The Official OpenRain Blog

New phone number: 1.623.691.7869

Try to contain your excitement, but we just implemented a shiny new phone system. It’s not exactly something you’d ask Santa for, but a critical piece of business infrastructure nonetheless. Last year we decided to try a Skype-based strategy and, well… let’s just say we had smiles when we turned on the new system.

We chose Cisco/Linksys SPA942 IP phones (currently ~$115 from Newegg) using VoicePulse SIP services in California proxied by an Asterisk server on our internal network. The awesome part is that we’ve been using the new system for about a week, and have seen crazy better call quality at negligible additional usage cost. The SPA942 has an outstanding price/performance ratio, giving you four lines, built-in web server configuration, PoE, voicemail, headset, tons of OSD menu options and other schwag for a little over 100 bones per unit. For all practical purposes that’s more than enough juice for a developer who only makes a couple calls per day.   

The increased SIP quality is also showing about 4x the bandwidth usage of our previous Skype hardware. While we could have a crappy Skype-to-Non-Skype call at ~4K/s before, a better SIP call takes about ~10K/s/channel, as reported by our T1 gateway. Using QoS prioritization at the border we’ve managed to avoid quality issues so far, but time will tell.

So, if you regularly have conference calls with us, we’ll probably give you our brand new 1.623.691.7869 number and a nice extension to dial into!

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preston.lee General Announcements announcement, bandwidth, infrastructure, number, office, phone, sip, skype, voicepulse, voip