Advice on creating PSTN/VoIP/DECT telephone system please

First post, so be gentle with me

I'm looking to renew my phone system at home, and need some advice. My current phone system dates from the stone age - I have multiple wired no-brand phones, connected to a standard single UK PSTN line (British Telecom).

I need the following facilities:
1) rock solid reliability. It has to just work, and be simple enough for my (non-technical) wife and daughters to use
2) several cordless handsets (DECT preferred, though I do have good WiFi coverage) possibly with one or two wired handsets too
3) multiple inbound (1 PSTN, 2 VoIP initially) and outbound services
4) the handsets must be independent, allowing the system to support multiple concurrent conversations (3 would be sufficient)

I'd like the following features:
1) distinctive ring tones, dependant on incoming service
2) ability to select which handset(s) ring when any given inbound service is called
3) time-based routing (eg all calls from service "x" go to answerphone between 8pm and 8am)
4) conferencing one or more inbound calls on one or more handsets.
5) least cost routing
6) system degrades to at least one "normal" phone working on the PSTN line in the event of power outages
7) Some degree of flexibility, as I'm sure there will be other things I'll want in the future

Budget is flexible, but probably limited to about 300GBP initially. Is this realistic?

I was initially very interested in the Siemens Gigaset S685IP/C475IP phones, as it seems either of these would tick most of my main requirements. Alan Lords review on his blog was very helpful, but unfortunately I see lots of grumbling on the Internet about reliability & needing reboots, and lack of support from Siemens, which is quite worrying. They also lack a couple of the features I'd really like (particularly distinctive ring & time-based routing) and their least cost routing options look pretty rudimentary.

So what other options do I have? I looked around but couldn't find any other better hybrid devices out there - did I miss anything? Or could I build a better system using some combination of DECT gear, ATA's / VoIP routers and Asterisk, in which case what combination is recommended? I've lots of experience with computers & networking, and a small, lower-power linux server already running 24x7 to put Asterisk on, but I've only very limited experience of telephony - and see main requirement #1.

Thoughts & recommendations appreciated, either for products to consider, how to plug together the building blocks to achieve what I want, or for places to read up further so I can better understand what my options are. Or even better, all three

Thanks
Richard

Hi

how many extensions?

to be honest £300 isnt going to go far.

Ian

You are asking rather a lot for 300 UK pounds. For 3 reliable calls at the same time you will need good high speed internet. If you have young people using the network you will need to be able to restrict bandwidth and apply QOS monitoring.
You can probably do most of what you want with an ATA and a DECT phone or two. The ATA (about 40 US pounds) that I have can handle the incoming PSTN line and one voip (only one at a time but the PSTN line can still be used and rings when voip is in use). A whole range of ATAs are available depending on how complex the system that you need. You could even get a small pbx box but not for 300 UK pounds. A service such as Voxalot can do quite a bit of the work in taking voicemail and redirecting calls according to the time of day for a small charge.

Welcome to VoIP User Richard!

Quote:

1) rock solid reliability.

3 Regular POTS lines from BT and 3 cheap DECT phones from Maplin would get you the bulk of the must-haves and leave you enough change for about 6 months worth of service out of your £300.

To be honest if rock solid reliability really is the leading must have then I wouldn't go VoIP *unless* you have bomb-proof DSL which is not contended.

Quote:

My current phone system dates from the stone age

But how many times has it let you down? Nothing wrong with stone age technologies.

I think many of the "likes" you have in your list, and perhaps a desire to be on more recent technology, needs to be weighed up against how important having service is and how plug and play it needs to be.

Reading between the lines a bit, if you really only need one line that is just there all the time (POTS) and the other two new lines can be a bit less reliable, and taking a guess you want to experiment a bit with Asterisk (which is great) then I would go for very cheap SIP handsets and spend the money on a good QoS router.

Guys, many thanks for the comments. Lots of food for thought.

ianplain :

how many extensions? to be honest £300 isnt going to go far.

4 minimum. 5 would be better initially, but probably end up with 6 or maybe 7 over time. And yes, having spent most of the day reading, rereading and searching for prices, it's clear that to fulfil all my requirements is probably going to dictate a bigger investment, and quite a lot of integration work.

dibsmft :

For 3 reliable calls at the same time you will need good high speed internet. If you have young people using the network you will need to be able to restrict bandwidth and apply QOS monitoring.

I've an ADSL2+ line, 16Mb down, 2Mb up. It is contended, but I figure it should be enough as my daughters aren't into heavy downloading - just talking on the phone a lot! I can apply a degree of QoS to the traffic through my router, but I don't know how effective it will be in practice, as it's only based on ports used not packet tagging. Having said that, I don't believe any UK ISP's would respect my QOS settings anyway.

dibsmft :

A service such as Voxalot can do quite a bit of the work in taking voicemail and redirecting calls according to the time of day for a small charge.

