Virtual PBX
In the continuing journey toward our new house, this week I setup our new phone system for the house. I decided to move away from Vonage and go toward a solution that was more flexible and less nickle/dimey than Vonage has been. Not to say we’re even high users of voice lines (we use cell phones), but I wanted to make sure that the house had a good and extensible voice system.
We chose OnSip, mostly based on Fred’s recommendation and those of others I know. I paired it with a SNOM M3 and a Linsys ATA router, the SPA3102.
Setup of OnSip was very easy. Amy and I have our own extensions and I setup a group for our mobile numbers and our extensions. The main lines are in simultaneous ring and the mobile in “hunt group”, so it’ll try us both. Incoming calls go to the internal group, and then during specific hours route to the mobile group before reverting to voicemail.
I also setup extension aliases, so Amy can just dial my work extension to call my office.
The setup of the SNOM M3′s was painless, while the setup of the Linksys was not, mostly because OnSip doesn’t have documentation for it. However, some of their online documentation (which is excellent) had similar configuration help, and those ended up working.
Our new house has the entire phone system wired into a VOIP box currently, so we’ll use the SPA3102 to make sure the whole houses RJ11′s are on the VOIP network. I plan on getting two more SNOM M3′s for the house and a Polycom desk phone for my office, Amy’s office area and possibly a conference pod for the living room.
That’s cool. But if you have an internet connection or WiFI in your house and you don’t want to mess with the RG11 cables then you can try Virtual PBX VoiP. No cables, and no additional phone hardware needed. Just the internet and your mobile phone.