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re: The Official Unifi Talk thread/Let’s talk VOIP and self-hosting
Posted on 8/5/24 at 9:33 pm to maht87
Posted on 8/5/24 at 9:33 pm to maht87
Welcome aboard.
Since it is bumped:
About a month ago they upgraded from 2.x.x—->3.x.x. The upgrade to the “3” iteration comes with the ability to upgrade to their “pro” subscription which offers 5 softphone licenses (plus unlimited minutes, unlimited SMS (which i still haven’t even tested and don’t really have a significant use case for with the current implementation), and some numbers of CNAM lookups. I upgraded 2 of 5 lines (after discussion with Unifi support to confirm this was within their idea of “intended use) to cover my lookups. It’s not enough softphone licenses to give to all my users. Not all of them really need one, either, though.
After the upgrade, I had a bit of instability. 5-6 second delays before calls. Calls with no audio. I was running on a USG-3 + cloud key so upgraded to the newly announced Cloud Gateway Max (5x2.5 gbps ports, secondary WAN optional, runs all their apps. So it’s a small, non-rackmount Dream Machine Pro that only accepts m.2 drives). Exporting my configuration went well for most things, but Talk was not one of them. I had to delete and re-add each extension, and I had to edit the audio on the smart attendant to get it to play. Not exactly rocket science. Not exactly what I expected, either.
Instability continues quite a bit over the next month. There was a new release today. I swapped my primary and secondary WAN because my slower WAN is fiber and had better latency. One afternoon of that has been successful, unclear if from the update or the ISP swap, but it seems much “snappier” since the ISP swap (100mbps fiber connection with 20-25ms ping vs 200mbps coax ranging from 20-40ms ping, usually falling in the 30-35ms to The Big Three services on the Unifi dashboard).
Unrelated: no idea what’s going on with my Network since the upgrade, but I have a synology acting as a domain controller. There’s a couple of mapped shares. Some firewall rules. Not much else. We are mostly using a browser-based EHR that’s cloud-hosted. The computers can’t find it, and the drives aren’t mapping. When I noted in Network that it didn’t seem to work, I added a local DNS record which worked but now again seems not to work for some reason. Haven’t cracked that egg. It’s accessible like 12 other ways and pretty low priority for me (I can just manually remap or show users how to use the web login when the mapped drives don’t work. It’s not mission critical).
Since it is bumped:
About a month ago they upgraded from 2.x.x—->3.x.x. The upgrade to the “3” iteration comes with the ability to upgrade to their “pro” subscription which offers 5 softphone licenses (plus unlimited minutes, unlimited SMS (which i still haven’t even tested and don’t really have a significant use case for with the current implementation), and some numbers of CNAM lookups. I upgraded 2 of 5 lines (after discussion with Unifi support to confirm this was within their idea of “intended use) to cover my lookups. It’s not enough softphone licenses to give to all my users. Not all of them really need one, either, though.
After the upgrade, I had a bit of instability. 5-6 second delays before calls. Calls with no audio. I was running on a USG-3 + cloud key so upgraded to the newly announced Cloud Gateway Max (5x2.5 gbps ports, secondary WAN optional, runs all their apps. So it’s a small, non-rackmount Dream Machine Pro that only accepts m.2 drives). Exporting my configuration went well for most things, but Talk was not one of them. I had to delete and re-add each extension, and I had to edit the audio on the smart attendant to get it to play. Not exactly rocket science. Not exactly what I expected, either.
Instability continues quite a bit over the next month. There was a new release today. I swapped my primary and secondary WAN because my slower WAN is fiber and had better latency. One afternoon of that has been successful, unclear if from the update or the ISP swap, but it seems much “snappier” since the ISP swap (100mbps fiber connection with 20-25ms ping vs 200mbps coax ranging from 20-40ms ping, usually falling in the 30-35ms to The Big Three services on the Unifi dashboard).
Unrelated: no idea what’s going on with my Network since the upgrade, but I have a synology acting as a domain controller. There’s a couple of mapped shares. Some firewall rules. Not much else. We are mostly using a browser-based EHR that’s cloud-hosted. The computers can’t find it, and the drives aren’t mapping. When I noted in Network that it didn’t seem to work, I added a local DNS record which worked but now again seems not to work for some reason. Haven’t cracked that egg. It’s accessible like 12 other ways and pretty low priority for me (I can just manually remap or show users how to use the web login when the mapped drives don’t work. It’s not mission critical).
2
Posted on 8/6/24 at 7:47 am to Hopeful Doc
Still love hearing your experience with Talk.
I ended up rolling out ClearlyIP after my testing phase. We have a need for paging and AFAIK UniFi Talk still doesn't do it.
I don't have any experience with other VoIP providers, so maybe my experience is not typical, but Clearly is clearly more complicated and involved to set up than Talk. There's a lot more to fiddle with and the whole process isn't as cohesive, but it's not too awful and so far I've managed to get things to work well enough.
I did run into an issue with our paging horns, and Ubiquiti did come to my rescue there. We had an OPNSense router before, and it worked well, but the damned paging horns would not stay connected to the cloud pbx for more than about a minute after a reboot or settings change. I should mention that we switched from Cox internet to Starlink at the same time, and the horns did stay connected via OPNSense and Cox, but not OPNSense and Starlink. I assume it had to do with the double NAT situation that created, and I was not able to figure out the magic firewall/router settings to make it happen. I'm sure it was possible, but I just couldn't do it. I switched to a UniFi gateway and it handled the double NAT issue perfectly by default and the horns stay connected now. Just throwing this out there in case anyone else is banging their head against the wall like I was.