I'd not thought of that option, thanks.

dean :

3 Regular POTS lines from BT and 3 cheap DECT phones from Maplin would get you the bulk of the must-haves and leave you enough change for about 6 months worth of service out of your £300. To be honest if rock solid reliability really is the leading must have then I wouldn't go VoIP *unless* you have bomb-proof DSL which is not contended.

I know what you are saying, and you're right. But the long term cost of 3 POTS lines just doesn't make sense - and they'd need to dig my garden up to get the third one into my house! I think I need to revise the budget up, and also adopt a phased approach, building towards a long term goal that meets my requirements. Hopefully that would give me the rock solid basics, to which I could then add more later, fulfilling more of my "wish list" items.

dean :

Nothing wrong with stone age technologies. I think many of the "likes" you have in your list, and perhaps a desire to be on more recent technology, needs to be weighed up against how important having service is and how plug and play it needs to be. Reading between the lines a bit, if you really only need one line that is just there all the time (POTS) and the other two new lines can be a bit less reliable, and taking a guess you want to experiment a bit with Asterisk (which is great) then I would go for very cheap SIP handsets and spend the money on a good QoS router.

True, the stone age stuff has served me pretty well. But I now work from home more, and my 3 daughters are starting to use the phone; we absolutely have to do something to relieve the contention. And you're quite right, there is an element in here of me wanting to play with Asterisk and SIP, but I'm also conscious that my ideal solution will require the kind of integration than only a real PBX can supply. And ultimately this is a home phone system - I can put up with a solution where if it breaks, we temporarily fall back to 1 working phone in the house (ie, no worse than the state we're in now).

So, having said all that, how does the following sound to you:

Long term plan:
1 x POTS line
2 x geographic numbered VoIP lines (inexpensive)
Asterisk, running on a small 24x7 linux server to handle the signalling (free, as I have spare capacity on an existing server)
1 x Linksys SPA3102 linking the POTS line to Asterisk, and providing a fallback wired POTS phone on one of its FXS ports (£60)
A Polycom Kirk Wireless Server 300 to provide the interface between Asterisk and the DECT handsets (Around £150?)
A PoE injector to power the KWS300 (Around £30)
As many DECT handsets as eventually needed.

If I can get that lot working together then it sounds from the manuals etc as though it ought to be capable of handling up to 12 DECT handsets (extensions), with 4 simultaneous calls - which is more than enough for me.

Short term plan:
1 x POTS line
2 x geographic numbered VoIP lines
1 x Quint package Siemens Gigaset C475IP (£220ish)

I can then start experimenting with Asterisk, and add the SPA3102 and replace the C475IP base station with the Kirk Wireless Server in due course, presumably reusing the handsets from the C475IP with the Kirk Wireless Server?

Total outlay will be nearer £500, but spread over two or three installments, so not quite so scary. Thoughts?

Hi

Sounds possible, one small thing is to check that the Kirk will allow non kirk handsets to connect. Gap compatibility is often a one way thing , Handsets may be Gap compatible but the bases only accept their own handsets. And the kirk spec sheets anly say you can connect Kirk handsets.

Ian

Sounds like a sensible plan to me.

Does anyone know if the Linksys SPA3102 provides fail-over to the FXS port (without power) in the event of a power-cut? If not, I guess you could always use a POTS two-into-one adaptor and a cheap phone effectively straight into the PSTN line. Check the REN value on the Linksys FXS too.

One other point - ADSL2+ is not great for VoIP because of the way the ISP's contend the broadband at the DSLAM, and they have zero QoS there (as you say, they won't respect yours). So the problem there is several ADSL2+ subscribers in your locality running P2P filesharing stuff. That will absolutely kill the voice traffic. Someone here who had this problem actually "downgraded" from ADSL2+ to regular ADSL to fix it. Peter Gradwall specialises in ADSL that has QoS for VoIP at the exchange, if he's in your exchange (you could email and find out) (www.gradwell.net/broadband/). Something like that might be sensible.

If ADSL2+ is already heavily-subscribed in your area then you can test it. Sign up for a free SIP account here and run a couple of calls. That's what we're here for.

ianplain :

Hi Sounds possible, one small thing is to check that the Kirk will allow non kirk handsets to connect. Gap compatibility is often a one way thing , Handsets may be Gap compatible but the bases only accept their own handsets. And the kirk spec sheets anly say you can connect Kirk handsets. Ian

Indeed ... its one of the things I need to ask their distributors (Icon) about. They say that their larger systems (eg the 600 and 1500) are GAP-compatible, but I didn't find anything specific in their spec sheets for the 300, and while it's clear that they would prefer you to use their handsets, that would turn it into a non-starter on price grounds (their handsets are very expensive).

dean :

Sounds like a sensible plan to me. Does anyone know if the Linksys SPA3102 provides fail-over to the FXS port (without power) in the event of a power-cut? If not, I guess you could always use a POTS two-into-one adaptor and a cheap phone effectively straight into the PSTN line. Check the REN value on the Linksys FXS too.

