Ask HN: What type of phone system do you use?

[mattieuga]

I'm looking for advice on setting up a phone system for customers to call in. We've experimented with both Twilio and Grasshopper and had some reliability issues (calls not going through, voicemails being left on employees phone, etc).

Any operationally heavy startup out there figured out a good option on a budget?

Matt - Founder at ScriptDash

[rahimnathwani]

If you want something you understand and can control, you could build your own phone system with Asterisk. Inbound calls could come via VoIP (if you can find an upstream phone company you trust) or PSTN (if you're willing to invest in having the necessary ISDN/phone line installed, and in the hardware to connect to those).

If you're doing it for the first time, you might be best served with specialised Linux distribution (e.g. Elastix[0] or PIAF[1]).

The cool thing about this type of setup is that you can do pretty much what you want (e.g. triggering scripts when calls come in, setting up fancy call routing rules, ...). The not-so-cool thing is that there's a learning curve and, if you doing anything fancy, then someone will need to make sure those things are working solidly. Also, as with any other server, you need to arrange for backups and disaster recovery.

[0] http://elastix.org/ [1] http://nerdvittles.dreamhosters.com/pbxinaflash/

[fenollp]

> If you want something you understand and can control, you could build your own phone system with Asterisk. Inbound calls could come via VoIP (if you can find an upstream phone company you trust) or PSTN (if you're willing to invest in having the necessary ISDN/phone line installed, and in the hardware to connect to those).

If you want to install it yourself / or not, have support, use a fully open source solution: go look at 2600Hz [0] (disclaimer: I'm a backend engineer there)

[0] http://2600hz.com/

[rahimnathwani]

I found your company's home page hard to understand, and to navigate. Also, the links at the bottom of the page are really low contrast (at least on my computer, running Debian 8).

But, I finally found links to the open source software you mentioned:

http://2600hz.org/bluebox_download.html

Your packaging approach seems similar to the Elastix folks. An ISO that does an unattended install of CentOS, with a PBX and a GUI. Except that you're using FreeSWITCH instead of Asterisk, and Blue.box (is this your own thing?) instead of whichever GUI they've skinned/modified.

EDIT: Hmm. This doesn't seem promising. The ISO download link on that page is broken (404) and the linked GitHub repo was last updated in June 2013. Going to http://repo.2600hz.com/Bluebox/ shows an ISO file from 18 months ago. I'd be more confident with a recent release of Elastix or PIAF.

[avatardog]

I work there, just saw this.

Bluebox was an old project to provide a GUI for freeswitch. Kazoo has been the focus for the past 4 years, bluebox is now a community project if I recall correctly.

Kazoo is a multi-tenant hosted pbx and trunking solution. It is an erlang cluster which uses amqp as a messaging bus and erlang apps which provide centralized call control and features across multiple freeswitch (media server) and kamailio servers (sip proxy). A shared cluster wide database is provided by bigcouch.

The difference between this and a cluster of asterisks (or broadcloud, kandy etc) is that you as a user or account, are not tied to a single server, any phone on your cluster can utilize the resources of the entire cluster as the erlang apps and AMQP bus provide a glue joining all servers in the cluster into a single "switch". Most of the "cloud" telephony out there is not distributed, it is mostly a lot of boxes with at best HA fail-over to another box that sits in as a warm standby with a unified provisioning layer to hide this from the users.

You can checkout kazoo at github http://github.com/2600hz/kazoo

There is a kazoo all in one ISO, which lets you run all the services in a cluster via a single server. You can get it at http://repo.2600hz.com/ISOs version 2 has the new GUI monster-UI.

Edit: phone does not a good comment make, spelling broken links ...

[rahimnathwani]

Thanks for taking the time to provide this background and level of detail. I will try out the Kazoo ISO some time.

[brudgers]

It sounds like primarily a level of service problem.

This might [0] be a case where having your own POTS [1] hardware makes sense. There is a vast expert technical infrastructure to support POTS and it is dedicated to reliability. The marketplace is highly competitive across market segments, by which I mean that there is heavy competition for two line systems and five hundred line systems. Above a certain threshold many systems are modular and provide 2x-4x linear growth.

Sure, maybe it won't scale out to a vast distributed team and you'll have to swap it out in two years and that will be painful. In two years your company will be swapping out phone systems if it is successful anyway...or it will be putting up with a system that's designed for the wrong larger scale until your company grows into it. That friction will probably reduce the the odds of getting there.

Telephony is hard enough to have given us Unix, C, Erlang, and information theory. For a business (and it looks like your company may be one) that will live and die by it's telephone system, controlling the hardware is consistent with Spolsky's approach to StackOverflow: it has its own servers because it can't afford to have critical infrastructure maintenance and repair happen on someone else's timeline. [2]

Good luck.

[0]: Or might not.

[1]: I'm cheating a little with "POTS", probably there's a VOIP component, but the big idea is a box in the closet with some telephony company's logo on it and a box of user manuals on a shelf.

[2]: edit - I might double down on controlling telephony as critical because of HIPPA.

[3]: edit - Outsourcing may make sense for non-patient call streams...e.g. sales and vendors and other generic business operations where a lower level of service might be acceptable.

[pavornyoh]

I have heard good things about these guys. They got accepted into TechStars and rejected the offer and are doing very well. They have great reviews for their services. Here it is http://talkroute.com

[jblake]

Mightycall looks solid. I currently use TalkDesk - but do not like it - so am also in the market for a switch. I also found Bitrix42 but seems to offer way more features than I need. any others out there?

[BorisMelnik]

I use a CISCO IP 303 Phone and pay traci.net next to nothign for VOIP service.

[codegeek]

i like 2 options:

1_ Mightycall (http://www.mightycall.com)

2. Skype with a business phone number.

Wasnt too happy with grasshooper which I also tried.