Click Here to Download PDF

Text from the article:

Frustrated at the cost of your phone calls? G7Eleven has the solution for you!

Voice over IP. The G7Eleven VoIP system allows a business to make and receive all telephone calls through an internet connection, removing the requirement for an expensive
fixed land line. “At G7eleven we are very busy converting hotels and other small to medium sized businesses from expensive fixed line operator systems to VoIP. In today’s climate the savings are hard to ignore and most hotel managers are very interested in understanding how this can work for them”. We are presently converting two major hotel groups to the G7Eleven VoIP platform”. Nick Whittome, Director G7Eleven

G7eleven is an Irish owned company that is providing innovative VoIP solutions to all businesses helping them to break free from high fixed line rental and mobile costs.G7Eleven was set up as the result of two IT business owners putting their heads together and seeing that in Ireland, there was a distinct lack of professional, technically minded, reliable IP phone system providers. On top of that, there was also no reliable, cost effective VoIP trunk provider. For this reason, Shane Hartigan and Nick Whittome established G7Eleven to tackle these problems and to finally provide a total solution for companies throughout Ireland. It’s time for G7Eleven, its time for New Thinking.

Save Money. By moving to a G7 Eleven VoIP system you will instantly eliminate the rental cost of Primary, Basic or PSTN line rental, in some cases this can be €300 or more per month. Up to 50% savings can also be achieved on all outbound phone calls.

Technical Expertise. G7eleven engineers are technically proficient with over 20 years of combined IT/wireless project experience, certified in MikroTik, Cisco and Microsoft technologies. They also boast significant in depth knowledge of VoIP system implementation and network management.

Personal Customer service. You can be safe in the knowledge that an in-house customer support member will personally respond to any issue that may arise in under 4 hours, or immediately if business critical. Through the easy to navigate client login area all customers will also have full access to all billing and call activity details.

Remote Access
G7Eleven’s internal systems allow their engineers to remotely login to a customer’s
site in order to resolve any issues and minimise any disruption that may be caused.

Customer testimonials
“We recently moved offices and were looking for a more cost effective telecoms solution and decided to move to the 3CX Windows PBX using the G7Eleven VoIP trunking service. We can now monitor all inbound and outbound call activity from our PC’s and have also achieved significant cost savings. G7Eleven installed this system seamlessly and we are very pleased with the results achieved to date.” Donagh Madigan M&C Property Management “We recently brought 2 separate doctors surgeries together into one and moved from an antiquated phone system to the most advanced telecom and VoIP system on the market. G7Eleven provided us with amazing customer support and set up of systems and we are now reaping the rewards with reduced phone bills and no fixed line rental.”
Niamh Cashel Healthcare

There are some important pieces of information missing from that blogpost.   The first most important piece of information is that this method will only work if the PC is domain joined.    Microsoft have in their wisdom not enabled this feature for standalone PC configurations.

The next obvious problem with the 3CX post is that the method they mention would tag ALL packets leaving that machine with priority.   Obviously this is not good if the machine is downloading updates, or generating other traffic out via your router.

Follow the process on the blogpost from 3CX, but at the point when you add the rule, make sure to specify the following applications: (you need to add three QoS rules).

3CXMediaServer.exe
3CXPhoneSystem.exe
3CXTunnel.exe

Which will look like this in your Group policy editor after you have added all three rules:

Once you have added the rules, the packets leaving your network should be immediately tagged so that you can go ahead and configure your router to prioritise the traffic.

Blogpost from 3CX

This is a shame, as it only means that the client has already lost faith in VoIP phone calls before a company like G7Eleven can come along to try to convince them that, in fact, VoIP is the way forward for everyone.  Recently, to bring people back to VoIP solutions, we install a demo of the phone system so they can see the full advantage of the technology, when it is correctly configured!

Without giving away all our secrets, the soution is a simple one.    It is vital, that above all other traffic across the customers internet connection, that the voice traffic is the most prioritised above everything else!    To do this, we must “tag” each of the IP packets leaving the network to the internet as voice, and then at our router, give it the priority it requires.

However, what about when you are using a software based phone system like 3CX?    Well, then the problem is a little more interesting as you need to not only set an advanced option on the 3CX phone system, but you also need to tell windows to allow the header tagging by a registry edit as it disables it by default.

First, set 3CX to tag the packets leaving it with a number you decide.   In our case we always use 47.   Once you have done this, you need to add a registry setting on the 3CX server….

• Open the registry editor: regedit.exe
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
• Create a new DWORD value called “DisableUserTOSSetting” and give it a value of 0 (zero)
• Reboot your server.

Example of Queue Control on MikrotikOf course, the configuration of such a thing is completely dependant on the phone system and phones you are using. For instance, if we have a client that has only one or two Linksys SPA phones connecting directly to our VoIP hosted SIP trunks, then the good news is that the Linksys phone has already tagged the DSCP field (in the IP header) with the number 46. Because of this, on the Mikrotik routers we install we can prioritise the traffic from all phones plugged into the customers LAN going out via our gateway router.

Now you can configure your router to prioritise the packets with the TOS/DSCP number you set in 3CX.

Of course, there is much more we could go into here, but we would end up with a seriously long blogpost!

Simply put, G7Eleven can provide you with the skills necessary to get this working in your company!

EDIT 20-01-2010:

Please note that this method only works on Windows XP based 3CX installs.   Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 server use a completely different method and therefore will not work.   G7eleven have an open case with 3CX to support the newer methods, and will update with a new blogpost if and when we hear anything.