Shoretel with VoicePulse
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Hey Scott,
Sorry to follow you over here on this topic :), but I check these boards now also great community add-on... I agree with you on the Voice Pulse thing. It might work.. the problem is that it might not. SIP is SIP for the most part, but SIP is also not always the same between all carriers because there are many settings in the SIP protocol and because they are not standardized it causes problems on certain systems.
I really don't understand why on Asterisk it seems like they can accept any SIP connection. I believe it is because you have direct control over the way each protocol is accepted and you can put in all the settings from a specific provider to make it work properly. For some reason on ShoreTel and other proprietary PBX systems you do not have this kind of control or access. ShoreTel requires the use of a SIP border controller through INGate usually we will use a INGate Siperator 21 or higher product depending on the amount of voice channels. In the INGate we can change the settings to work with any carrier, however, there are predefined carriers in the INGate SIP profiles that will work "Out of the box" with ShoreTel. You could definitely get Voice Pulse to work with ShoreTel, but it may take some engineering and support time with the carrier to get it working properly.
Those are my thoughts on it. All in all it is just far easier to get it to work with the carriers that are already certified with it.
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@TeleFox said:
I agree with you on the Voice Pulse thing. It might work.. the problem is that it might not. SIP is SIP for the most part, but SIP is also not always the same between all carriers because there are many settings in the SIP protocol and because they are not standardized it causes problems on certain systems.
I'm very surprised that the carriers are not putting in more effort to at least publish a how to as often this stuff is not hard. This also highlights why it is crazy that everyone is not on IAX2. We used IAX2 when we started with VoicePulse, worked great. Lower overhead, far less to configure, always "just works."
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@TeleFox said:
ShoreTel requires the use of a SIP border controller through INGate usually we will use a INGate Siperator 21 or higher product depending on the amount of voice channels. In the INGate we can change the settings to work with any carrier, however, there are predefined carriers in the INGate SIP profiles that will work "Out of the box" with ShoreTel. You could definitely get Voice Pulse to work with ShoreTel, but it may take some engineering and support time with the carrier to get it working properly.
Maybe we need to set up Asterisk as a border controller then
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Well.. now you are getting beyond my expertise :). If you could do that I am sure it would work great. However, I know that many of these companies want an all in one solution that falls under a single support contract and that's what the ShoreTel Border Controller offers them. Basically they just don't want to think about it. But in the cases where they do like to think out of the box a bit I'll keep you in mind to help with that!
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Asterisks is not a good SBC, I was mostly being silly. No reason that it would not work, though. An SBC is really just a fancy term for SIP Proxy, but good ones (Blox, for example) do a lot more in that realm and less overall than something like Asterisk.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Does Shoretel have any other SBCs that it is known to work with? What about Blox or OpenSIP?
ShoreTel strategically partnered with only InGate.. so much so that now that the whole system is completely virtualized even the InGate SIP controller is virtualized with the ShoreTel VMs.
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@TeleFox said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Does Shoretel have any other SBCs that it is known to work with? What about Blox or OpenSIP?
ShoreTel strategically partnered with only InGate.. so much so that now that the whole system is completely virtualized even the InGate SIP controller is virtualized with the ShoreTel VMs.
Seems like a point of fragility to have an external dependency outside of Shoretel's control that makes Shoretel unable to work universally.
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So it sounds like InGate needs an SBC in front of it to provide the functionality. If you consider the InGate to be part of the ShoreTel "black box" this because a somewhat normal approach.
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Digging through my notes I also have a note that Cox had to switch from a Atrica to Alcatel SBC. At least that was their claim. In the end they didn't swap the box and instead made changes to the existing Atrica.
