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Mobile call routing using VOIP phones
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Just a thought ...... you use up to 2,000 minutes mobile calls per month ..... and the cheapest you can get is apparently €30 per month unlimited use.
On my home set up I use FreeVOIPdeal at present for outgoing calls.
When I make a payment on account I get 3 or 4 months free landline calls to most of EU, Aus, US etc, and calls to Irish mobiles are charged at 1 cent per minute or part of a minute.
I am unsure, but would expect it must be possible to find similar or better rates for a guaranteed use such as your business.
All of this is pointing to me questioning whether or not you need the 3G set up for outgoing mobile calls, or not.
The set up would be much simpler if it was not needed ...... I like the KISS principle
Maybe I am forgetting some aspect of your requirements that make the 3G necessary .......
...... just thinking out loud .......
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Oh, BTW ..... I am looking forward to Mr.G's thread and lomb's write up if he goes ahead with the proposed set up.0 -
Johnboy1951 wrote: »Oh, BTW ..... I am looking forward to Mr.G's thread and lomb's write up if he goes ahead with the proposed set up.
If you want to help with a how-to on your Draytek set up (If I'm not mistaken?) it would be much appreciated. Plan is to create a sticky with some how-tos all in one place with links to other sites and threads
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Heya, sure you are right to question it. I have never considered an alternative. However standard voip providers like Goldfish, Magnet? and the others make their money out of mobile. If you can show me a deal for 30e a month and 2000 minutes Im willing to listen.
It doesn't seem like it will take anything other than a box running Linux (raspberry pi), 1 3g dongle, freepbx installed and the system set to send outbound 08xxx calls to the 3g landline to Goldfish and line 2 set to Goldfish if the 3g is busy. It doesn't seem much to set up from what I can see.
The other possibility is find a cheap VOIP provider for outbound calls, like freevoip but whats the setup involved here? The other thing is what happens if I go in someday and the freevoip provider has closed the outbounds wont work without reconfig. I now have 4 voip phones on the same desk connected to the same Goldfish account and receiving inbound calls from a single number.
Absolutely fire away with the draytek setup, how yours works what its designed to do first and foremost. Is it for LCR or for something else. I know in PM you said you didn't use 3g so Im guessing you route calls using this router to cheaper voip providers like freevoip?
Whats the call clarity like, and how long have they been around for? CheersJohnboy1951 wrote: »Just a thought ...... you use up to 2,000 minutes mobile calls per month ..... and the cheapest you can get is apparentlanyy €30 per month unlimited use.
On my home set up I use FreeVOIPdeal at present for outgoing calls.
When I make a payment on account I get 3 or 4 months free landline calls to most of EU, Aus, US etc, and calls to Irish mobiles are charged at 1 cent per minute or part of a minute.
I am unsure, but would expect it must be possible to find similar or better rates for a guaranteed use such as your business.
All of this is pointing to me questioning whether or not you need the 3G set up for outgoing mobile calls, or not.
The set up would be much simpler if it was not needed ...... I like the KISS principle
Maybe I am forgetting some aspect of your requirements that make the 3G necessary .......
...... just thinking out loud .......
*******
Oh, BTW ..... I am looking forward to Mr.G's thread and lomb's write up if he goes ahead with the proposed set up.0 -
@lomb
I would not suggest FreeVOIPdeal for business use ... nor indeed any provider from that group, unless they specifically do business offers. I am using a personal calling 'plan' which has limitations such as acceptable usage.
They are down to a price ...... but I have to admit I have not suffered from call quality problems.
The only thing I noticed was a period when the first few seconds were echo prone, but this seems to have disappeared.
My phone use this year has also dropped significantly (personal circumstances) ... so much so, that some days it is only used for one or two calls.
Soon I should be able to do without
Regarding LCR ... I used FreeVOIPDeal as the default for all calls, after adding them to my multiple accounts, as I could get no better prices for any of my usual calls from any other provider.
Previously I had three other provider accounts and used those for the different calls based on charges.
Last year that all went ..... or almost all.
My 'suspicion', that prompted the previous post, was that there is likely some provider with a similar type for-business plan ...... no doubt a bit more costly, but somewhat on the same lines.
