done.

Here, I’ve got to double click the button, then hold my finger on an icon until they all wobble and the minus sign appears, and then tap the one I want to kill, and then press the button to get back to ‘normal’ mode.

I really am struggling to see that as an advance. Yes, I know there are lots of things that iOS does that people think Symbian makes impossible; I know that many of the settings in Symbian are tucked away and confusing; and I know that I can just tap on an app in iOS and it’ll carry on where I left off, which is probably find for most users.

But I still really find this multitasking business – as described here, with 3CX – utterly bonkers on the iPod Touch. And since SIP functionality is something I consider very important in a mobile, it really has put me right off having an iPhone.

Upgrading to 3CX 9

Over the holidays, I took the plunge and updated my home phone system to version 3 of the 3CX software PBX. There are various improvements in version 9, including automatic blacklisting of IP addresses to help ward off VoIP hackers, and some options such as ringing your mobile at the same time as your extension.

The former will be quite useful – I’ve disabled direct SIP calls through my firewall at the moment, because once you turn them on, script kiddies will attack your PBX – though since my phone can connect to 3CX via mobile data, that’s cheaper than having the system call it the old fashioned way.

Installing the update

In theory, upgrading from 3CX 8 to 3CX 9 is straightforward. You use the backup tool to save your configuration (which can include all your voicemail files), uninstall version 8, then install version 9 and, during the initial setup wizard, you point it at the backup file, rather than walking through the installer and picking things like the number of digits for extensions, who’s the operator, and so on.

That’s the theory. In practice, it didn’t work. Installation went without a hitch, but then when the config wizard started, it told me there was a problem starting the ‘secondary database service’ and wasn’t able to go any further. The same happened when I tried to create a new PBX from scratch, thinking that perhaps I could then restore all my old settings.

In the end, the solution was pretty simple. After trying uninstalling and reinstalling a couple of times, I simply quit the config wizard when it started, and followed the instructions at the bottom of this article to perform a restore of the database from the command prompt.

That worked a treat, and got 3CX up and running again with all my old settings restored – aside from a couple of tweaks that were needed.

Time-based call forwarding

Some of the call forwarding rules that I set up using 3CX 8 weren’t imported to 3CX 9, because things are done slightly differently. For my business line, I use the Office Hours functionality of 3CX, ensuring that if anyone calls me outside 10am-6pm Monday to Friday, their call goes to voicemail.

I have a private number for family that always rings, and another number that I give to more casual acquaintances, like people I’ve chatted up. I obviously don’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night by a weirdo from the pub, so that number needs a different set of rules. Essentially, I only want calls to this number to ring between about 9am and 10pm.

In 3CX 8, that could be done by setting up advanced forwarding rules, which allowed you to specify certain hours in a rule, and direct calls accordingly, so to the voice menu during the daytime (which warns cold callers they may as well go away right now), and to voicemail the rest of the time. Incoming calls to the ‘public’ number were directed to a spare extension, which then used the rules to forward the call, and the voice menu would connect lucky winners to the phones in a particular ring group.

That’s not available in version 9, but there is a way to do it, once you get your head round how things work.

Forwarding rules in 3CX 9

in 3CX 9, an extension's status can be set automatically, based on time of day

Forwarding in version 9 is done by the phone status, eg Away, Busy and so on. But there are also two Custom status as well, and these are key to controlling calls by time of day the way I wanted them to be.

First, on the Office Hours tab for an extension, you can now choose global or specific office hours, so my spare or virtual extension can have its own office hours set.

Below that, you can tick ‘Automatically switch Office Hours Profiles.’

Move to the Other tab, and set the status of the extension to Custom #1 if it’s in office hours, or Custom #2 if it’s not. Now, the system will automatically switch between these two settings, based on the time of day.

Use the custom phone statuses to control call forwarding by time of day

On the Forwarding tab, there are sub-tabs for the different statuses, so on Custom #1 I have calls set to forward to the voice menu for call screening, and on Custom #2 they’re all forwarded to voicemail.

Once you’ve made the changes on all the tabs, just click Apply at the bottom right, and you’re done.

3CX message waiting and the Nokia SIP client

Here’s a quick tweak to my Nokia SIP configuration – if you have the free edition of 3CX, you can’t do this as it doesn’t support the Message Waiting Indicator, but if you have the demo licence or a paid for one, then here’s how to get a notification on your Nokia mobile phone when a new message arrives in your 3CX mailbox.

I’ll assume you’ve already set up your Nokia as a client for 3CX, following my previous guide. Now you want to go to the menu, Control Panel, then open the ‘Net Settings’ app and choose ‘Advanced VoIP settings.’

