Just to bring things up to date. hellodirect offered to replace the unit at their shipping expense. Kudos to them for stepping up to the plate to solve the problem. I recieved a replacement phone quick enough and have been using it with a Vonage Softphone account for the last couple months. It works rather well. The only time I really have a problem hearing someone, is if I am transfering data with my computer (browsing or email). My internet connection is a SBC DSL line. I really like the way Vonage does voicemail. When using the phone, the prompts are easy to figure out, but I love that the voicmails are emailed to me, so that they can be archived locally on my hard drive!

Right now I don't have a computer to install asterisk on. I don't have enough in my self imposed budget to purchase the necessary hardware, since I just purchased some desktops for the new sales people. I will see if I can scrounge an old PII 266mhz machine, but I don't really have the time to waste if the hardware is insufficent to run asterisk.

My current plan is to set Asterisk up with the vonage softphone account as a trunk and one extension (the Sipura 841) on my desk. I will use this phone for outgoing calls only, and I will give the number to select people for incoming calls. After I am satisfied that I am comfortable configuring the system and that it works will, I will add my current 5 incoming lines as trunks, and deploy VOIP phones to the rest of the company. I will leave the old system intact, so that I can revert back to it at any time.

I have not blogged in this forum in a LONG time. I really would like to pick this project back up! Some other things happened in my business that have captivated my attention. Such is the life of owning a small manufacturing company in a highly competitive industry!

My company exclusively relies on a direct sales force as our primary marketing tool. I lost a couple of sales people due to attrition and a resignation. Luckily the people who retired are on good terms with me, and are happily introducing the new sales people that I hired to their customers. Unfortunately one sales person resigned and it is not on good terms. He decided to go to work for a competitor and he is working in the marketplace against us. All of our customers are important to us, but he was responsible for maintiaining a few of the larger accounts. I am very happy with the person that I hired to replace him, and I am ready to start working on this project once again.

One interesting note. I began deploying Mandriva Linux boxes to my sales people to use as a desktop computer in the office. They are being recieved well enough as one can expect. The sales people are very used to Windows and MS Office, but they are picking up Linux with little to no training. I am very happy how this migration is going, and would like to continue to deploy Linux boxes around the rest of the company.

Sipura tech support finally sent through the RMA process, and I am to send the unit back for a replacement. Interestingly, the RMA link they sent me to complete the process is a Linksys.com url. I am a little upset about this, they are asking me to ship the unit at my cost back to them. If this is truly a manufacturing defect, shouldn't they cover that cost? I purchased the unit from Hellodirect.com, and I shot them an email to see what they were willing to do for me. Hopefully the e-tailer will step up to the plate and turn an unhappy customer into a happy one!

Maybe I should be looking at Cisco phones? We will see what hellodirect.com's response is to this. I might return the phone to them and start shopping again. I am not sure why, but the Polycom phone's bother me. I will take a look at them. Maybe I will take a look, and see what 3com has to offer?

I found another interesting link today. I will have to file this one away for future use:

http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Sipura+Mass+Deployment

This may come in handy one day!!

I got to thinking some more. I am able to call my softphone from the SPA-841, by putting the userid@ipaddress:5060 into a speed dial. How would I call the SPA-841 from the softphone? What user id would you use? I tried many things and none work. I eventually found this website:
http://www.sipura.com/support/spa841faq/Section_2.html

Right now I have line 1 on the phone configured for Vonage, and I don't have line 2 configured for anything. So I dropped in "1001" as the user id on line 2 and tried dialing from Kphone (my VOIP softphone on my PC).:
1001@ip_of_SPA-841:5060

That did not work. So I started trying other things. I finally got one to work! As I said I have line 1 configured for Vonage. When configuring the SPA-841 for Vonage, you put your vonage supplied phone number in the userid field. So I tried dialing from Kphone:
7-digit_vonage_assigned_number@ipaddress_of_SPA-841:5060
and that worked! The SPA-841 rang and I was able to pick up and hear what the user at Kphone was saying.

Sipura Tech support has had me try a couple things. One item was rather interesting. He thought that my rtp is being blocked out. Not sure what that means, but he wanted me to connect my softphone in my PC directly to the SPA-841 without using a proxy.

He told me to bring up the config page for the phone and on the user tab enter into speed dial number 2:
username_of_your_softphone@ipaddress_of_your_softphone:5060
My login on the machine with the softphone is "bob" so I used that as the userid. Then to place the call you push 2# on the SPA-841 to dial speed number 2 and then lift the handset to place the call. The phone dialed the number and my softphone rang! I picked up the softphone and I am still having the same problem. The person on the SPA-841 can hear the softphone user just fine. The user on the softphone can not hear anything the SPA-841 user is saying.

