You'd have to be crazy or driven to build your own custom phone system, right?
In reality, there are several good reasons to take this approach. It takes commitment, though, so make sure this is the right choice for your situation before you embark on a custom phone system deployment. You must be willing to learn, configure, deploy, and supportyour phone system internally.
Note: We do help some customers with design, configuration, and deployment, and can consult for change requests. However, we do not provide on-call technical support for custom phone systems. We simply cannot guarantee an acceptable quality of support for this type of setup, so you must be prepared to handle technical support internally.
On premise requirement: Some businesses have a requirement to keep all critical systems onsite. If that's you, and you are willing to learn, configure, deploy, and support your phone system internally, then a custom system can fit the bill. We usually try to find a way around this requirement, though, as the benefits of a solid cloud-hosted system can outweigh the challenges of hosting internally.
Mostly internal calling: This is another reason to build and run local. If most of your calls go between extensions in your office network, and internal calling is more important than outside calls for your team (or you simply can't rely on routing over the internet through a cloud-hosted system), then you may have a good argument for a custom system.
Many extensions with low call volume: With a cloud service provider, you'll pay a monthly cost for each active extension. If you have many extensions that sit idle most of the time, that cost for unused calling capacity can really add up.
Here's an example for this scenario. A hotel with 200 rooms might be required to put a phone in each room, likely with speed dial for front desk, guest services, et cetera. However, most guests will rarely or never make outside calls on their room phones. You might need to pay for only 4 outside calling channels for all 200 guests. In addition, with a custom system, you could choose to mix and match VoIP phone models, using inexpensive feature-limited phones for guest rooms and selecting fuller-featured phones for staff use.
Integration: Software-based phone systems have the potential to be highly extensible. If you need to integrate with other systems, software, or services, having full control over a fully customizable phone system might be the only way to go for you.
Learning opportunity: In our early days with VoIP, we were simply excited about the technology and wanted the opportunity to learn and try new tools and approaches. Today we're glad we did, but there were certainly challenges along the way. You'll have to decide if going custom is right for you, and be willing to face any challenges that come up along the way.
Recommended Services
Still here? Great! Let's get you started with some options we know are worth using.
Since the early 2000s, we've tried dozens of VoIP service providers, ranging from free to premium-priced options. Our experience can be summed up easily: don't rely on free, and choose stable services with a good track record of reliable service and excellent support.
You get the benefit of our hard-learned lessons. These are the best services and options we've found for custom VoIP systems.
Vitelity: VoIP Carrier Service
Vitelity is our preferred voice service carrier providing VoIP call routing and termination, including SIP trunking, Virtual PRI, and regional DID (phone number) provisioning. That means they're the ones who provide the VoIP equivalent of traditional phone service; you choose what phone system and phones to connect.
We have used Vitelity ourselves, and for many customers, since the mid-2000s with excellent results.
Vitelity is a prepaid carrier service, allowing them to operate with some of the lowest pricing in the industry, while still providing top-tier quality of service and excellent technical support.
For small businesses with modest calling needs, we frequently recommend the Unlimited Numbers plan, which includes unlimited domestic calling on 2 channels (2 simultaneous active calls) with no per-minute fees. Overage (more than 2 simultaneous calls) is billed at $0.0144 (1.44c) per minute.
For larger businesses, or those with higher call volumes, we typically recommend the Virtual PRI service, which provides unlimited domestic calling channels to your phone system. For larger numbers of channels, bulk discounts are automatically applied to your account.
Side note: In addition to providing phone services, Vitelity can host your phone system if you want everything in one place (which can help when you have technical support issues).
RentPBX: Hosted VoIP Phone System
RentPBX is a hosting provider dedicated to hosting VoIP phone systems. That means their network infrastructure is tuned for voice applications, and they know how to build and support software-based phone systems.
We ran on a RentPBX VoIP phone system with Vitelity VoIP phone service for most of a decade while growing our business, and have helped dozens of other businesses get set up there. Their pricing is reasonable, with discounts for prepaid terms, and their support is consistently helpful.
