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

Breakup email sent, port requested on 3 lines.

Got an email this morning that the port to Unifi Talk on 2/3 numbers would take place Tuesday, 3/5.


Missed update: got one exactly 2w after the request went through saying we had given the wrong porting information (I won’t beat the dead horse over again and again about how or from where I received incorrect information). So the original port to response time was 2w. And the “updated ticket” to scheduled time will be something like 10d (a Thursday to the 2nd Tuesday following with the date it was announced/scheduled being 6d after the updated info).


Everyone has been practicing/playing with parking and intercomming and has both phones on their desk (all of which are on current firmware with current Talk implementation).


I did send an email inquiring about when number 3/3 will move.


I’m honestly having more trouble moving the POTS line that I use for fax from their account to mine than this porting process so far (which, at $38/m may eventually end up on the VOIP train, but I like to have the potential to frick up one process at a time, not multiple).


See you guys after we do it live!

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tes fou

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this is interesting as i have one client i recently setup on ringcentral and it seemed pretty straightforward....its for a hair salon so pretty simple setup, hardest part was configuring phones that were bought by owner BEFORE going to voip...price for ringcentral seems competitive for business level service provider

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Now I'm ready to ditch them, we have a bunch of unifi network gear in our business and really want to just buy a half dozen talk phones and roll this out

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Advice after half a day in actual production:
Buy a phone (or two), make sure your controller is Talk compatible (most are), play with it. They’ll let you try it free for 15 days. It’s $10/m for a new phone line for 3000 minutes.
If you use a “traditional” system with 1/few DID and everyone can transfer via internal extensions, you want their unlocked phones ($200 vs $79 for the Touch. Touch max is like $300 unlocked). Each DID = $10/3000 minutes + 50 SMS (did not test. Will not use. To implement texting, 50 is a joke of a number, and I don’t want to pay the price of texting when I already have multiple other methods of contact and don’t want to bother with consent, encryption, etc. Plus users would need access to the web interface, and there’s not really a solid management structure for that. The admin tools are great. But giving users access gives them access as if they’re read-only admins, basically (they can see all the stats on everyone else, other people’s voicemails…this really could use some work or some flushing out by me. But it’s only really useful to give someone access to voicemail remotely, and that’s not a huge need right now as people who are present are required to check people who are absent’s voicemails in our workflow. Even access via the app that doesn’t exist yet won’t change that workflow for us- we work when we work, and when we are off, we cover for those that are off)).

If you have half a dozen DID and everyone uses their own DID, then the locked phones are fine, but I would make sure you comprehend the difference between the two before jumping on one ship or the other. I don’t want to say there was a “bait and switch,” but the phones used to all be unlocked, then there was a pretty quiet “unlocked” price hike + new “locked” phones where you need 1 DID/phone and 1 $10 subscription per DID/phone. I do think those minutes also “pool” each month but do not “roll over.” Rate beyond purchased volume is around $0.02/m. I learned a bit less about the “locked” plans, but I think that’s all true there, too.


But in any event, if you’re considering it and already managing your own setup, $210-410 where you can probably return the phones or sell them near MSRP online is probably worth the gamble if you have simple needs (call, hold, transfer, parking lots). If, for whatever reason, you want a phone where you don’t have a drop, they work very reliably over wifi with a PoE injector like this one. So if you’ve got access to a standard power outlet and decent wifi, you’ll be fine. Obviously, I’d use phones at drops if I could, and once we get the old phones off the desks, the few I have on wifi will be wired, but it’s an option even for long term use from my experience (again, only a day in real production, but I’ve played with these phones roughly since launch and still have one of the first gen phones that’s got a full android OS embedded in it (a real miss of an opportunity honestly. But I understand why they simplified the process).