D'OH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I found this website today:
http://www.miselconsulting.com/?page=841

This guy seemed to be having a similar problem to mine! He has some interesting pictures of the inside of the phone. I have read other webpages about people claiming they HATE the rubber buttons on the phone. I have no complaints. Mine don't seem to stick at all. I think they have a nice feel. I wonder if they made improvements? Or do we all have a different opinion? :-)

I was playing around with the Sipura SPA-841 a little more last night, and I figured out something kinda cool! I was seeing what happened when I tried to connect the SPA-841 to my Vonage softphone account, and then at the same time try to connect to Vonage with Kphone (the software VOIP phone that is on my laptop). No matter which phone I connected up first, he SPA-841 always took over the connection! As long as the SPA-841 was powered, I was unable to use kphone with vonage at all!

I am now worried that if I leave the SPA-841 on my desk configured to vonage, and I am "on the road" with my laptop, and I wanted to make a call with kphone, I will be unable. I will have to remember to unplug the SPA-841, EVERY time I go somewhere! Not a good solution!

Well, I came up with a solution! Let me stop and tell you a little about my network topography. I have a residential DSL connection to the internet. On the DSL conection, I have one of those ubiquitous linksys four port routers. I signed up for a free account at dyndns.org and setup one of their free naming services so that I can host my own webserver. One nice thing about the linksys routers, they graciously provide support directly for dyndns.org. So you can configure the linksys router to update dyndns.org with your current ip address! If you don't have a linksys, there is software you can run in Linux (ddclient) and windows to keep dyndns.org up to date. Configuring the linksys to do that however, is far easier in my opinion. I then forward port 80 (default port for the http protocol) on the linksys router to the IP address of my webserver that is on my LAN. This causes the web server to be seen by the world with the domain that I set up at dyndns.org!

This got me to thinking. The web configuration on the SPA-841 defaults to Port 80. I already forward port 80 to my webserver, but you can change the SPA-841 to a different port! So I changed it to port 8080, and set my linksys firewall to forward port 8080 to the ip address of the SPA-841. Now I can configure the phone (or disable it so that I can use kphone) from anywhere in the world by typing mydomain.com:8080!

Still no answer from Sipura tech support. They commit to answering questions within 24 hours and it has been longer than that. I sent the email again today. If I don't hear anything by 5pm my time today, I think I am going to call them. I found a phone number on their website. I was thinking, Now I can have their support personel look directly at my phone configuration!

--
later,
bob

I got an email back from Brian with Sipura Tech Support about 1 hour after my email to them. In my email to him, I included the version of the firmware (3.1.2)of my phone. In his email, he told me that there was a problem with the volume settings with my software version, and that I should upgrade the phone to the latest version. I checked on their site and there was a newer version. They are now up to 3.1.4! I downloaded the zip file, and there were two files in the zip. A *.bin file and a *.exe file. Information on their website stated you can update the phone two ways. The first preferable method is to use the windows *.exe file. I use linux so I went on to option 2. Option 2 requires you to have a tftp server or an http server running on your lan. I have apache running, so I decided to try that option. you use a browser on a PC to hit the phone with this url:
http://192.168.1.134/admin/upgrade?http://192.168.1.129/path/to/bin/file.bin
where 192.168.1.134 is the ip addres of my phone
192.168.1.129 is the ip address of my apache server where I put the bin file.

After putting the .bin file on my server, i hit the phone with the browser. The phone began blinking as their instructions said it would. The phone informed me not to disconnect the power while the upgrade process is taking place. When the phone was finished, it rebooted, and connected it self back up to Vonage. I tried a call, and it still had the same problem. I checked the firmware version, and lo and behold, the phone was reporting the original firmware version 3.1.2, not the new one, 3.1.4. I tried the same process a second time with the same result! So I went to a Windows computer on the LAN and tried the .exe file. The program that ran asked me for the IP address of the phone, and then appeared to be updating the phone. The phone was blinking it's lights the same as it did before while doing the http update. When it was finished the phone is now reporting the new software version number! Success!!

I tried to place a call and ... still no joy! Still the same thing as before! I can hear the person on the other end just fine, but they can not hear me at all. They can still hear the DTMF tones when I push the buttons on the handset. I am stumped. I shot an email back to Brian at Sipura. Interesting, when you reply to them, you MUST put your reply inside certain brakets on their email to me. Almost did that wrong, but got it right before sending the email...

While waiting for Sipura to write back to me I got to thinking. They were really pushing Broadvoice with the leaflets with the phone. Maybe there is some obscure setting that doesn't work with Vonage?

