setup for 2 accounts

Question for IPtel.

corrently I have a premium account.

I am working with a US based company and would like them to also use a pbx for call.

I have a US DID number that I can register at my PBX which is on the paris or franfurt server.

The problem I could have is when the US company registeres as an extension on my account the delay could be to big. If a US customers calls on the US did the signal goes to paris and than back to the US.

I have not tried it so I only assume this.

For this reason I want to setup a soho account for the US number and the company there can register their extension.

In that case my question would be that in order for me to receive the call would I have to register the US extension as a trunk on my premium pbx ?

or is it possible that I register directly on the US based soho server. I am asking this because I read somewhere that you could not logon the same ip to 2 different accounts, or does this only apply when these acount are on the same server (ip)

There are many factors which can cause delays over VoIP; It is not always the distance that can cause the delays.

I used the San Diego server in Australia, and the delay (minimal) was neither an obstacle or annoyance. I am now in Canada and use the same server, again the delay is very minimal and like in Australia not really noticeable. I also used it abroad when travelling through Asia and the delay was not a problem.

Personally, I don't think having 2 separate accounts in attempt to reduce delay between calls from Europe to/from US is going to help much. It will probably improve the US company's call delay for incoming & internal calls though.

The other thing is to try the audio bypass feature (per extension basis). While it doesn't always work (depends on your network set-up), what it does is connect the party to the 3rd party directly without going through the middle-man PBX. For Example: if the US were to make a call to the US through a US VoIP provider, even if the PBX was in Paris, the audio would go only from the US extension to the US VoIP provider.

Other ways to reduce delays:
- Set up Quality of Service on the network so VoIP traffic has priority and gets through first
- Increase the bandwidth available for calls to get through on (i.e. faster connection)
- Choosing a different Codec can also help with latency/delays. Some codecs take time for the computer to encode/decode adding delays to the audio. Others have less encoding/decoding but use more bandwidth
- A different ISP may be able to provide faster & better Quality of Service routing for VoIP calls.

This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by ozp on 24.04.2008 at 03:40.

RE: setup for 2 accounts

Registering the same IP to several accounts should be avoided also in case the accounts are located in different datacenters.

The importance of Public IPs

An addition to ozpoole's excellent suggestions is acquiring public IPs for use in the SIP UAs (IP-phones, ATAs etc). A public IP (and the absence of NAT traversal) will do wonders for the SIP Re-Invites the Audio Bypass feature provides access to.

This will reduce the delays and improve the audio quality, as long as the SIP Proxy of the trunk is in the same continent with the PBXes server used.

RE: setup for 2 accounts

My case is somewhat similar.

I'm in Canada, and my account hosted at www4.
I have another extension located somewhere in southern part of Europe. Voice quality between extensions is excellent.

However when someone calls my European party from a local to them DID, call goes via www4, i.e. via US.
Going back and forth makes all this too much of a good thing and voice quality drops severely.

Does it make sense to open a separate account hosted in Europe to handle local calls?


P.S. Unfortunately having public IPs is unfeasible.

RE: setup for 2 accounts

I believe it makes sense to open another account so your users in Europe will be closer to a server. Also, if their SIP UAs support multiple registrations, they can have an extension on each account. It helps a lot when an extension unregisters, the other one can accept the call.

Just be careful to assign unique ports for SIP on each registration (Line on SPAs), otherwise no calls will be able to complete reliably.

Regarding getting Public IPs in Canada, you are in luck if you reside in ON or QC.

RE: setup for 2 accounts

I'm in QC, but I don't know an easy way to get a public IP... Do you have any information?

RE: setup for 2 accounts

You are in luck. Can you get Bell ADSL service in your area?

What city are you in?

RE: setup for 2 accounts

Zitat:

Originally posted by Diafora You are in luck. Can you get Bell ADSL service in your area? What city are you in?

It's Montreal... But wait - Bell Adsl?! I know them way too well... for too long... No, no Bell internet for me.


Could you advise what is the best way to communicate between extensions of two different accounts? SIP URI?

This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by dor on 22.08.2008 at 02:01.

Multiple Public IPs in Qc

Hey, I feel the same with you. Videotron is the way to go, but a second IP from them costs about $20 +tax.

A business connection from Bell though, allows the use of multiple Public Dynamic IPs. These Public IPs are not Static but Dynamic, but since your SIP User Agents will be on these public IPs their re-registration will be instant, when the IPs will change.

I will be testing this setup next week, and if you are interested I can let you know how it went.

RE: setup for 2 accounts

Zitat:

Registering the same IP to several accounts should be avoided also in case the accounts are located in different datacenters.

i-p-tel, could you clarify this statement?

2-port ATA, such as PAP2T supports 2 registrations from obviously the same IP, but different ports. Am I allowed to register both lines to two different extensions?

This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by dor on 03.09.2008 at 02:55.

RE: Setup for 2 accounts

Here is what we have found so far, regarding registrations from SIP UAs which support more than one SIP registrations. This is meant as a general guideline, something like a "best practice" guide, which can provide you with redundant service if you so desire.

The crux of the issue, is that most of the currently available ATAs and IP-phones, don't allow their admin to explicitly set the signaling port (SIP port) to a different number, for every SIP registration. The exceptions to the above, are the SIP UAs from Linksys (Sipura) and Grandstream.

This is a very important setting, which needs to be provisioned with a unique port number, in all SIP devices connected to your LAN. That includes the SIP UAs we might usually forget to include, such as: Vonage, Packet8, PhoneGnome etc. ATAs, which do not necessarily have to do anything with PBXes, but reside in your LAN and possibly interfere with the SIP UAs registering to PBXes.

Getting back to the subject at hand, assuming the only SIP UA in your LAN is a PAP2T, registering both Lines to two extensions of a single PBXes account is feasible, but ensure the SIP Port, in the SIP Settings section, under Line 1 & Line 2, have unique numbers anywhere between 5061 to 5080.

But having access to a dual registration capable SIP UA spells the possibility of redundancy, provided you have accounts in different data-centers. Set one registration on your account in one data-center (NY for example) and the other in Paris or Nuremberg. But here too, assign distinct ports for Line 1 & Line 2, even if their SIP Proxies are on different IPs. This will prove invaluable, if your account gets moved to another data-center, in case of a temporary network outage.

As a rule of thumb you should never have duplicate signaling ports in your LAN. I hope this clears up any misunderstandings on the subject.

RE: setup for 2 accounts

I tried to register two lines of PAP2T to extensions of two separate accounts hosted on different servers: one on www4, the other one on www1.

Interesting problem appeared. I'm not sure how DNS SRV record works with pbxes.org, but it appears that DNS caching somewhere linked pbxes.org with a particular server, and then another line can't register as request sent (by DNS cache) to a wrong server. When cache expires, roles can switch on a random basis.

The "wrong" line eventually registers on the "wrong" server, but it takes few minutes with no connection, probably time needed to load my user on the "wrong" server...

Does it make any sense? If I'm right then registering to different servers using the same proxy from behind any DNS cache, be it on router or ISP is not possible?

RE: setup for 2 accounts

www1 www4 have different ip addresses, I don't know if you can just use the ip address to register extensions.

The only downside of this will be than whenever the server is done and your account is automaticcaly moved to another server you will have a problem registering your extensions.

RE: setup for 2 accounts

Both the FQDNs and the IP addresses can be used to register SIP UAs directly on the specified servers.

Keep in mind though, server fail-over will only work when your SIP UAs are registered to pbxes.org. In any other case, the SIP UAs will loose their registration until they regain connectivity to their provisioned server.

Any server failure can of course be mitigated with SIP UAs which support multiple registrations.