Can I manage multiple companies’ incoming calls with one single Phone-System?

Yes you can! It is very simple on our Hosted PBX System. By simply utilizing Hunt Groups or Call Centers you can easily do this.

Here is an example:

I will name one Hunt Group “CompanyABC” and assign it its own phone number (DID) and extension. I will then name a second Hunt Group “CompanyXYZ” and assign it its own phone number (DID) and extension.

I will then place a call to the phone number assigned to “CompanyABC”. This is what you will see on the Call manager and the physical phone.

Here you see on the Polycom Phone display the company that is being called (Hunt Group Name) followed by the Caller ID of the person calling in.

On the Call Manager POP UP you can see the Company name that is being called (Hunt Group Name) followed by the caller ID of person calling in.

Here is the second example:

I will place a call to the phone number assigned to “CompanyXYZ”. This is what you will see on the Call manager and the physical phone.

Here you see on the Polycom Phone display the Company that is being called (Hunt Group Name) followed by the Caller ID of the person calling in.

On the Call Manager POP UP you can see the Company name that is being called (Hunt Group Name) followed by the caller ID of the person calling in.

This is a very common request. Most people don't realize that this is possible without spending enormous amounts of money to purchase hardware.

The Hosted PBX will allow you to avoid having to spend money to buy equipment upfront. This is a very good solution for most.

Carlos Barron

What should be considered if you are in the market for a new Phone System/Service?

There are three generic deployment scenarios to consider. You will have to do some homework to determine which one is best for you. You will need to know what features you need and how many users you will have on your network. With this information, you will be able to determine which method will work for you. The preferred method is the Hosted PBX. With this method you will not have to worry about purchasing equipment, maintaining it or hiring staff to manage it. The other two methods may be needed only if your required features are not available in a Hosted PBX platform.

Hosted PBX:

1. With Today’s technology it is very common for a Phone Service provider to Host the phone system on their network. This is a Hosted PBX or as some people would know it as VoIP Service. You would essentially be outsourcing your Phone System.

Pros:
• You have a flat monthly cost.
• You don’t have to buy any equipment.
• No Startup Costs.
• No Installation costs.
• No need for qualified technicians to manage and maintain equipment. (Provided by Service Provider)
• No equipment warranty or extended warrantees are needed.
• No equipment installations at remote locations.
• Fast and simple web-based administration
• Large numbers of Features are available
• Advanced call and messaging functionality
• Reduced Operating costs
• Reliable, carrier-grade service
• Unlimited scalability.
• Office-to-Office calls are free.

Cons:
• Some Specialized Feature may not be available.

IP-PBX:

2. Second method if you have a need to physically own or if you have specific requirements, which can only be obtained with specific equipment. This method requires that the PBX (Phone system) support IP Stations.

Pros:
• You own and operate all equipment.
• You will have access to specialized features that may be vendor specific (Rare) and have determined the need for this specific phone equipment vendor.
• Only one PBX (Phone system) needs to be installed.
• No equipment installations at remote location.
• Reduced Operating costs
• Fast and simple web-based admin
• Office-to-Office calls are free.
• Scalable limited by the Phone System.

Cons:
• You own and operate all equipment.
• Large equipment Start-Up costs.
• Large Installation costs.
• Qualified technicians are needed to manage and maintain.
• Equipment warranty or extended warrantees are needed.
• High Performance IP WAN network must be implemented between remote sites to assure quality calls for all remote locations.



Traditional TDM PBX:

3. Last is the old method of deploying a phone system. This will require the installation of a PHX (Phone system) at each location.

Pros:
• You own and operate all equipment.

Cons:
• You own and operate all equipment.
• Large equipment Start-Up costs.
• Large Installation costs.
• Qualified technicians are needed to manage and maintain.
• Equipment warranty or extended warrantees are needed.
• Equipment needs to be installed at every location.
• Office-to-Office calls are not free.


All three scenarios are still viable today. With new technology the last scenario is hard to imagine for much longer. Most PBX’s sold today have some IP Station support. As the Hosted PBX platforms continue to develop and add features it wont be long before scenario one becomes the only viable option based on cost, functionality and ease of use.

Carlos Barron

Does VoIP Technology actually work? Why so many horror stories?

Absolutely! The Technology is awesome. The horror stories come from the companies that deploy it.