I decided to give Asterisk @ home a try. I installed it on my laptop with a spare hard drive that I use when trying anything new. To my surprise, the Asterisk @ Home install was easier than any linux install I have EVER done. It was the scariest too! I burned the CD image, booted the CD and it gave me a boot prompt. I could simply press enter to start the installation. Typing things at the prompt would allow me to boot with special parameters. I just hit enter, and the install launched! I was watching the progress, and at one point it formatted the entire hard drive and installed asterisk, without ever asking me! I am really glad that I did not try to install this on a partition on my regular hard drive. (that reminds me, time to do a backup!)

The install automatically ejected the cd when finished and rebooted to asterisk @ home. I entered the IP address of my asterisk box into the url field on a browser with another computer. I got their configuration pages. I followed the instructions right off the asterisk @ home webiste and was able to add extensions. I added extensions 200 and 201. I then used the browser to configure the SPA-841 to use the asterisk box. I configured the phone proxy with the IP address of the asterisk PBX and the phone connected! I picked up the handset and was able to dial my own extension and a nice voice told me the extension was in use, and to leave a voicemail after the tone. I did this and then the menu girl voice asked me if I would like to listen to the voicemail. I pushed 2 to review the voicemail I had just left and there was complete silence. I tried again and again and always got the same result. I tried one last time, this time pushing the number keys on the phone. This time when I listened to the message, I could hear the tones of the keys being pressed. D'OH!! the exact same problem as Vonage!

At least I know that the phone (sort of) works with asterisk @ home. I noticed that when I left a message the voicemail indicator light lit up almost immediately. I also got a stutter dial tone when I pick up the handset. Can't wait to hear back from Tech support and get this puppy working!!

I finally got some more time to experiment with the Sipura SPA-841 VOIP handset. I decided to try and call someone and see how the call quality was. I called someone that I knew would be willing to put up with some problems, someone who has patience with things like this.

To my surprise the phone was not working! I was able to place the call, I heard it ringing, I heard the person on the other end answer. But they could not hear me at all! I tried wiggling the handset cord and a couple other things, all to no avail. I opened up my browser and dove back in to the settings. Aha! there is a setting called "Handset Input Gain." You can either set it at one of three settings: 6, 0, or -6. I tried all three, rebooted the phone each time. And... nothing. It still would not work. I thought the mic might be bad in the handset. The phone has a plug on it for an external headset. It is the same plug that my cell phone uses, so I plugged a headset in and had the same result, the person on the other end still could not hear me. In my experimentation, I found that the person on the other end was able to hear the tones when I pushed the buttons on the handset. So I think it must be configured with vonage correctly?

I am not sure, so I went on to Sipura's website. There I found two full manuals for the phone. One was called the "Admin manual", and the other was called the "User Manual." They were both PDF files. Consulting the trouble shooting in both turned up nothing, I also consulted the FAQ on the Sipura website. That had nothing pertaining to my problem either. I broke down and emailed their support staff...

My Sipura SPA-841 arrived yesterday. I pulled it out of the box, and was rather intimidated by the complete lack of documentation. There was a leaflet that welcomed me to Broadvoice (a Vonage competitor) and thanked me for buying my Broadvoice start up kit. This leaflet stated that I must have a broadvoice account to use this phone, and described the various features of Broadvoice, and stated that Broadvoice does NOT support 911 calling.

I can only assume that Broadvoice must have some type of deal with Sipura? I got one of their phones? No idea, but I have no plans to use this phone with Broadvoice! I did check out their website. They have some compelling VOIP plans. I will have to file them away for future reference.

There was another small leaflet that stated the device is preconfigured for DHCP, and it explained how to use the keys on the phone to assign a fixed IP address and then use a browser from a PC to configure the phone. A DHCP assigned address works better for me, so I did not configure anything, I just plugged the phone in, saw the ip address that my DHCP server assigned and brought up a browser to configure the phone. Configuring the phone to work with my Vonage Softphone account took very little guesswork. I configured the phone as follows:
Proxy: sphone.vopr.vonage.net
Outbound Proxy: 216.115.25.198:5061
User ID: 1440xxxxxxx (this is my phone number, make sure you keep the "1"!)
Password: ************ (Password supplied by Vonage)

I placed a call to my cell and it worked!! I was very happy, I had a busy day ahead talking to customers, and I didn't want to try it out on them, so I left content that everything was working!

My latest purchase in the VOIP category was a Sipura SPA-841 VOIP handset. As VOIP handsets go, it was very inexpensive at $79. I purchased this handset with the idea that I would evaluate it as use as a potential handset for our entire phone system! It is a very basic phone, and I am thinking that it might not work for my "heavier duty" phone users. It should be fine for a sales rep or maybe as a phone in the lobby for customer visits.