Now choose ‘VoIP services’ and on the next screen the service that you set up for your 3CX system, probably something like ‘sip.mycompany.com’, then on the next screen ‘Profile settings.’

Scroll down and below the items for Caller ID that I covered last time, you’ll find ‘Voicemailbox settings ID’ which should be pre-selected with the name of the SIP profile. Next you can select a preferred internet access point to use – probably your home WiFi network, or maybe a VPN if you set things up that way.

The ‘Voicemailbox resubscribe interval’ can be left set to 0.

‘Voicemailbox address’ is your extension number, an @ and the name of the sip server, so something like ‘176@sip.mycompany.com’ if your phone is extension 176. The next entry is ‘Voicemailbox listen address’ and looks much the same, though the number is replaced with the 3CX voicemail extension number – by default 999, though naturally being in the UK, I’ve changed that to something else. It will look something like ‘999@sip.mycompany.com.’

Now, when a message is received in your mailbox, you’ll get what appears to be a text message on your phone, notifying you (and the same will happen when you sign in to 3CX, if there are new messages waiting). Hold down the 1 key on the phone and you’ll get a popup menu asking which mailbox you want to call ‘Voice mailbox’ or ‘sip.mycompany.com’. Select the latter, and the phone will dial your 3CX voicemail for you.

Nokia E72 step by step VoIP and VPN setup for 3CX

I’ve just had a clear out of unnecessary crud from my mobile phone, and took the opportunity to set everything up from scratch, so you can see exactly how easy it is to get something like a Nokia E72 (or pretty much anything with S60 v3 Feature Pack 2) working as an extension for an IP phone system.

Don't be put off by the 'advanced' tag - setting up VoIP on Symbian is easy

First, you’ll need Nokia’s SIP VoIP Settings app. Download and install this onto the phone, then from the menu choose ‘Ctrl. Panel’ and ‘Net Settings’. You’ll see a new ‘Advanced VoIP settings’ option here. Select that, and on the next screen pick ‘Create new service’ and when the pop-up appears, choose ‘Create new SIP profile.’

All you need to enter is your SIP ID and password

Now, you’re asked for the username – if this is extension 107 and the 3CX (or other VoIP) server is sip.mycompany.com, you type in 107@sip.mycompany.com. You’ll then be asked for the password, and then if you want to search for wireless networks.

It’s a good idea if you’ve saved the wireless network in your phone before starting VoIP setup, so you won’t have to enter the password here. Once the connection to the network has been established, you’ll see a screen with the message ‘Activate service’, and selecting that may connect you to the VoIP service.

In the case of 3CX, it probably won’t – there’s one more setting you need to change. So, go back to the Net Settings tool, select Advanced VoIP settings again, SIP settings, and then the name of your sip server, eg sip.mycompany.com. Scroll down to ‘Proxy server’, select it, and on the next screen, enter the name of the 3CX server in the ‘Proxy server address’ box.

Set up your wifi connections first - it's easier

Now you’re done. You can sign on to the phone system in two ways; first, open Contacts, press left on the nav pad to get to the menu at the top of the screen, and select your SIP server there, then select ‘Activate service.’ You can sign out in a similar way.

Activate VoIP accounts via the Contacts app, or just by dialling

Alternatively, just enter a number on the phone, and the right hand soft key will be labelled ‘Net call.’ Press that, and you’ll be asked if you want to connect to the internet telephony service; choose Yes to sign on and make the call.

Out and about

So far, so good, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, connecting through firewalls can be tricky where VoIP is concerned, and using a VPN can make life simpler.

I’m using Telexy’s SymNC (which is a bundle of tools that includes SymVPN, which I mentioned the last time I talked about this). On the 3CX system, create a network connection for incoming connections, and specify a user name and password for it – you use the New Connection wizard in the Windoows Network Connections control panel, chose the advanced option, and ‘Accept incoming connections.’ I reserved a pair of IP addresses for the connection, one for each end. If you have lots of remote users, you’ll need more.

SymNC includes Telexy's SymVPN app

Now, start SymNC on the phone, scroll down to ‘Settings’ and click OK. On the next screen, select ‘PPTP VPN’ – if you’ve just got SymVPN rather than the whole suite, this is the same as launching SymVPN.

The screen that appears is blank except for an ‘up’ folder. Press Options and choose Add new, then enter a name. This will be a Symbian network destination, like the access points for your mobile phone network; a name like HomeLan probably won’t clash.

After the name, select the access point to use, which will be your phone company’s mobile data service, and for ‘Host’ enter the name of the 3CX system (or the other system you set up to listen for incoming connections).

Select your phone company's access point, then enter your VPN host name

Below Host is the account option; this takes you to a new screen, where you choose ‘Add new’ once again, and enter the user name and password you created on the Windows server. Click Done to return to the previous screen, and Done again to return to the main VPN screen.

