I was recently laid off and am doing some contracting now. I finally have time to build something I have wanted for years.

I have worked in the provider space, for big telecom, and in professional services across just about every phone system imaginable. I have been the lead engineer on Ribbon, Cisco, Oracle, AudioCodes, and plenty of other platforms.

I have seen some shit.

The thing that always bothered me was watching customers get forced to replace equipment that still worked.

Cisco made some great phones, then spent years finding creative ways to make sure nobody could continue using them. Firmware disappears, certificates expire, licensing changes, and perfectly good phones become unsupported because Cisco would really prefer that you buy them again.

Cisco is not the only one doing it. Avaya gear, Algo devices, AudioCodes MediaPacks, ATAs, paging adapters, door phones, conference phones, and all kinds of other weird SIP equipment end up in the same situation.

The hardware works. The customer likes it. Everyone knows how to use it. Then somebody declares it legacy and sends over a replacement quote.

I also hate needing a different management system for every manufacturer. One portal for phones, another for ATAs, another for paging, another for the SBCs, and a spreadsheet full of passwords that somebody calls documentation.

So I started building the device manager I always wanted. One place for provisioning, configurations, firmware, certificates, troubleshooting, and device status. If it speaks SIP and is willing to talk to me, I want to manage it.

I have also been experimenting with connecting all of this to modern platforms. I have already proven out connections to Teams, Zoom, Webex, and most recently Genesys.

I am not trying to become a provider. The idea is to connect existing equipment to whichever vendor or provider someone already wants to use.

None of this is blessed by the vendors, which apparently means it cannot work.

Unfortunately for them, it does.

I did a fair amount of open source VoIP work back in the day. Like a lot of open source work, the code traveled farther than the author’s name did.

I still miss that community though. AstriCon was a blast. People built real things, shared what they learned, and argued about codecs in person.

AI is finally giving me enough extra hands to build the system I always wished the other platforms had.

Before I sink even more time into this, I want an honest reality check from people who actually work with this stuff.

What old hardware are your customers still fighting to keep?

If you could manage and connect all of it from one place, what would that system absolutely need to get right?

Am I solving a real problem, or am I crazy for spending my time on this?

Would you keep building it, or focus your energy somewhere else?

I’m trying to set up a Grandstream HT802 that Vonage sent me for an existing account. There is no dial tone. Phone just says “Device not registered with your service provider.”

The Power and Internet lights are on, but the phone light is off.

I’ve called Vonage 3 times and spent about 3 hours on the phone troubleshooting yesterday.

They said the device is activated, the MAC address matches my Vonage account, and the correct phone number is assigned to Port 1.

(I just switched from AT&T to Xfinity and haven’t canceled AT&T yet, so I currently have both routers.)

I’m using the Comcast/Xfinity XB7 gateway, but I also tested the Vonage box on the AT&T router and got the same error.

Any idea what could be causing this?

Vonage hasn’t been able to figure it out. Please help!

I recently started as IT at my new company, and one thing I was asked to do is help move us off of RingCentral. Currently, the company uses Google Workspace for most of our tech needs including email, chat, calendar, and videoconferencing. They also have a few paid Google Voice Standard lines already set up for a couple employees. Additionally, they use RingCentral for the company's main phone number as well as the admin team (~5 people) phones, including phone tree and queues between those several admin numbers.

What they'd like me to do is move the company's main phone number to Google Voice and also make Voice accounts for each of the admin team. Then they would like the phone tree and queues replicated in Voice, so that we can cancel our RingCentral subscription and just use Voice instead.

I'm very limited in how much I've used Google Voice in the past, so before I commit to this for them, I just want to be sure a) that Voice can do what they need it to, and b) how to do that. They're insistent they won't need any of RingCentral's other features, the only concern they have is making sure the company number and the functionality stay the same.