One gripe that’s been echoed online and should eventually be fixed:
The auto attendant.
It’s pretty easy to use. There are some useful tips online on their forums and in the help sections. They launched an AI help bot recently, but I haven’t tested it. A few things are buried/not intuitive (creating ring flows as their own user without an extension and making the “ring flow” user getting a single/6sec ring that can be moved to the last ring of the flow. Adding someone to global contacts to forward to an outside answering service from the auto attendant).
But the big complaint: you can select what happens during business hours and during nonbusiness hours. You can change auto attendants. But you can’t “schedule” your “holiday” attendant ahead of time (unless you adjust your “normal” attendant hours in which case you have a week to schedule it, and a week to readjust it). And you can’t change your attendant based on the day of the week, either. You can adjust the hours for each day of the week, but if your workflow is that certain users answer certain calls on certain days of the week (we basically have a different nurse field phone calls from patients each day and certain ones that are out a half day every other week), but there is no way to “schedule” who gets the calls. Current solution is that all the calls go to all the nurses, they can all answer, and one is responsible for the voicemails (which all go to one specific phone. I understand it to be possible to automatically transcribe them and email them to a common email address, but I’m honestly too lazy to determine if I could use that without a big disclaimer implying consent, and I have no control over how they email the transcriptions, and probably half or more of them are patients trying to pronounce medications, so the accuracy is getting to be usable, but it’s still pretty hit or miss for us), but the ability to have a 7 or 14 (or 5/10) rotating schedule that could be configured would be super useful for us. You may read this and think I’m insane. You may read it and realize you have a very similar workflow. You may read it and think that 14 days isn’t enough and monthly schedules would be the minimum required. But there are a lot of suggestions as to how they could/should be able to schedule their attendants, and I’m not particularly bothered by changing the business hours a week ahead of time for Good Friday and moving them back sometime before the next Friday. You do need something that isn’t an iPhone to adjust those hours. The attendant manipulation doesn’t do very well on safari on iPhone. Best to use any laptop browser. Perhaps it works better on a tablet or any kind, some other browser, or android in general, but I’d wager that they don’t really anticipate on you making that change from a phone, so I would plan accordingly (I have my office manager trained to adjust the hours on the attendant. She’s extremely non-tech oriented and nervous about it. We will certainly forget to do it, and I’ll find my way to a laptop/desktop to fix it if I can’t walk her or my partner through the process).





Also, I’m a rambler.

Some stats:

1) 1,351 calls over the previous 7 days (696 out, 654 in).
2) ~4100 minutes
3) the number that didn’t port right is ported (again, worked as of the day it said in the email, despite appearing to be there a week early. Outbound worked fine from the day it appeared in Unifi Talk.
4) call, handset quality have yielded zero complaints
5) transferred calls to groups show up as a whole group, so that’s neat (all nurses know that Nurse Z picks up phone on Day Y, but after 3-4 rings, they all are able to grab it)
6) you can’t see someone else’s line ringing and answer for them. There are workarounds (ring flows), but you’ll have to put some effort into this as there is no “here’s 20 extensions to view at once”
7) I think using the touchscreen to select contacts to transfer calls without knowing the extension is both useful but quite a bit slower than having a traditional phone with handwritten names/extensions on it, because you basically scroll through a cell phone address book. For 20 extensions, this isn’t cumbersome, but I do think that the interface could be better for somewhere that has a high call volume. It’s great for us though. Along those lines, I still haven’t touched a Max phone. But from every review, everything is just bigger. I would like to see more of a “secretary” format with “favorite” extensions in a more “traditional” look, because otherwise, there’s little benefit to the bigger phone (supposedly a better speaker. Even Protect isn’t utilizing the full screen with the Max phone though, so I’m really just not understanding the current state of affairs other than “bigger is better.”




So, the skeptic has come around. I have no reason to leave. There are some things I would change or like to see changed, but our needs our met and should only be improving (with an app in the next 2 weeks to meet their goal, though I’ll just place my wager on missing the deadline for softphone app).

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Have you looked into Vonage? From my dealings with them they are very well run and do things right.

