Monthly Archives: July 2015

Don’t know much about SIP Trunking? No worries!

SIP Trunking can be, and is very painless and easy to switch to.

The flavors will vary, and depending on how much you choose to do yourself, so will the pricing.

First you need to ask yourself some questions and provide really honest answers, as you will more than likely be with a provider for at least a year, in some cases longer.

• How do I use my phone system?
  • Are you simply receiving calls from clients?
  • Are you hosting conference calls everyday with clients?
  • Are you often out of the office and rely on voicemails?
  • What about faxing?

You want to honestly understand how important the phone system is to you or your business, how often you receive calls, when you receive them, is someone there to answer. How is the state of your phone system going to reflect your business model to the clients?

These answers will dictate what services you are looking for in a SIP Trunk provider. While many providers are out there, they do not all offer the same services, and while you can find several very affordable providers, if they can not provide the services you need, how will that help you?

• How will my needs for the phone system grow over time?

We are a very digital oriented human race today, the SIP trunk phone system simply will expand on that, with offerings like voicemail to email, texting, and video chats. You may not need all these features, however voicemail to email is usually a pretty standard feature and one that can keep employees connected even when they are out of the office. The ability to forward a desk phone to a cell phone is another feature that is generally included, and another excellent feature for workers who are rarely in the office.

With the ability to have a SIP Trunk and accept calls and voicemails sent to one single number from anywhere, without actually giving out a personal cell phone number, the ability to do business anytime, and anywhere should be a true consideration in how your business can benefit from sip trunking, and what your future plans may be.

• How much bandwidth do I need from my ISP? Do I need an additional access point?

While searching for a provider, you should be looking at the information they provide on bandwidth usage over a specific number of calls, if you plan supply your own internet connection. However there are providers who will supply dedicated connections for your voice service, and this is sometimes far more effective when and if you have issues with your trunks. Simply contacting the provider will be enough to sort out issues, however if you choose to utilize and existing network connection, or even if you plan to have your provider bring in a second connect specifically for voice, it is wise to keep in the front of your mind that you now have multiple points of contact for phone issues. Will it be the trunk provider, will it be the ISP, could it simply be an internal issue? The complexity of issues that arise are not frequent, but as with any other type of support, it can be easy to point at someone else. Be sure to check the reliability of not only Sip trunk providers, but of the ISP as well.

The complexity of the system you will need should be dictated by the needs of your staff and your customers, not the price of the provider. Sip trunks are a powerful tool for your business, having a clear understanding of your own needs, as well as those of your customers will allow you the knowledge and flexibility to select a provider that offers the services you require with the room to grow.

CV1 has helped our business grow rapidly, to areas outside our office’s region, through the creative use of their SIP trucking and ability to have phone numbers that are “local,” to nearly every region of the United States.

Businesses and people like to deal locally – If you live in New York, you don’t want to be calling a California area code for your services – and visa versa. There is a mental stigma that most people have against dealing with people they feel are not geographically located. Fortunately, this is not the 1900’s – phone calls travel at the speed of light – the internet makes accessing services and people nearly instant – regardless of the physical distance they reside from each other.

This is where CV1 came to the rescues. We have clients who are attempting to reach out of their geographic area, expanding their business, engaging in businesses ranging from property management to payroll accounting, IT and customized web application development to workforce management. We ascertain what area codes and phone numbers “look” local to the target areas our clients would like to expand into, and purchase these phone numbers (DIDs). Each DID is linked to their main phone number – and the businesses each appear local, when they advertise their local area code and phone number.

A real world example involves a Scranton, Pennsylvania based property management company, that has recently started soliciting potential property owners in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania region. Even though both locations are in the same state, Scranton (area code 570) and Philadelphia (area code 215) are over 125 miles apart! Initially, solicitations for business in the Philadelphia region, using a 570 area code phone number yielded little to no responses – after obtaining a second phone number, specifically targeted to Philadelphia (215), and re-running the same solicitation, 8-10 phone inquiries pursued the solicitation.

In a slightly different scenario, for the same company engaging in property management, calls for routine maintenance (noisy refrigerators, running toilets) typically take lower precedence over those calls for new apartment inquiries, or emergency type issues (broken pipes, fires, etc.) Given limited budgetary resources, and therefore limited phone staff, a unique phone number for each activity is assigned and routed to different ring tones and phone display names through the office’s PBX. In this scenario, emergency calls can get the highest priority, followed by new revenue generation (apartment inquiries), and lastly low priority maintenance issues can be handled as timer permits throughout the day.

In conclusion, the ability to obtain unique phone numbers (DIDs) and the SIP trunking ability that CV1 affords us, has allowed us to offer unique solutions to complex problems to our customers. In addition, it has allowed our customers to have a competitive edge in their respective industries, helping them to continue to grow, and continue to both keep us as their IT solution provider, as well as recommend us to other people with whom they do business. The ability to obtain local phone numbers, in nearly any geographic region of the United States, and have them instantly directed and identified with a plethora of different activities, has made the impossible, possible. Thank you CV1!

In spite of the popularity of VoIP, there are still a couple of business owners who are reluctant to adopt it. Usually, these are small and home business owners who believe they don’t have enough financial resources to run a VoIP network. Others charge the apprehension to lack of technological experience.

VoIP isn’t a perfect system. It has its own loopholes and glitches. In fact, it may not be as cheap as others would like to think. However, the benefits small and home business owners can take advantage are way more than the cons:

It helps you cut back on communication expenses. As mentioned, not all VoIP systems are cheap; that’s why you need to compare packages. In general, however, VoIP allows you to pay monthly fixed fees or per-minute charges for your long-distance phone calls. You can also find reasonably priced plans with unlimited overseas telephone calls.

For the equipment, plenty of providers can already give them in exchange for a lock-in contract. If you don’t want to be tied down to one provider, you can purchase them both online and offline. Because of stiff competition among suppliers, VoIP phone costs can be as low as $30.

It’s easy to expand your business. Almost always, VoIP upgrades are completely for free. You will simply be notified whenever new updates are available. Moreover, when you need to add additional phones or change your network, you can do so through a GUI. You don’t have to request for a technician, which is additional cost for you.

You don’t have to miss out any calls. You can now configure VoIP to redirect calls not only to another landline number but also to your mobile phone. You can also activate your voice mail and access messages anytime and anywhere.

You can run your business like a huge enterprise. VoIP offers auto-attendant, which provides a professional-sounding system to your network (it’s the one that says, “Press 1 for customer service,” etc.). You can also set up limited conference calls.

Its a common issue with asterisk as it sometimes wont pass dtmf properly. To solve the issue first we need to check the network has sufficient bandwidth, if bandwidth is sufficient then we need to add the below parameters on all CV1 trunks. Note that if you are using G729 codec then inband wont work. First try with dtmfmode=auto, if it didn’t work then try with dtmfmode=inband.(For only ULAW) codec. If you are using g729, then force rfc2833 instead of inband.

Example

[didforsale1]
type=peer
host=209.216.2.211
nat=yes
canreinvite=no
disallow=all
allow=ulaw&g729
context=from-trunk
dtmfmode=auto or (use inband for ULAW / Use rfc2833 for G729)