VoIP is an IP service that is delivered over IP. This means that the company that provides this service to you must be able to deliver IP at the quality level that you would expect to receive voice serves at. Well, if you are thinking any old traditional phone company can do this you are very mistaken. Most phone companies don’t have a clue how to deliver high quality IP services. I have worked with a few companies that started out as ISP’s who have deployed the service successfully.

There are a few obvious deployment errors. Anybody who will sell you VoIP services without you buying a link into their network doesn’t know what they are doing.
Ex. If you buy Internet access from one provider and VoIP service from another, you will have your own horror story. Everybody assumes the Voice Over IP means “Voice over Internet” Voice Over Internet doesn’t work. There is not quality control.

The other major problem out there is the big names in Telecom don’t have the intellectual property to do it and especially don’t have the networks or policies to execute it. They will sell you the services but you will experience the same issues and more than you did when you had traditional phone service with them. They built out their IP Networks for low cost, NOT high performance. They never intended or wanted to put voice on their IP networks. This is why they are struggling today to provide VoIP quality products. Some small providers wholesale these services and utilize these same networks.

Many IP providers are aggregating heavily into Frame Relay networks. You will see the same performance on their T1 networks that you see with their DSL services. What you want to look for is a provider that will drop your T1 circuits into the POP that delivers you to the Internet and links you to the VoIP switch. This is the best scenario, But hard to find.

If you are considering VoIP you should only talk with providers than can give you both Internet and VoIP products. Ask them how they will guarantee the quality. Then consider whom you are doing business with. If you ask them for VoIP and they don’t know what you are talking about you should move on. Small companies are the best positioned to provide these services at high levels of quality. The problem you will see here is that most of the small companies are startups that are operated by Traditional minded personnel.

Traditional Telecom mentality is what has un-necessarily dragged the VoIP products from taking off. VoIP has been the clear choice for at least a decade. Dealing with sub pare IP Networks and providers lead by the Telco Industry has really been a struggle.

You can take the telco worker out of the telco but you cannot take the telco out of the worker. Well, not unless you have a little more than a decade to do it;)

Is five-nine (99.999%) reliability a reality in today’s Telecom?

I have spent many years working directly within many of the big name Telecommunications Providers and I think there are many factors that contribute to a service declining trend.

First I think that 99.999% is hard to do even in traditional TDM deployments. It requires a lot of discipline and planning in operations to do this, and let’s face it many cLEC’s don’t have it.

Many providers are deploying VOIP services over old IP networks that were not designed to give 99.999% availability. IP was always a secondary non-critical service by many consumers and was not considered a critical service by Telephone companies. The IP networks need to be able to provide 99.999% availability before any service riding on it will be able to.

Consumers should also know that VOIP does not bring about lower prices. It facilitates some additional features, functionality and design benefits. You get more but you don’t necessarily pay less. In some instances it does save money. But I have seen many in which it costs more.

Many large VOIP providers are providing VOIP services over the public Internet. This just doesn’t work for large deployments. Many of their customers are deploying low budget communications systems for their business. On top of the fact that the traffic transverses the Internet they are usually running this over a DSL circuit which cannot provide consistent IP quality to the Internet. So a low budget deployment such as this is where you get the horror stories. These are really horror customers. The best deployment here is a couple of LAN lines and their DSL.

If you want to benefit from VOIP and experience high availability you need to step up to a TDM link to the same provider who is also hosting your VOIP service. Yes this costs a little more but that is why it works. You may also be surprised to see that this costs less than your DSL and traditional analog lines that you currently have.

Are all Internet T1 Lines the same?

No, not to the end user. Technically the T1 line is the connection between the Local Central Office and the Customer location and should all be the same. When you add services to the T1 line such as Internet Access then they differ greatly by providers.

T1 lines can provide a reliable connection between the customer building and the local central office, but that is all the T1 line does. From the local central office, the T1 is carried on a DS1 path to somewhere in the providers network.

Telecommunications providers have traditionally treated their IP networks as a secondary non-critical service. When they invested into their IP infrastructure they looked to save money and keep costs low. The problem they are now struggling with is that their IP networks perform poorly and the services that their customers are demanding will not work. By aggregating traffic into frame relay clouds they introduce latency fluctuations. It is very difficult to utilize these infrastructures to provide quality service for services such as Voice or MPLS services. An Internet T1 line on these networks is essentially “Reliable DSL Service”, high cost connection with cheap low quality bandwidth.

