Working from home, with a remote phone connection to your office PBX
Maintaining an office extension while working away from your desk
Why?
Most, if not all of us, have experienced (or is currently experiencing) stints of working from home during the past year.
Of course, it would be easy to be in touch with your smartphone. However, some of us would like the convenience of maintaining our desk extension. It allows for quick and easy communication with those working in the office, cheaper in the long run, better voice quality, and most important of all, keeping the ability to segregate just a little bit between being reachable when you are at your desk (i.e. working), or when you are not (attending to family, in the toilet, etc). You can always call back when you are done with your business, and get back to, um, real business.
How?
We are already using a plethora of Voice-over-IP solutions such as Zoom, Skype and Teams while working from home. The same technology can be used to get your desk phone to work remotely.
What do you need to set up this service?
First, you need to identify if you have PBX which is capable of IP extensions. Many of us already do. Examples include the Panasonic NS 300, NEC communications systems (SL 2100, SL 9100, etc), Yeastar, among many others. You may already have IP phone connectivity in your office.
In such case, you will need the following to set up an extension remotely:
- A Firewall set up in your office, so that phones working remotely, can connect back to your office via a VPN connection
- An IP phone capable of establishing a VPN connection to the Firewall in the office
Firewall
A Firewall capable of handling OpenVPN connections over the Internet will be suitable. Depending on your needs (Internet Bandwidth, number of users), a suitable Firewall needs to be selected (CPU, RAM).
For SME’s, Intel-based Firewalls running OPNSense or OpenWRT are found to be very cost-effective.
The VPN firewall can replace the ISP router directly, or it can also work alongside with an existing ISP router (using a Port Forwarding connection to the VPN firewall).
IP Phone
Any SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) phone should be able to connect to the PBX over IP. Please note that many brands such as Panasonic and NEC need licenses to be purchase for SIP phone connections.
However, not many phones can support OpenVPN by default. We recommend the Flying Voice IP-622CW, that come with both built-in VPN client and WiFi capabilities, at a reasonable price.
It is interesting to note that not many premium brands (including Panasonic, NEC and Cisco) support WiFi connection. We find that WiFi support is very important for folks connection from home.
More info
For additional discussions and information about extending your office PBX to your home, please contact sales@avm.com.my.