I ended up rolling out ClearlyIP after my testing phase. We have a need for paging and AFAIK UniFi Talk still doesn't do it.
I don't have any experience with other VoIP providers, so maybe my experience is not typical, but Clearly is clearly more complicated and involved to set up than Talk. There's a lot more to fiddle with and the whole process isn't as cohesive, but it's not too awful and so far I've managed to get things to work well enough.
I did run into an issue with our paging horns, and Ubiquiti did come to my rescue there. We had an OPNSense router before, and it worked well, but the damned paging horns would not stay connected to the cloud pbx for more than about a minute after a reboot or settings change. I should mention that we switched from Cox internet to Starlink at the same time, and the horns did stay connected via OPNSense and Cox, but not OPNSense and Starlink. I assume it had to do with the double NAT situation that created, and I was not able to figure out the magic firewall/router settings to make it happen. I'm sure it was possible, but I just couldn't do it. I switched to a UniFi gateway and it handled the double NAT issue perfectly by default and the horns stay connected now. Just throwing this out there in case anyone else is banging their head against the wall like I was.
Posted on 8/8/24 at 10:50 am to Korkstand
quote:
Still love hearing your experience with Talk.
I’ll share another:
Unifi gear loves to “hiccup” after configuration changes. Obviously, when you change something big, you expect the “provisioning” time to be in the couple minute range. Something as simple as adding a user to a ring group also triggers a whole system provision/pause/hiccup. Usually 1-3 minutes. I suppose I should’ve known the rule of “don’t mess with something that’s working during business hours,” but I was adding a softphone for one of the docs in the group (if you know, you know. But if I didn’t do it for him on site while he was there and show him it worked, it wasn’t going to happen. We are, in general, the fricking worst). It was a silly way to drop calls consistently for a couple minutes and get 5 employees complain. But hey, I’m an idiot.
quote:
I ended up rolling out ClearlyIP after my testing phase
Nice! I never got any of the config info or ever had a handset connected to it myself. Some of the users’ softphones actually still work here however many months we are out from porting.
I did enjoy 3cx with my short time testing it. My wife did not particularly like the idea of me setting up 2-5 handsets around the house to test it out. The nail in the coffin was that most the handsets I came into were EOL Cisco phones, and they wouldn’t provision. Then I also bought an old Unifi VOIP phone with Android. This is honestly a setup that I have NO idea how it didn’t catch on for general office use. Think a basic mounted smartphone-sized cheap Android tablet that had an integrated phone app + standard App Store stuff. So for a business user, a $150ish phone that displayed email effectively. It wouldn’t exactly force people away from the multimonitor setup, but it was a sharp-looking, useful tool (or at least when I had a normal desk job, I would’ve thought it was a super useful addition to my desk and good use of space). But by the time I wanted to consider rolling it out, the concept of some hardware being incompatible and investing in the most compatible hardware to test at my house to eventually roll into production was just too much. And the tweaking/configuration options were vast compared to Talk, which I’d imagine is how Clearly is.
There are a dozen reasons Talk isn’t right for everyone. And right now, as I understand it, reselling it isn’t “baked in” very well. But i am having a lot of fun with it. And I’m a lot more responsive to problem solving than the last guy.
quote:
I did run into an issue with our paging horns, and Ubiquiti did come to my rescue there. We had an OPNSense router before, and it worked well, but the damned paging horns would not stay connected to the cloud pbx for more than about a minute after a reboot or settings change. I should mention that we switched from Cox internet to Starlink at the same time, and the horns did stay connected via OPNSense and Cox, but not OPNSense and Starlink. I assume it had to do with the double NAT situation that created, and I was not able to figure out the magic firewall/router settings to make it happen. I'm sure it was possible, but I just couldn't do it. I switched to a UniFi gateway and it handled the double NAT issue perfectly by default and the horns stay connected now.
Well that sounds absolutely maddening.
There are some people who use an ATA and old analog paging systems in the forums. But there’s no real use for paging that intercom doesn’t solve for our use.
This post was edited on 8/8/24 at 10:53 am
Posted on 8/8/24 at 11:10 am to Hopeful Doc
quote:Yep. Neither Clearly nor the horn manufacturer could help. They had me try various things, but nothing worked. It was far cheaper to replace the router than to try to get help configuring OPNSense to work right.
Well that sounds absolutely maddening.
quote:I considered that since we already had analog horns, but I got these SIP horns because they seemed pretty cool. They can adjust their own volume based on ambient noise, which can vary widely here.
There are some people who use an ATA and old analog paging systems in the forums.
quote:Yeah, to your comment about the dozen reasons that Talk isn't for everyone right now, we've got 40k sqft of shop that requires multiple horns to hear everywhere.
But there’s no real use for paging that intercom doesn’t solve for our use.
Posted on 10/20/24 at 8:35 am to ElectricRose
Glad I found this thread. I'll be rolling unifi talk out to my church soon. Its just a single number I'm porting and only one phone, so it's as basic as basic can get when it comes to a VOIP setup.
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