
Ask HN: What type of phone system do you use? - mattieuga
I&#x27;m looking for advice on setting up a phone system for customers to call in. We&#x27;ve experimented with both Twilio and Grasshopper and had some reliability issues (calls not going through, voicemails being left on employees phone, etc).<p>Any operationally heavy startup out there figured out a good option on a budget?<p>Matt - Founder at ScriptDash
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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/](http://elastix.org/) [1]
[http://nerdvittles.dreamhosters.com/pbxinaflash/](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/](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](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/](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](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](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](http://talkroute.com)

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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?

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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](http://www.mightycall.com))

2\. Skype with a business phone number.

Wasnt too happy with grasshooper which I also tried.