If that doesn't work out, I figured as a last resort, that i could use it with my vonage softphone account to place calls from my desk at home. Since the vonage softphone account supports standard SIP sessions, it should work with that. It would be nice to have a hardware phone to place calls on, rather than have to fire up the laptop just to make a phone call! I will initially configure it to work with Vonage to do my evaluation of the phone, and later set up an Asterisk PBX to see how Asterisk and the SPA-841 work together!

My next dabble with VOIP was signing up for a second account with Vonage. This second account is designed to work with the Vonage Softphone product. This allows you to use a PC, your soundcard and special software (free download from Vonage) to place phone calls. The software only runs in Windows, but the account that I signed up for uses the standard SIP protocol, so almost any VOIP phone should work. I thought the softphone was a decent idea, so I found a KDE softphone called (are you ready for this?) kphone. It uses the SIP protocol, and I was able to get it working with help from this website: http://brandt.kurowski.net/blog/raves/kphone.html
These settings worked great with kphone, and I use still use this account regularly. The plan costs about $10/month and gives me 500 minutes anywhere in the US and canada. You have to have a regular vonage account with them first, you can't just get a softphone account alone. I have been using it for the last couple months to call vendors that do not have a 1-800 number, instead of using the employee line I discussed previously. I also use this account to make some personal calls from my laptop during peak hours on my cell phone. To save my precious cell minutes (that I have never gone over!).

In my first blog posting I outlined where I am today, and where I am going in the future migrating my old proprietary phone system to an advanced PBX with VOIP handsets. In the next couple posts I will bring up to date with what I have done so far.

My first dabble with VOIP was signing up for a Vonage account about a year ago. I signed up for a plan that costs about $25/month. For this I get an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) and a phone service that allows me unlimited incoming calls, and unlimited long distance calls in the US and canada. I had to provide a regular analog phone and an internet connection. My first experience with this was very positive, and I still use it today.

The reason I set this up: I have a payphone in my manufacturing plant for the employees to use, so that they don't tie up my regular lines for personal calls. The payphone costs us $50/month and we don't get to keep the quarters from it!! The phone company comes and empties it!! I thought this was terrible, so I decided to get a VOIP (Vonage) phone for the employees to use. I provide it for them free of charge, and it only costs me $25/month! They have been very happy with it and use it daily. I added a regular cordless phone to which I leave in my office. The cordless phone tells me on the screen if the line is in use or not. If the phone is not in use, then I periodically use the cordless phone to place long distance calls on to my vendors that don't have 1-800 numbers. Just to save a little on my long distance costs. This has worked very well, and I am very happy with the service!!

This is my first post to this blog. This blog is going to be a documentation of my trials and tribulations integrating VOIP into my business. Let me start by telling you a little about me. I own a small manufacturing company and I also consider computers a hobby of mine. I am presently using KDE as my desktop enviroment both at work and at home. I really love the look and feel for KDE and encourage everyone to give it a try! I run KDE on top of Linux, but would follow KDE wherever it goes (BSD, other unix, even windows if I had too!).
While I use KDE on my desktop, my employees continue to use Windows on their desktops. I do this for a number of reasons that I will not go into now. But let me say that I would like my employees to migrate to Linux boxes in the future. Right now I don't have any time frame in mind and don't foresee that happening any time soon.
Recently I learned that our phone system is no longer supported by the manufacturer. The system is very proprietary and manufactured by a company called Nitsuko. The handsets and central box are no longer manufactured, so when one breaks, we can not replace it. The system is not a PBX and has many intracacies that we are very used to! It has no voicemail, or caller ID or other "advanced" features. The system is capable of 15 extensions, but we currently only use about 10. The system is capable of 6 incoming lines. We use 5 as incoming voice lines and the sixth line is jury rigged to the Public Address system in our manufacturing facility. We are connected to the POTS (plain old telephone system) via regular analog phone lines. We currently have 7 lines provided by SBC. They call this service "centrex". We use 5 lines for voice, one for fax and one for our credit card machine. I had nothing to do with the installation of this system, it was here when I got here!
My plan is to migrate to a system that uses VOIP handsets and an asterisk PBX. I will use the 5 analog lines to trunk the asterisk PBX to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). I would like to have caller ID, voicemail, and some type of automated attendant. Many of our customers are "old school" and will not appreciate the auto attendant, so it MUST have the ability to immediately ring a live person. I will NOT bury my customers in lots of menu's! I would like to eventually migrate this system to a VOIP trunk to minimize our long distance costs. But that is long term and much further down the road!
For those that do not know, asterisk is an open source PBX that sits on top of linux on an ordinary desktop (or server) PC. It has many advanced PBX features and can be customized many different ways.
I am going to use this blog to document what I have done to migrate my telephone system. The primary purpose is for this blog to serve as a reference tool for myself to help me understand where I have been and help me develop a better perspective of the future. It might also serve as a reference tool for others to follow and incorporate VOIP into their own businesses and jobs!