The Official Unifi Talk thread/Let’s talk VOIP and self-hosting

Update: I went with Unifi Talk

I have a small office. 20 or so employees. 15 phones.

Our EHR is cloud-hosted, we have no local shared resources to speak of. I’ve recently taken the step of throwing in a synology NAS for their active backup for business feature for when I buy new laptops or when a drive crashes (one won’t back up due to errors so is slated for replacement when I get a drive in and some free time, i actually had one crash a week after setting this up). I’m in the process of joining them all to a domain so I can set roaming profiles (the nurses like to keep some useful sticky notes that aren’t shared…the only thing really kept “local” and most of it is on paper somewhere anyway).


I have a couple Unifi access points. I still have an old USG in failover mode because I have 2 internet sources (because about 4 days a year of no internet was so damn intolerable that this was worth it, and I’m half tempted to upgrade to a UDMP and add cellular failover as a 3rd WAN option but don’t necessarily think that would be useful (as it stands, it would take a few minutes, but because local resources aren’t necessary, a couple phone hotspots have us running close to normal operations).


The one thing that we have trouble with, but not just in that scenario: voice.

We can usually call and have everything forwarded to a cell phone when that happens. It’s far from ideal, but it more or less works to get things done.


But our current VOIP provider…I am not particularly confident in. Reason:
High call failure rate at certain times. Almost predictable times of the day. Some phones drop calls (consistently) when this happens or just disconnects altogether.

When I look at my logs, I show great internet connectivity, no failing over to WAN1 from WAN0, no ridiculous latency. There is a “spike” in internet throughout, as high as about 5mbps (on a 200/200 and 100/100 connection). Happens for a week or two at a time then runs smoothly for a few weeks, happens again.
VOIP providers suggestion is to try swapping WAN connections. I do. Problem is essentially unchanged.
I bought a new switch (previously he provided 2x 16 port unmanaged practically no-name switches which I never really thought were the problem. When I asked him if I should move them to their own VLAN, he essentially asked me what a VLAN was. Then I went ahead and moved them onto their own VLAN, confirmed they were working, etc). Problem recurred, more or less ruling out either WAN, LAN traffic as the predominant issue. He does have a decent network guy that I don’t interface with much. I invited him to the admin console to view the settings. He looked around a bit but didn’t offer any insight.
His response is basically to come put a second router, his own switch on one of my internet connections to “monitor the situation.” It continued to happen for about 2 more days and stopped (and I expect will recur in a few more weeks but has not yet). He has not come back with any sort of “aha! This is the answer” or anything. He has never offered any sort of inkling that he even knows how to review a log file and look at anything from the PBX or offer any real useful solution than “restart it all and try the other WAN.” And again, while I agree this is often a great first step when weird things happen, when you need to do this consistently multiple times a day for weeks at a time, I lose faith in that as a solution. And he could also come out and say, “the internet has been funny everywhere” and I would accept it. But he hasn’t. The problem seems to persist across multiple routers, switches, phones, and internet companies, leading me to question the PBX or something outside of my control entirely.


We tend to use under about 6K minutes/m. Am I an idiot for thinking of self-hosting my own VOIP or even going to Unifi Talk here? Literally the cost of the phones and service would break me even at the 1y mark or less if I bought the executive-looking Unifi phones (and I already have one of their ATA that I have played with for fax with favorable results).


And, then a step further, I have hosted a 3cx with VoIP.ms at home to test around and play with. I was able to configure it and do things like softphone extensions, a couple of physical phones, transfer, etc, but I’ve never been able to simulate a “full office environment” to test out, and that does make me a little nervous.


Am I being a wuss, or should I probably just take the plunge and self host my voice network (probably by porting to Unifi Talk because worst case I can port it all back to this guy or someone else if it doesn’t work as I hope or actually becomes somewhat of a hassle that I can’t fix?)


Update: I went with Unifi Talk (and there are updates later in the thread)