Xantek VOIP Blog

Did You Know? Call Pickup Service on Xantek Business Systems

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:23:00 +0000

It's a common business scenario. You are working late in the office, and you hear a phone ringing somewhere. It might be important, so you start hunting through the office to find out which phone is ringing. And just as you get there, it stops.

You can avoid this hassle if you add call pickup service to your Xantek Business Phone System. Call pickup allows you to dial a single code on your phone to answer any ringing phone in the office.

Or, it can be customized to answer only calls incertain areas. So, maybe, as Sales Manager, you only want to pick up calls in the Sales department.

There is no charge to add call pickup to any business PBX system. Call us for details: 1-866-553-3833

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

911 Status

admin — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:52:00 +0000

We have added a menu choice on the left nav bar called "911 Status". Choose this item to get a complete and up to the minute report of the 911 addresses associated with each phone number. This is the address that 911 responders will go to if called.

Also please remember that calls to 911 from caller id's that are not registered with the 911 service will incur a charge of $100 for each 911 call made.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Yealink Phones Security Vulnerability

admin — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:23:00 +0000

We have recently found a security hole in Yealink phones when located on a public IP. Having the phone on a public IP allows hacker access to the phone and extraction of the username and password. We don't really know what paths hackers are using to get the password from the phone. (If anyone knows, we would appreciate hearing from you.)

We recommend you take the following precautions on all such phones:

Don't put them on a public IP unless absolutely necessary.
If you must, firewall block all ports below 5000. This should prevent most access paths. Or better, block all IP's except ones that you need to communicate with. 82.192.91.0/24 is a known phone hacking site in Holland, so for sure, block that.
Upgrade to the latest firmware.
Use a very secure admin password. Passwords consisting of 9 digits provide a billion combinations. Adding letters and capital letters into the mix increases that number to 13,537,086,546,263,552. (13,000 trillion)

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Disaster Failover Plan

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:37:00 +0000

We at Xantek are pleased to announce some recent changes in our disaster fail over plan.

This plan is designed to provide survivability of your phone connections in the event of a major disaster on our end. We have always had backup service provisions, of course, but they have been manually implemented based on alarms received by our key personnel. The new disaster plan is automated and runs 24/7.

Our service depends on three critical server operations:
1. The SIP softswitch, which provides all authentication and switching for inbound and outbound calls.
2. A database server, where we store authentication, routing, and billing information.
3. A STUN server, which allows phones positioned behind NAT's to establish a path to our softswitch.
(These three servers are on three separate machines located in our primary data center outside Chicago.)

The new disaster plan monitors these three servers repeatedly, and in the event of a detected failure, reroutes all of your phones to log in on our backup softswitch, backup database server, or backup STUN server. (All of our backup servers are located in a data center in Norhtern Virginia.)

The new disaster plan relies on remote provisioning to accomplish its rerouting instructions, so it will only work on phones that have remote provisioning established. (We currently have remote provisioning available for Linksys and Yealink phones only.) Conversely, all phones that have remote provisioning set up will automatically receive automated disaster prevention.

Here is the scenario of a critical server failure:
1. The status monitor checks the status of servers every 5 minutes, so the average time to detect a failure is 2.5 minutes.
2. Upon detection of a failure, the status monitor rewrites all of the provisioning files with the new addresses.
3. Phones request provisioning information every 60 seconds, so the average time to reprovision a phone is 30 seconds.
4. At this point the phone will go through its reboot cycle; the phones will show that they are rebooting. Depending on the phone, rebooting takes anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds.
So, in most cases, it will be 3.5 to 4 minutes for the system to detect a failure and get the phones working again.

