4 Primus VoIP phones on one hi-speed connection
March 30, 2004 - 5:44pm — bmann
That's what got asked in the Broadband Reports forum:
ONE MORE QUESTION! How is the performance if I hook up 4 Primus VoIP phones to one Hispeed Internet(Bell Sympatico/Rogers)??
BBR Forums
And I answered:
This is only doable if you have 4 public IP addresses, since all 4 phones use the same ports.
That is, if you use a router and want to forward ports, you won't know which phone to forward it to.
Many non-Sympatico DSL providers in Canada provide extra IP addresses at a reasonable cost. For instance, iStop in Ottawa has business DSL that includes 5 public IP addresses for $99/month.
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Wouldn't the easiest way be t
Wouldn't the easiest way be to purchase Digium Cards, install Asterisk, and run your own PBX? A lot more flexibility too. Solves all of those problems and gives you the ability to go VOIP internally and externally without worrying about the whole "number of phones" issues, they don't even have to be VOIP phones in that case. I have my own derived versions of the IP PBX as well, and write for VOIPBLOGS.com. A lot of companies are moving from just the VOIP phones in the office to incorporating the PBX to create remote extensions as well and to centralize billing. If you have several offices and don't plan on making local calls via the remote VOIP phone, then you only need one PBX. But if you have more than one office and want to use the VOIP phone for local, national, and international termination, you will need a pbx for each location.
These days, a PBX should not cost you anymore than $5k max. using PC based solutions. The PBX can terminate via primus etc, and should differentiate the call records by the extensions in the PBX. If you are growing, you should consider investing in a VOIP PBX. Lots of models to work on, feel free to throw any questions at me.
Ryan Gibson
gibson@vocalscape.com
You bet Ryan -- a PC-based IP
You bet Ryan -- a PC-based IP PBX is a great (and money saving) solution.
But the fact of the matter is that a) when you start talking Linux and ordering/installing extra hardware, it's too complicated for most people, and b) there are few (local) tech consultants who have enough voip experience to help out.
As I've written elsewhere, I expect broadband router appliances to eventually evolve into VoIP appliances.
And of course, local IT shops and resellers will educate themselves on VoIP solutions as well, just as they did with Linux. I think a great business model would be to provide turnkey solutions to independent consultants -- including things like local termination and other "real" phone system interconnects.
Primus Port Limitations
I have 2 Linksys Switchs, a D-Link Switch and now the D-Link Primus, currently it is arranged as:
Modem->Linksys Switch->Linksys Switch->D-Link Primus
->D-Link Switch
We would like to remove the first Linksys switch because we've blown some ports and put the Primus up front so that we aren't cutting off our calls. Hopefully it will look like this:
Modem->D-Link Primus->Linksys Switch
->D-Link Switch
One problem I ran into; however, was that I could only let the 6 IP's enter through, and I need alot more, I am just wondering, if releasing all the IP's on the Primus, and leaving the switches to handle it would allow for all the traffic to go through and then be sorted, but then I would have to setup both Linksys and the D-Link switch to cover all of them wouldn't I? Any help would be awesome thanks!
6 public IPs?
From the sounds of it, you have multiple public IP addresses that you are trying to pass through? If you need anything more complicated than just straight DHCP, there are not enough configuration options on the D-Link Primus box.
I would get a router right behind the modem. Off that, hang the Primus box, as well as a second switch if you need the extra ports.
More details on these 6 IPs would probably be useful. You should just be able to do DHCP and hand out as many internal addresses as you need.
Actually More
We have quite a few more than 6 public IP's that we want to send though, we would actually like to have about 20. We would like to have a range of IP's we could just allow through but I couldn't find any place wher eit would allow a range of IP's. We want to put the Primus in front so that it does not disconnect our IP phone when we are downloading from all of our workstations, and we can accept the limitation on bandwidth during a phone convo on the IP phone its just a matter of being able to send enough IP's through that is the problem.
Once you need to manage this
Once you need to manage this mix of public and private IPs with distinct rules about filtering and firewalling them, you should get a good, business-class router. It will have all the features that you need.
As well, if you have that many Primus systems, you might consider running your own IP-PBX. It would give you more features, be easier to manage, and would likely be cheaper as well.
But in the meantime...?
I am just wondering if in the meantime there is a way to cover a range of IP's to allow through on the Primus box, or if I release ALL Ip settings will that somehow 'open the floodgates' and let all IP's through, or will that block everything?
This all depends on your router
This all depends on your router. Yes, this is possible with many routers. It also not possible with many cheap low-end routers, which can only let through a single IP.
Basically, you need to turn off firewall blocking for all the Primus phones.
Thats not Ture.. you can h
Thats not Ture..
you can have multiple phones/PC behind a firewall/router and they will work with Primus.. Primus us Vocal Data as it's softswitch, which has "NAT/Firewall" traversal features. you can hide any number of phones (assuming bandwidth is available) once the ATA's "connect" to the call agent, they keep a permanant channel open for downstream activity.
There are several ways to figour out the maximum.. look at the codec they are using (g.711 I think or G.729) they claim it will work on a DSL lite, which is 128K download. I'm not sure what speed you hve but you can do the math XXXX/128K (roughly) for the upstream (the more important) do the same as well.)
Darryl
darrylb@nospam_remove.burke-consulting.net
G.711u = ~87.2Kbps (Assuming
G.711u = ~87.2Kbps (Assuming an Ethernet Frame Type, does not include other tunneled protocols like PPPoE, GRE, IPSec etc, which decreases the MTU size of the frame)
G.729 = 31.2KBps (Assuming an Ethernet Frame Type, does not include other tunneled protocols like PPPoE, GRE, IPSec etc, which decreases the MTU size of the frame)
Primus sets G.711u as the default forh most customers. Lite customers are set to use G.729. There's more then enough bandwidth to process a full duplex RTP stream.
-marco
Thanks
Thanks for the post, Darryl. So you don't need to open any ports for this to work? It justs works via magic NAT traversal sauce?
Well, colour me impressed. Maybe Primus didn't initially have things set up properly, but I've just removed all my port forwarding rules, and ingoing and outgoing calls work just fine.
This method of opening channel should allow you to have as many gateways/phones as you have the bandwidth for.