A high quality Internet T1 line will not have latency fluctuations. Since all T1 lines theoretically run at the same speed the bandwidth is not the issue. All T1 lines will give you 1.5Mb/s. In fact you can get more bandwidth out of a DSL line than on an Internet T1. But because DSL is unreliable and low cost they will not provide you quality bandwidth.

There are very few Telecommunications Providers that will give you a good quality Internet connection that will not experience large latency fluctuations. Their network designs are the key to performance and will usually cost a little more than your low cost Internet T1 providers. You will notice that when you add additional services such as voice or MPLS the costs for these services is less. It is easier to provide these services on a network that performs well.

Unfortunately the big names in the industry are the high priced service provider and are the biggest quality offenders. I would say you get what you pay for but that doesn’t seem to apply here. You just have to understand how the providers operate in order make an educated decision.

Carlos Barron

The Ultimate Guide for Creating Strong Passwords

“Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months” - Clifford Stoll
When you create an account on a website, you may have the “password dilemma” for a second. The dilemma is whether you should provide a weak password that is easy to remember or a strong password that is hard to remember. Following are the rules and guidelines that may help you in overcoming the password dilemma and help you in creating a strong password that are secure. These are the things that I’ve used over years based on my own interest in the area of keeping the password safe and secure.
I. Two essential password rules:
Following two rules are bare minimal that you should follow while creating a password.Rule 1 - Password Length: Stick with passwords that are at least 8 characters in length. The more character in the passwords is better, as the time taken to crack the password by an attacker will be longer. 10 characters or longer are better.
Rule 2 - Password Complexity: Should contain at least one character from each of the following group. At least 4 characters in your passwords should be each one of the following.
Lower case alphabets
Upper case alphabets
Numbers
Special Characters
I call the above two rules combined as “8 4 Rule” (Eight Four Rule):
8 = 8 characters minimum length
4 = 1 lower case + 1 upper case + 1 number + 1 special character.
Just following the “8 4 Rule” will be a huge improvement and instantly make your password much stronger than before for most of you who don’t follow any guidelines or rules while creating a passwords. If your banking and any financially sensitive website passwords doesn’t follow the “8 4 Rule”, I strongly suggest that you stop everything now and change those passwords immediately to follow the “8 4 Rule”.

II. Guidelines for creating strong passwords:
Follow “8 4 Rule”. Like I mentioned above this is the foundation of creating a strong password.
Unique Characters. Should contain at least 5 unique characters. You already have 4 different character if you’ve followed “8 4 Rule”.
Use Password Manager. Strong passwords are hard to remember. So, as part of creating a strong password you need a reliable and trustworthy way of remembering the strong password. Using password management tool to store passwords should really become a habit. Anytime you create a password, note it down on a password manager tool, that will encrypt the password and store it safe for you. I recommend Password Dragon , a free, easy and secure password manager that works on Windows, Linux and Mac. This can also be launched from the USB drive. There are lot of free password manager tools available, choose the one that best suites your taste and use it.
Use Passphrase. If you don’t want to use password management tool, Use Passphrase to easily remember the passwords. You can use initials of a song or a phrase that are very familiar to you. for e.g. “Passwords are like underwears, change yours often!” phrase can be converted to a strong password “Prlu,Curs0!”
III. Guidelines for avoiding weak passwords.
Avoid the following in your passwords. Even part of your passwords should not be anything in the following items.
Password same as username or part of the username
Name of family members, friends or pets.
Personal information about yourself or family members. This includes the generic information that can be obtained about you very easily, such as birth date, phone number, vehicle license plate number, street name, apartment/house number etc.
Sequences. i.e consecutive alphabets, numbers or keys on the keyboard. for e.g. abcde, 12345, qwert.
Dictionary words. Dictionary words with number or character in front or back
Real word from any language
Word found in dictionary with number substitution for word look alike. for e.g. Replacing the letter O with number 0. i.e passw0rd.
Any of the above in reverse sequence
Any of the above with a number in front or back.
Empty password




