Sangoma SBCs Advantages for Hosted Providers

By Kate Stolworthy
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Jul 15, 2016
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Product Information

Securing voice traffic in a hosted telephony environment is a core requirement for any business to survive. Consequently it’s important that IP communication is managed and secured properly. Many hosted telephony providers from around the world deal with 100’s of products from different manufacturers, however without interop testing and secure networks, device compatibility can be hard to assess. With Sangoma’s E-SBCs, device interoperability can be simplified as it offers a secure enhancement to hosted VoIP deployments, acting as a medium between devices.

Here’s some of the key features of Sangoma’s SBCs:

Encrypt SIP signalling and audio media
Remote site VoIP demarcation point
Reduce firewall and NAT issues
Secondary Registration for Failover to Local Gateway Access
Ensure SLA compliance

Ultimately Sangoma’s E-SBCs allow service providers to take advantage of all IP communications
offerings, without compromising security, service quality, reliability and/or availability.

Sangoma offer a range of Enterprise SBCs with support for 5 up to 250 sessions and their carrier
models can handle up to total of 4000 sessions.

Find out more: Vega SMB SBC Appliance use cases
View Sangoma’s series: SBC Appliances

2016 Comms National Awards – Have you submitted your entry?

By Kate Figg
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Jul 14, 2016
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Events and Training

cna-blog

There’s just over 2 weeks to go before the entry deadline for the 2016 Comms National Awards and our entry is beginning to take shape. With a number of awards targeted at resellers and Service Providers, we wanted to share with you some of the categories up for grabs and the benefits of entering the awards.

So why enter the awards?

The build up to the awards helps to generate a buzz internally and helps to acknowledge your team’s hard work and dedication.
If you are shortlisted for an award you’ll receive free PR and be recognised among other leaders in the Comms and IT Channel.
A shortlist announcement gives you something exciting to talk about and share with your customers and stakeholders.
Entry is completely free!

To enter, simply register and download the application form from the CNA website, the deadline for entries is 29th July.

Top Tip: Nigel Sergent, Editorial Director at Comms Dealer is always happy to help with any entry enquiries, any questions can be directed to him at: nsergent@bpl-business.com

The Comms National Awards are prestigious awards and having been shortlisted for the past 2 years, we would encourage you to get involved – who knows you could be named champions at the ceremony which will take place on 13th October at the Hilton on Park Lane, London.

We look forward to seeing you on the night and raising a glass to your success!

The ProVu Team.

Snom 320 End of Life Notice

By Kate Stolworthy
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Jul 14, 2016
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Product Information

We have received notice from Snom that the Snom 320 will be going ‘end of life’. From our current stock levels, we predict that our stock will last until mid August 2016. Please note; this is only a prediction and our ability to supply this model is ultimately dependent upon the orders we receive. Once our stock has run out we will be unable to replenish it.

Up to date stock availability can be seen on ProSys.

2N’s Helios IP Verso Tamper Switch

By Gavin Sykes
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Jul 08, 2016
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Technical Hints

We have had an enquiry come in about how to wire in a tamper switch without an I/O module or a Wiegand module. I must admit I thought this was strange at first, given that I always thought it was fairly simple to do. It turns out it is but it is also easy to overcomplicate.

Make no mistake that 2N’s ideal setup would be a tamper switch connected to either an I/O module or a Wiegand module – every single piece of documentation I have found shows it connected in this manner. The idea is that it has 2 switches – we’ll call them switch 1 and 2 – with switch 2 connecting to the I/O module and back into the Verso, where it is recognised as a tamper switch, and switch 1 connecting to, for example, a 3rd-party alarm system, where it is recognised as a generic input that activates whatever the alarm system is programmed to activate.

The Verso however has its own generic input, into which you can wire switch 1 and have it behave as exactly that – a generic input.

Please note: in order to make use of a tamper switch in any way, you must have at least the Enhanced Integration Licence.

What you will need:

A 2N Helios IP Verso base unit with or without camera – 9155101C or 9155101
A tamper switch – 9155038
2 lengths of thin wire, about 6 inches long should do it – the lengths of wire I picked up for this demonstration are closer to about 6 feet.
A small screwdriver
Whichever other modules you wish to connect to the Verso – we have just an infopanel on our demo one.
The relevant mounting boxes and/or frames – we are using a 2-module flush-mount box and frame.
A computer on the network to do the programming.

This is the bottom of the backbox and the tamper switch is inserted where the green square is. — This is the bottom of the backbox and the tamper switch is inserted where the green square is…

The tamper switch is inserted like so... — …the tamper switch is inserted like so…

The tamper switch then needs wiring in via that little green terminal block on the left:

Fairly simple, just insert the wires into here... — Fairly simple, just insert the wires into here…

Your wires will ideally be a bit shorter than this!

As mentioned earlier, because of the way it’s wired in, the Verso doesn’t know it is communicating with its own tamper switch, so the below is what you’ll see in the web interface when you try and program it as a tamper switch:

To run a quick demo of it working, I told the Verso that its Secured State Control was controlled by the status of input 1 – all this does short of any programming is activate a red LED next to the camera in the shape of a padlock – without the Enhanced Integration Licence this is all it will be able to do.

By using a screwdriver to press and depress the tamper switch, I was then able to turn the red LED on and off.

Please note: If you are using a tamper switch in this way you will not be able to wire anything else, such as an exit button, into the same input on the Verso. The only way to use an exit button without buying an I/O module will be to buy a security relay.

Strangest bug I’ve ever discovered

By Paul Hayes
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Jul 06, 2016
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Product Information

I have just accidentally discovered a very strange bug (or feature?) on a snom phone.