You need do nothing to take advantage of these services; they are being implemented this week on all phones which have remote provisioning. (This includes all of our business service phones, and many single user phones as well.) If you would like to add a phone to this system, it is only necessary to include remote provisioning in the phone setup. Call us if you need to get the correct entry for your phone.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Telephone numbers WITHOUT 911 Service

admin — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:56:00 +0000

The following telephone numbers DO NOT have 911 service. If one of these is yours, make sure that is what you want. (See next Post.) 2135502973 2135502974 2396036670 3018306400 3056530925 3056770545 3473421840 3476376619 3477159545 4079825932 5087444162 5092098302 5094951260 5134480405 5134480406 5418057077 5616926677 5616926684 6169186601 7072067691 7075044010 7075044011 7075084323 7075084525 7076347770 7077366425 7077722860 7078749150 7079310006 7165260000 7326340722 7726215044 8042120430 8324274030 8324274031 8324274032 8324274033 8324274034 8502600085 8503734006 8503734007 8503734008 8503734009 8503734191 8505476467 8505476751 8505476776 8505476858 8584294386 8584294387 8584294388 8584294389 8584294390 8584294391 8632618376 8632618488 8632618545 8633010160 8633010253 8634249404 8637631040 8637636268 8637636699 8637639900 8638247550 8638247795 9013341677 9092873829 9094440142 9095987011 9096144171 9098953183 9172849284 9727724469

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Rogue 911 Calls

admin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:37:00 +0000

Just a reminder about 911 calls made from accounts without 911 service:

Any phone in our system can make a call to 911 and get emergency response. B y law, we cannot refuse to accept such calls just because the user has not registered an address.

If the customer has registered his address with the 911 system, it is easy for the emergency response operator to get help on the way.

However, if a call comes into the emergency response center without a pre-registered address, it requires a good deal more work to get the address from the caller, find a number to forward the call to, etc. So for those types of calls (called rogue 911 calls), we get charged a service fee of $100 for each call.

Any phone unit can verify whether 911 service is properly installed by dialing 933. A voice response will tell the caller the address that is in the system or that the user is not in the system.

The 911 service fee is included in the cost of all of our business service accounts. But that does not mean that 911 service will be set up automatically. For per minute service accounts, such as residential service, the 911 service fee is $1.49 per month, and is added to the cost of the DID.

Even if an inbound phone number is NOT registered through our system, we can still provide 911 service for that number. (Example: a customer retains his ATT phone number and uses it for the callerid on his VOIP phone.) Since 911 is triggered off the callerid, we still need to register that number and its address for the service to respond.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Payments for Accounts

admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:39:00 +0000

Because of increasing regulation and compliance restrictions on the acceptance of credit card payments over the internet, we have decided to stop accepting such payments.

Instead, we will be using PayPal for all of our account payments. If you already have a PayPal account, you will have no trouble sending payments either with credit card or direct from your bank account.

If you don't already have a PayPal account, it is simple to open one. Just follow the instructions when you start to make a payment.

If, for some reason, you are unwilling to use PayPal, you can call us with credit card info and we will process it by hand. Our number is 1-866-553-3833

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

New Softphones

admin — Sun, 22 May 2011 23:20:00 +0000

We have two new softphones for you to consider:

1. Phone on a stick.

A complete softphone installation on a USB memory stick. This phone is based on technology developed by QuteCom. Plug it in to a laptop or desktop (Windows only). The softphone interface can be personalized with a message of your choice and any username/password to log in with:

Your cost for the stick with software installed: $19.95 (minimum order 10)

2. Phone Tablet:

The phone tablet consists of a WM8650 8 inch tablet computer, with phone software installed. It also comes with a web browser and email client. The computer runs Android 2.2 Operating System. And it comes with a 110v/220v 50/60hz battery charger with both US and European style plugs. A compact headphone is included for ease of listening and the tablet has a built-in microphone.

The softphone is based on Linphone Android Phone technology. The tablet can connect to any wifi system or to a wired ethernet connection.

The screen interface looks like this:

And it can be used with any valid sip account. Wholesale pricing $169 (minimum order: 1)

Original post blogged on b2evolution.