Now, select the entry you just created, click OK and select Verify. After a short pause, you should see a confirmation screen telling you the assigned IP address, DNS server and other information for your network. If this is fine, then VPN should work.

There’s one last thing to do. Go to the ‘Ctrl. Panel’ on the phone, select Settings, Connection, then Destinations. There will be an ‘Uncategorised’ option at the bottom of the list. Open this, and you’ll see the ‘HomeLan’ access point you created for the VPN. Use the Organise option to move it into the Destination for your VoIP service, which will be called sip.mycompany.com. It will be added to the bottom of the list there, and automatically used when the wireless network is unavailable.

Move the new access point to the one named for your sip server, and you're done

Try this out by either switching off the wireless network, or going outside the range, and dialling a number, then pressing ‘Net call.’ The first time, you may be asked if you want to allow the access point ‘HomeLan’ to be used automatically in future. Choose Yes, and after a short pause while the VPN is setup, you should be connected to your phone system.

If you have issues with caller ID, I covered some of those earlier.

Welcome to the world of VoIP

Yesterday was the day I ditched BT and their expensive ISDN 2e service. I’d had ISDN for around fifteen years – back when I started writing about the internet, it was one of the simplest ways of getting a relatively fast connection. I carried on using it both as a way of providing backup for other net connections and because it provides some useful features for people who work from home.

For example, an ISDN 2 line allows two simultaneous calls, and you can have blocks of numbers allocated to the line – I had the typical ten number block, allowing me to have a main number for business, one for fax, one for family, one ‘public’ number in the phone book, plus others that were used at various times for things like specific projects, or to give my then lodger a separate phone number on which he could be reached. It was all routed through a small Euracom 141 phone system (originally made by Ackermann), which also allowed clever stuff like automatic diversions based on time of day, so if you call by business number any time other than 1000-1800 weekdays, you get voicemail, and I don’t get disturbed.

But times move on; my Euracom died earlier this year, and I’ve been using a FritzBox as a stop-gap, while porting my numbers to a VoIP service (provided by Gamma Telecom). One of the reasons for doing that is BT’s charging policy for ISDN; you get the feeling they never wanted it to succeed, certainly not when  a typical quarter’s bill would come to £151.41 (plus VAT) for line rental and services, with calls making up a measly £24.96. That line rental bundle is made up of £103.41 for the basic rental, £2.40 for the first two numbers, £19.20 for the additional ones, £8.25 for the ability to divert calls, another £8.25 for caller ID display, and finally £9.90 for the ‘Total Care’ package that I took out after one too many BT mistakes had left me without any service at all. It’s really pretty overpriced, in my view, and a good example of how BT puts prices up on some services, while pretending to keep them low overall. (And don’t forget the £9 charge just for not letting BT, with their broken billing systems that have overcharged me so often in the past, have the keys to your bank account).

So, VoIP. And what can it do for me? Well, my VoIP service is about £10 a month for a SIP trunk with two channels, so the same call capacity as BT. No extra charges for number rental, or call diversion, or caller ID. All those things are taken for granted, and I have a relatively low-powered PC (a Via mini-ITX system) running Windows XP Pro with 3CX.

Now, I have the same numbers, and I can do most of what I did with my Euracom and ISDN via 3CX (a few things I’m still working on, some you can’t do with the free version of 3CX).

And I can do more clever things; my Nokia E72 connects to the phone system. All my numbers are stored on that in international format, and 3CX works out what to do when I call via the Nokia, which can be done over WiFi  when I’m in the house, or using SymVPN to connect back into the phone system when I’m somewhere else (see this post for more). So, I can be anywhere I like, find a number on the Nokia, select ‘Internet call’ and as far as the person I’m calling is concerned, it looks like I’m sat at my desk in Hackney. If there isn’t a network connection to let me use VoIP, I can just dial using the mobile as normal – no need to store numbers in different formats at all.

Diverting calls over the internet effectively costs me nothing. As far as most people are concerned, nothing’s changed – they dial the same number to reach me. But for people who live back home in Winchester, I have a local number there, so they can dial me with six digits instead of eleven. Thanks to a service called IPkall, I also have a number in Washington state’s 360 area code, where my half-sister lives. Rather than being a separate VoIP account, that simply directs the number to any existing SIP address you have.

Voicemails are delivered by email, as well as being available from the phones; so since I use the excellent ProfiMail program on my E72, I can pick them up easily too.