If the power fails then PSTN what you get when you pick up the phone. I still keep an old PSTN phone plugged isto the PSTN system as well.

The voip has been very reliable and on three occasions now I have had to call the phone company by voip to complaing that the PSTN phone was out of order (ADSL was still working)!

dean :

Sounds like a sensible plan to me. Does anyone know if the Linksys SPA3102 provides fail-over to the FXS port (without power) in the event of a power-cut? If not, I guess you could always use a POTS two-into-one adaptor and a cheap phone effectively straight into the PSTN line. Check the REN value on the Linksys FXS too.

Yes, it does. It can also failover like this in the event of failure of the VoIP service (or the networking supporting it), though from various threads on the Internet, it appears to be quite easy to configure yourself into a corner in this area

dean :

One other point - ADSL2+ is not great for VoIP because of the way the ISP's contend the broadband at the DSLAM, and they have zero QoS there (as you say, they won't respect yours). So the problem there is several ADSL2+ subscribers in your locality running P2P filesharing stuff. That will absolutely kill the voice traffic. Someone here who had this problem actually "downgraded" from ADSL2+ to regular ADSL to fix it. Peter Gradwall specialises in ADSL that has QoS for VoIP at the exchange, if he's in your exchange (you could email and find out) (www.gradwell.net/broadband/). Something like that might be sensible. If ADSL2+ is already heavily-subscribed in your area then you can test it. Sign up for a free SIP account here and run a couple of calls. That's what we're here for.

Hmmm. I think this is going to be one of those situations where the only way to find for sure out what the situation is like will be to "suck it and see"; and of course, any testing I do could be when the heavy P2P users are out of town

I'm still locked into my current broadband contract for the next few months anyway, so couldn't make any immediate changes in that area anyway. I'll think some more on the implications of that, but I suspect the answer is to go with the short term plan, and see how it works out. If it looks like lack of QoS is the issue then I can tackle that before spending more on the "long term" solution.

I'll post back here with more info on the outcome of my conversations with Icon & non-Kirk handsets on the KWS300 when I've talked to them next week.

dean :

Peter Gradwall specialises in ADSL that has QoS for VoIP at the exchange, if he's in your exchange (you could email and find out) (www.gradwell.net/broadband/). Something like that might be sensible.

I checked this out, and Gradwell resell Tiscali's LLU offering, which I assume they customise to add their own SLA's. It is available in my exchange, but they're 3 times more expensive a month than my current contract, with the only difference being the minimum uncontended bandwidth allowance. Its a good idea, but in my case it would actually be cheaper to have 2 more POTS lines installed, notwithstanding the disruption to the garden

Prehaps it is time to experiment. An SPA3102 is already on your list so you could get one of those (about 45 quid) so you could get one and get a free basic Voxalot account and with the Voipuser service see what you can do. Your internet is much faster than mine so you should be able to make very good calls.
You can plug one of your present phones (or a cordles set .. mine is a Sanyo 3 handset unit) into the ATA. (Make sure that you get a proper adapter for the 3102 to those funny UK phone sockets). It will not cost you much and you can get a measure of what is possible.

dibsmft :

Prehaps it is time to experiment. An SPA3102 is already on your list so you could get one of those (about 45 quid) so you could get one and get a free basic Voxalot account and with the Voipuser service see what you can do. Your internet is much faster than mine so you should be able to make very good calls. You can plug one of your present phones (or a cordles set .. mine is a Sanyo 3 handset unit) into the ATA. (Make sure that you get a proper adapter for the 3102 to those funny UK phone sockets). It will not cost you much and you can get a measure of what is possible.

I agree. No substitute for some practical experience. However, since my wife wants to go cordless as part of the upgrade, it probably makes sense just to get the Gigaset.

I can test the VoIP side of things with that, and if it doesn't work out well then I still have a DECT system to hang off the POTS line. The advantage being, SWMBO'd will then be happy while I work out how to fix the VoIP... I feel a plan coming together here

The reason that I suggested what I did is that it does not really mean that anything changes at once. SWMBO should not notice at first as PSTN will work as notmal I an not sure why you want DECT phones as such now. My Sanyo cordless have worked well and cost about 40 UK pounds. But then, I have not got a SWMBO! The Giga set seem to be popular but I have no experience other than helping with problems on voipuser.

Sorry, a case of regional differences I suspect. The only cordless phones available in the UK these days are DECT phones. Many of us tend to use the terms interchangeably now.

However, I now see what you meant about the SPA3102 - which makes sense, as it provides some endpoints for the Asterisk system, and my current wired phones can stay "in parallel" with it on the POTS line (subject to REN limitations) so absolutely no changes required at all for the rest of the family. I'll see if I can get one ordered this week.