IV. Common sense about passwords:
All the following points are nothing new and very much common sense. But most of the time, we tend to ignore these items.
Create unique password every time. When you are changing a password for an existing account, it should not be the same as the previous password. Also, do not use incremental passwords while changing it. i.e password1, password2 etc.
Change your passwords for all your accounts once every 6 months. Since passwords have a fixed length, a brute-force attack to guess the password will always succeed if enough time and processing power was available to the attacker. So, it is always recommended to change the passwords often. Schedule an recurring appointment on your calendar to change your passwords once every 6 months.
Never write down your passwords. Creating a very strong password and writing it down on a paper is as bad as creating an easy to remember weak password and not writing it down anywhere. There are several interesting surrey’s done on this subject, where it was found that several people write down the password and keep it somewhere next to the computer. Some of them think keeping the post-it note below the mouse pad is secure enough. You should never write down the password on a paper. If you want to carry your password along with you all the times, use a password manager tool that runs from USB stick and take that with you all the times.
Don’t share with anyone. Anyone includes your friends and family. Probably you might have heard the phrase “Passwords are like underwear, don’t share with anybody”. We teach our kids several things in life. Teaching them about online safety and not sharing the password with anybody should be one of them.
Never keep the same password for two different sites. It is very tempting to create one set of passwords for all your emails, another password for all the banking sites, another password for all the social networking sites etc. Avoid this temptation and keep unique passwords for all your accounts.
Don’t type your password when someone is looking over your shoulder. This is especially very important if you type slowly and search for the letters in the keyboard and type with one finger, as it is very easy for someone looking over your shoulder to figure out the password.
Never send your password to anybody in an email. If you follow #3 mentioned above, this should not be an option. But the reason I’m specifically saying about this is because several hackers send emails as a support person and asking for your user name and password through email. Legitimate website or organization will never ask you for your user name and password either via email or over telephone.
Change password immediately when they are compromised. Even if you have the slightest doubt that someone might have stolen your password, change it immediately. Don’t even waste a minute.
Don’t use the “Remember password” option on the browser without setting the Master Password. Don’t use this feature of the browser to store your username and passwords without enabling the “Master Password” option. If you don’t set master password on the firefox browser, anybody who uses your firefox browser can see all the passwords that are stored in the firefox browser in plain text. Also, be very careful with this option and say ‘Not Now’ in the remember password pop-up, when you are using a system that doesn’t belong to you.
Don’t type your password on a computer that does not belong to you. If possible, don’t use someone else computer that you don’t trust to login to any website, especially to very sensitive website such as banking. It is a very common practice for hackers to use key loggers that will log all the key strokes on a system, which will capture everything you type including the passwords.

VOIP traffic through your firewall?

Can you send your VOIP traffic through your firewall and still expect good quality of service?

The answer is “that depends”. Most firewalls are not built to handle VoIP traffic. Firewalls actually stop and look at every single packet that passes through them for IDS (Intrusion Detection Signatures). This is a problem for VOIP packets because they depend on low latency delivery. Firewalls that ‘packet inspect’ introduce latency and further, may not be able to apply QoS techniques. So, as your users download files and your firewall becomes busy, it is going to inspect each packet in the queue and make your VOIP packet wait. This gives your phone calls problems like echo, static, or even dropped calls.

Most firewall vendors have recognized this and have rushed to upgrade thier firmware to support VoIP traffic. Yet the results have been disappointing - so you may need to buy a new firewall, or bypass your firewall altogether because VoIP traffic is just too sensitive.

I recommend you bypass your firewall completely for all VOIP traffic or IP Phones. Here’s how:

#1- Setup an alternate gateway IP on your WAN router. This is done with a secondary private IP address (such as 192.168.1.254) doing simple NAT in addition to a WAN IP (Public) address on your WAN router. Ask your ISP to do this for you, (California Telecom does it for you).

#2 - Now do something that may seem dangerous, but is actually harmless. Plug your LAN (trusted) and WAN (untrusted) ports of your firewall into your LAN switch. It’s harmless because your switch is smart enough to keep track of which ports are talking to which IP without bleeding over to the other ports.

#3 - Then plug your WAN router port (which normally plugs into your firewall untrusted side) into your LAN Switch. Since all your host traffic will go to your firewall LAN IP gateway (192.168.1.1), you need to direct your VoIP phones to your alternate IP gateway, directly to your WAN secondary IP (192.168.1.254). This will bypass your firewall completely.

#4 - You definately want to put a simple ACL (Access Control List) that only allows traffic to and from a specific IP (your VoIP switch IP) so your users don’t get any wise ideas and use the alternate .254 gateway to bypass their own traffic. This will also protect your network, but your VoIP traffic is free to pass through this 2nd gateway.

#5 - Last step is to configure your DHCP server for MAC reservation and have your IP phones pull a different DHCP scope that sets the alternate IP Gatway.

This will ensure that your VOIP IP phones are troublefree.

Any further questions you can email me: jim@californiatelecom.com