When signing up and choosing your system, select FreePBX for a more mainstream interface with plenty of settings you can tweak, or PBX in a Flash for the ultimate in flexibility and configurability. RentPBX supports both, but only to a point! Your customization has the potential to break a system beyond their capacity to diagnose or support.
After selecting your phone system software, choose a region and spend some time checking your connection to the test IP addresses provided. You want consistent, low latency, and reliable communication (no dropped packets, minimal jitter). Set your billing cycle, enter a hostname (you can use this to create a DNS record for connections to your new server), and proceed with signup.
What phone system software should you choose? There are a ton of options, with costs ranging from free to very expensive, and various support options as well.
Since you're taking a DIY approach here, I'll recommend no-cost options we have used both internally and for customers with great success. Both run on asterisk open-source telephony software, which is open source and widely deployed in a huge variety of software-based phone systems.
FreePBX is a web-based management interface for configuring your phone system. It supports a wide variety of features and configuration options within the GUI interface, and allows deeper customization of config files if needed. FreePBX also offers commercial modules, and paid support is available.
We've used FreePBX internally and for many customers since the mid-2000s, and found it suitable and adaptable for many types of businesses, and using a variety of brands and models of phone hardware.
PBX in a Flash is a full-featured asterisk-based software PBX system. It runs on your Linux system, either on-premise or cloud-hosted, and builds your open-source installation from source code during setup.
We've used and loved PBX in a Flash over the years for its incredibly broad feature set, extreme customizability and extensibility, helpful forum community, and stimulating opportunity to learn more about all its components and supporting technologies. That said, if those don't sound like aspects you would enjoy, then buyer beware! It's all free, and you'll definitely earn it.
Phones and Other Hardware
When you build a phone system and connect your service for call handling, the final piece you'll need is a phone to make and receive calls.
Our favorite general-purpose VoIP phones are made by Mitel (formerly Aastra). They're well-built with good quality components, sturdy and durable, have speakerphones in the mid- and high-end models that rival industry leader Polycom for audio fidelity, and are an all-around very good value for the price. Also, like everything else we recommend, they are well supported.
Mitel provides phone and email support for years on each model, and publishes firmware updates with feature improvements, bugfixes, and security patches. They have consistently provided firmware updates for several years after discontinuing models to continue supporting the existing install base. That's good customer service!
If you want to add a compatible headset, our longtime favorite is the Plantronics CS510 wireless headset with DECT 6.0 wireless. The audio is clear, with a noise-canceling microphone, and the range is truly impressive for a compact wireless headset. DECT 6.0 wireless also means that you can use a large number of these near each other without suffering from interference.
Best of all, this Plantronics headset model plugs right into the dedicated headphone jack on the Mitel 6867 SIP phone!
You can really branch out to find a truly bewildering variety of phones and accessories to work with your VoIP system. Some are restricted to vendor-proprietary phone systems (e.g. Avaya); some are cheap and easy to deploy, but dissatisfying for users and suffer high failure rates (e.g. Grandstream); and some are more complex to manage and configure, but may offer better commercial support or high-end features (e.g. Polycom or Cisco). If you go beyond our tried-and-true recommendations, we wish you good fortune.
Help Getting Started
We all need a little help from our friends.
Want to get started with your very own custom phone system, but can't quite decide which way to go? Need some help designing, validating, configuring, or deploying your new system? Stuck on the Queues vs Ring Groups debate? You're not alone! Everyone goes through some version of this along the way.
If you do want some help, we're available for consulting, whether that's an hour or two here and there to keep you moving, or a full custom design, build, and deploy process.
Just remember, we can't provide on-call technical support after deployment.
We can provide consulting services for periodic change requests (e.g. adding new phones, updating system recordings, and similar non-urgent matters on otherwise working systems).
Ready for assistance? We're happy to help if we can. If not, we'll try to point you in the right direction. Just click through the "Schedule a Call" button below to book a time that works for you.