If one sets up a FreeVOIPDeal personal account, lodges a minimum of €10 +VAT, that account has free calls to a large range of landlines worldwide for a period of 120 days, and the €10 is used to pay for calls to Irish mobiles at a rate of 1c per minute or part of a minute ..... equivalent to 1000 minutes or part of a min ..... and to pay for otherwise non-free landline calls and foreign mobiles at their respective rates; Freevoipdeal are apparently making some profit else they would not still exist.
How much more costly it might be for a similar business plan is unknown to me but I thought it might be worth your while investigating if such plans exist from any provider.
So, in summary, I would not suggest the likes of FreeVOIPdeal for any business ..... in fact I believe they specifically say their service is for personal use.
Nonetheless, if they continue to operate with this scheme, then it must be somewhat successful, which lead me to suspect that a very low call-cost business plan might be available from some provider, which would fit your needs.
On the other hand, as the capital cost of your proposed setup using 3G is small, if an option of using VOIP only, arises in the future, it would be a small adjustment, and little lost, to reconfigure and maybe only use the 3G as a fail-over.
It would seem you are better "covered" by the proposed scheme ...... but I would, in your position, continue to monitor what becomes available.
Prices are still dropping for such services, and more suitable 'plans' are being offered, particularly when new providers enter the market.
Regarding my own use of the Draytek .... because it has the possibility of having 6 different accounts I was able to 'play about' quite a bit .... and the 'quick dial' phone book, allowed me to use SIP addresses allocated to quick dial numbers, so the SIP accounts could be dialled from an ordinary desk phone.
In addition the Draytek is capable of doing direct-to-IP SIP calling (providing the receiver of the call is also capable), which I used a lot for direct access to some people without going through any provider.
I have over the years made full use of the multiple accounts function in the Draytek ... even to the point of adding a free SIP account for a period of some months to communicate about a particular project.
We must remember, when I got this router it was a long time ago in the development of such devices, so it is very much past its design time and newer much better devices are no doubt available.
There was little or nothing comparable that I could find at the time, at anything close to its price range.
All its 'competitors' appeared to be for large industry use and not micro business use, and priced accordingly.
Anyway that's all history.
I can only suggest you keep a close watch on what becomes available in the way of 'plans' for outgoing calls because the ground shifts daily
sorry for being so verbose
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Im using this opportunity to read up on Linux history and basics and will get the kids books for the Pi as it seems to be interesting. If a 12 year old can do it and all that. Ive yet to draft in my brother who has Linux experiance , used to use it on his desktop for a while. I wanted to do it myself if possible.
However in the mean time not getting you guys. The Pi has installed Rasbian Linux off the SD card (I persume a protected area) that came with it. It is now asking me to expand the OS to use the entire SD and to this I will select yes I get that.
However why would I want Pi to boot off Asterix? Asterix is a program no , so needs to be installed like a program on a USB stick I would think from within a Linux installed Pi.
Booting off an iso on the Linux SD isnt going to work is it or am I missing something? Cheers
I think you're overcomplicating things
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If you install the operating system on the SD Card onto the Raspberry PI, everything you need for a phone system will be installed. Asterisk is part of the distro, it is a program but if you have successfully installed Raspbian just type 'raspbx' into your web browser or navigate to the ip address of the Raspberry PI and set up your system through FreePBX. At this point you can just use a SSH client like PuTTY and leave it plugged in beside the network switch.
Once you've written the ISO to the SD Card and inserted it into the slot, the Raspberry PI will recognise that you have inserted a new SD Card and it will boot of that. All storage by default is on the SD Card itself, like it's "hard drive". You can insert and mount a USB is you wish but if you're not recording much I wouldn't bother.0 -
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Out of curiousity - Assuming the broadband pipe is adequate, how many simultaneous calls could a Pi handle?
Around 10. Anything more than that would be pushing it. For such a small device, with a low spec it delivers good results. I have got 5 concurrent calls working without any problems
Obviously if you are going to use encryption or G729 compression you're not going to get as many concurrent calls.0
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