And for my own convenience, 3CX makes it simpler to dial people I call a lot; key in a six digit number, and it’s set up to add the dialling code for Winchester automatically. Enter eight digits instead, and it’ll assume a London number, prefixing 020. Enter just four, and it’ll add the prefix for the numbers at Incisive Media, where I work with quite a few people, so I can effectively just dial their extension numbers, like I do when I’m in the office. And any number starting with 118, or just three digits long, is passed to the FritzBox and on to the analogue phone line that provides my DSL service.

There are some other useful goodies too, like ‘digital receptionists’ that answer the call and give people a menu; I’ll never have to listen to a telemarketing recording again, because it won’t know which button to press to reach me.

I’ll be blogging a bit more about the technical side of this later – but for now, so long, BT. I’m really not sad to be leaving you, and I’ll be glad of the extra cash in my pocket.

Going mobile with VoIP and SymVPN

A break (and probably quite a welcome one) from surround sound on Freeview this weekend, with a little more tinkering with the VoIP phone system. One of the theoretical benefits of using a phone system like 3CX is that you can have remote extensions.

Put simply, that means that as long as there’s an internet connection, you can plug in a VoIP phone anywhere, and it will connect to the phone system. So, I could be working in someone’s office, and if there’s an internet connection, I can have my usual phone with me, so when someone calls my business phone number, it would ring wherever I am, anywhere in the world. Of course you can do that with call forwarding, but with VoIP there are no call charges, and you can do things like transfer a call to a different extension too.

Now, it would be a bit tedious to carry a desk phone with me, but my Nokia E72 has VoIP built in, and can connect via WiFi; I’ve used that with previous phones in the past to avoid roaming charges when abroad, and when I’m at home the E72 connects to the 3CX phone system perfectly.

Unfortunately, VoIP is very picky when it comes to firewalls, and unless things are configured properly, you end up with problems like audio only working in one direction – and that’s exactly what I’ve been experiencing when trying to make the E72 work when I’m away from home. I’ve tried the usual solutions, but without being able to alter the settings on some of the networks where I use the phone, it’s hard to be sure it will always work.

Step forward the VPN

Since the phone works perfectly when it’s connected to my home network, a VPN is a potential solution, since it can make the phone look as if it is connected there, and the E72 has a built in VPN client, while my new Draytek broadband router has a VPN server that supports IPSec, PPTP and L2TP.

The standard Nokia client uses IPSec, which is a bit of a pig to configure in my view. It made my head hurt and generally and drove me to distraction, so I opted instead for Telexy’s SymVPN which does PPTP, and has a two week free trial.

That’s much simpler to configure, and it didn’t take very long at all to have the phone connecting to the router, and signing in to the 3CX phone system. Unfortunately, that’s as far as I got – there was still just one way audio. I think that is something to do with address allocation on the Draytek and how it handles public IP addresses – my network doesn’t use NAT. I’m sure it could be fixed given time, but in between other work, I had only three days of the SymVPN trial left.

So, I’ve opted for the alternative – 3CX runs on a Windows XP Professional system, and that can also accept PPTP connections, and having the phone connect directly into the same machine that runs the VoIP software should make it much easier to avoid firewall and routing problems.

And, indeed it did; the only other thing that I needed to do was to disable the VPN service on the router, and add a rule allowing traffic to port 1723 to pass through to the Windows computer, for both TCP and UDP, as well as IP protocol 47, which is something called GRE, and essential for PPTP VPNs.

Given more time, I could probably have solved the issues with the Draytek VPN server, and maybe even made it all work with the standard Nokia VPN, but there are only so many new things I like to learn at the same time.

Call me

Once SymVPN is installed, it creates a new access point on the phone. I have a destination configured for my VoIP account which has the home WiFi network first, then the access point from SymVPN.

Within SymVPN, you can pick which access point is used to create the VPN connection; when I tell the phone to sign in to the 3CX system, if it can’t find my home WiFi, it then uses SymVPN and connects that way. To all intents and purposes, it works exactly the same as when I’m at home, whether using another wireless network, or Orange’s data service.

So, I can dial a number on the E72 and press the right hand soft key (labelled ‘Net call’), to call using my home phone line. And calls that come in to my business number will ring on the mobile, wherever I am in the world.

If there’s free WiFi, then it costs me nothing more than it would cost to be using the phone at home – no incoming roaming bills, or international calls back home. People just dial my normal number to reach me.

Even if I can’t find free WiFi, I have an option on my mobile phone called Orange Travel Daily Data, which provides 50MB of data per day when abroad, for £8.50. Even a conservative estimate of how much data VoIP calling uses suggests that that 50MB limit is around 2 hours of calling – which would cost a lot more in roaming charges; the same price would get you around 45 minutes of incoming calls, or just 22 minutes of calls back to the UK.

Now that it all works, I’ll try to find time to do a step by step guide to setting some of this up.