It affects 8.7.5.35 firmware and possibly others. When tested on firmware 8.7.5.13 this doesn’t occur.

If you set up a SIP account, any SIP account (doesn’t even have to be a real working one) and the SIP password contains the word “monkey”, you get the following error message and the account will not work:

I have informed Snom about this. I’ve never had a customer reporting this problem, it is just funny.

Sangoma Vega SSH

By Chris Wild
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Jul 05, 2016
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Technical Hints

It is sometimes necessary to perform more advanced debugging on Sangoma Vega’s.

The process is documented here:

Sangoma wiki

I faced a strange problem when trying to SSH onto the Vega from my Debian desktop… the connection sat there and just timed out. I could telnet to the port and was prompted with SSH-2.0-Mocana SSH but nothing was happening with SSH.

I did some digging and found that there was an incompatibility with the algorithms in use in the default configuration.

You can get around this by specifying the following SSH options:

ssh -o HostKeyAlgorithms=ssh-rsa,ssh-dss -o KexAlgorithms=diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -o Ciphers=aes128-cbc,3des-cbc -o MACs=hmac-md5,hmac-sha1 root@hostname -p2022

Hopefully, this will serve as a reminder to me in future. If someone else finds this useful then all the better!

ProVu Win Independent Software Vendor Award at 2016 Comms Business Awards!

By Kate Figg
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Jun 28, 2016
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Company News

In May, we were named finalists in two categories in the 2016 Comms Business Awards, our shortlisted categories included: Market Maker Distribution Award and the Market Maker Independent Software Vendor award. Last week both our Managing Director, Darren Garland and Sales Director, Ian Godfrey travelled down to London to attend the awards and we are delighted to have been named winners for the Independent Software Vendor award!

Our independent software, ProSys was launched in 2006 and continues to be developed in-house by our development team. For those who are not familiar with ProSys, it is our online portal which allows resellers and service providers to access a range of tools designed to ease the fulfilment of Customer Premise Equipment, more information can be found on our ProSys information page.

As part of our entry process we were asked to submit a case study which demonstrates how ProSys has revolutionised our customer’s processes. For this we chose to focus on how we adapted our systems to work better for a leading Service Provider, here’s a glimpse of some of the work our development team carried out:

Among our range of value added services, we offer zero touch automatic provisioning for phones, and an API that enables resellers and service providers to integrate their services with ours. Through our API, customer orders can be placed on their websites and fed directly through to our despatch queueing system, however sometimes we need to unwrap our services a little to make them work for our partners.

The service provider in question had their own phone provisioning systems and their own ordering systems which they wanted to feed directly through to us in order to automate their order process. In response to this we created a completely bespoke API for them.

Through our developments, ProVu now sit in the middle with this service provider’s orders; we receive the order from them, translate part codes to their own part codes, ship the items and then they pull the order status information back from us to display on their system and populate their own provisioning server.

This particular service provider had a unique set of requirements which were not available elsewhere in the market. As our systems are developed in-house, we were able to solve their problems and they now have a solution which is entirely within their control, but has all the benefits of the automated ProSys workflow.

Our team work exceptionally hard to develop our systems to ease the fulfilment of CPE and it is a great honour to win such a prestigious award. We are delighted to have been recognised among other leaders in the Channel and are very happy to receive such recognition.

Gigaset C430H Update

By Kate Stolworthy
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Jun 28, 2016
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Product Information

C430HX The Gigaset C430H has been updated and has changed to the C430HX. The C430HX looks identical to its predecessor and there is no change to the pricing. The only difference between the two models is the C430HX includes Cat IQ 2.0 technology and supports HD voice.

ProSys firmware provisioning

By Chris Wild
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Jun 24, 2016
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Technical Hints

It has always been possible to manage firmware upgrades using our online phone management portal, ProSys. Support staff can do this very quickly by selecting from a drop-down box of available firmware on the portal.

What happens if you want a newer firmware, or just one which isn’t listed in the drop-down (yet!)?

Well, fortunately, it is possible to provide a custom setting in most cases to allow you to select the firmware you wish to provision to a device.

Proceed with caution…

You can use the “Quick entry” to add configuration settings to an individual device.
This allows you to add (key, value) pairs to the provisioning settings, giving you the power to provision firmware directly.

	key	value
	SYMB_ITEM_BS_IP_Data1.aucS_SPECIAL_DATA_SRV	http://p.gigaset.me.uk/profiles/n510_238/42/fw238.bin
	FIRM_FILE_PATH	http://pana.provu.co.uk/fw/TGP5xx-DECT-22.88_HW1.fw
	firmware	http://snom.provu.co.uk/sw/snom300-8.7.5.44-SIP-f.bin
	firmware.url	http://yealink.provu.co.uk/fw/T41/36.80.23.1.rom

Warning: If you are not sure you are doing this correctly, then stop! Speak to our technical team (support@provu.co.uk), we are happy to help.

As always, feedback is welcome, so please do get in touch.

Learn about the new Sangoma PBXact UC systems

By Kate Stolworthy
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Jun 24, 2016
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Events and Training

With last week’s launch of the new Sangoma PBXact UC Appliances, we are inviting resellers to join us for one of two webinars introducing the series of high-performance communication solutions:

Wednesday 29th June at 15:00 (GMT+1)
Thursday 30th June at 11:00 (GMT+1)

Find out more information and register your attendance

Presenting the webinar will be ProVu’s Muhammad Bajwa and Simon Horton from Sangoma Technologies. We expect the webinar to last approximately 45 minutes.

Categories up for grabs:

So why enter the awards?