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I did. They’re competitive with other trunking services (VoIP.ms (probably the least reliable but maybe reliable enough), nextiva, twilio, 8x8). I, since the post, have pulled the trigger on Unifi Talk. I am going to add one more DID in the next week or so, and at that point, I’ll be paying $50/m for my entire business phone service*


*phone cost was not terrible. There was a discount on the phones when I bought them. I bought a 48 port Unifi PoE switch (yes- these are overpriced. No- they’re not necessary. Yes- there are switches with more/better features, but I found a used one at a 25-30% discount, and I was having all the problems mentioned with my VOIP before, so I wanted a managed switch that I could power cycle per port and was already using Unifi (and I’m not physically present in the office for 1.5 of the standard 5 day work week).

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We don’t have much for complicated schedule etc other than it being handy to fwd calls to our cell during off hours or holidays as desired.

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That’s super easy:
1) Each phone can have a forwarding number set on the device itself. This is very manual. But the user can set the status to use the forwarding number vs the voicemail. When set to “away” and to forward, everyone can see their status is “purple” instead of the standard color (green) in the internal contacts
2) you can schedule for a 7-day workweek for “business” and “non business” call handling. Calls that come in at 5:01pm for an office that closes at 5 can be set to automatically go to the cell of someone (you HAVE to include that person in “Global Contacts”). You can also have it set to have a full auto-attendant for these hours (ie- you’ve reached tes for sales. The office is closed and will reopen (x). Press 1 to speak to (on call person). Press 2 to leave a voicemail that will be checked in the morning). You can also make it act exactly as if you’re in the office but the numbers ring differently so no one will ever know you’re off, if that’s the environment you’re trying to create.
Holiday schedule is unfortunately manual. The best current option is to create an auto attendant without a schedule, once the work day prior to the holiday ends, switch to that attendant, then any time after the business day of that holiday but before the start of business, revert to the “standard” attendant. This was recently addressed for “static” holidays in Access (I don’t use it). No word on adding the function to Talk, but users online want it, so you’ll probably see it come over. You’ll basically need to update it every year for all the “mobile” holidays (Good Friday, Mardi Gras, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving are very hard for the logic they use to understand. Which is simply picking a date on the calendar. It’s both easy and difficult for them to fix this, but “here’s next year’s calendar, pick your holidays” seems to be their solution, and I probably wouldn’t expect that to change. It’s probably no more annoying than your current solution, but knowing how it could be done (I personally have written recurring logic for most of these holidays), it’s annoying to see.

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Biggest thing is ability to take incoming calls, transfer/page and keep costs reasonable.

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Super easy. And there is something they use called “ring flows,” so you can make phones or groups of phones ring 1-6 times, then a next user/group (which can include the original phone that rang). A user can transfer an incoming call without answering it. They can also transfer cold (traditional) or warm (ring extension, say, ‘I have (x) calling for you,” hit the hang up button, then the person they called rings with the transferred call).
Of note- ring flows can be tricky to create. Works best if you create a user without an extension, create multiple ring flows inside of that “fake” user, and then they’re available for all the smart attendants.

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One item that would be nice, do they have a bulk import feature for contacts?

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Yes. It has a CSV import feature. I didn’t use it. You will need contacts for the incoming caller ID to show anything more than the number. This (CNAM lookup for incoming calls) is supposed to also be a future update/option (that they may charge for- I am not totally clear).

I sincerely appreciate your effort and updates ITT. I love reports on real user experiences.

Looks like they missed their Q1 softphone deadline, hope that's coming soon.

Resiliency test in production mode:


Ok. Not a test.



Main internet went down. I called in within 3 minutes of the notification. The autoattendant was still up and running. When the primary internet was restored (around 10 hours later), everything rolled back to normal.




There are a few online snippets I read where people’s Talk instance had difficulty running on WAN2 or reverting back to WAN1 after outrage. I cannot explain what their problem was or why it happened, but mine worked in the expected fashion (again, CKG2 and USG-3). Perhaps I was lazy in not testing the resiliency prior to production (considering the only online information was negative), but my real world experience was a positive one.




Still no softphone.