We get a large number of calls from people with questions such as "Why would I use VoIP?" or "What are the advantages of VoIP?" so I thought I'd make a short post answering some of these. I'll also cover another common one, "What is the quality of VoIP like?"

Firstly lets's talk about who can benefit from using VoIP technology. Pretty much everyone can in some capacity;

• If you have a home with teenagers who like to talk on the phone a lot you might like a second line (or third!) line to stop people hearing the busy tone when they call. It's better than call waiting as you'll actually know when someone calls and be able to talk to them there and then.
• If you're a SOHO (home office) or telecommute then you may benefit from having all your business calls separate to your home calls. This solves that old problem of people calling in expecting a business and getting one of the family answering the call.
• If you're a small or medium business then you will be able to increase the amount of incoming/outgoing lines to your office at a very reasonable price. You'll also likely save a substantial amount on calls.
• If you're a business with multiple locations around the country (or world) then you will be able to save a substantial amount off not only your normal calls but calls between offices will likely be free of charge.
• A contracting business such as building with mobile workers will be able to save money on calls to it's mobile workforce.

Let's mention VoIP providers briefly. These are the guys that offer you a phone service to go with your VoIP phone, much like Telecom offer you a traditional phone service. A couple of years ago there weren't many VoIP providers in New Zealand to choose from and the quality may have been less than ideal. These days there are a bunch to choose from and the quality is superb.

For an example we will pick on 2Talk (we use 2Talk for our calling here at nicegear). 2Talk has a range of plans on their website, from a no-monthly-cost plan up to larger business plans. Their entry level monthly plan (2Talk 500) offers two lines, two incoming numbers in your area (pretty much all areas of the country are covered these days), 500 included minutes to anywhere in New Zealand and most countries around the world, 5c per minute after that and 25c per minute calling to New Zealand mobiles. Along with that all their plans support a huge number of features; Voice mail (with emailed messages), call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, call transfer, locate me (rings multiple phones simultaneously), call recording, etc. etc.

2Talk is just one provider that you can choose from these days, I've discussed them here as we use them for our calls here and know their service a little.

This brings me to the quality issue; "What is the quality of VoIP like?". In a sentence, it's as good or better than your normal phone line. If one end of the call is a normal old style telephone connection then it's going to be the same quality as it always was. The reason I say it can be better is if you're calling a friend who is also on VoIP the connection could be digital all the way, in these cases the quality can actually be better than you're used to. If you'd like to test the quality feel free to give us a call (03 974 9011) and see for yourself.

For most people the cost savings and features that you get out of the box are the main interests of VoIP, although, there are many other advantages for advanced users too such as incoming numbers in multiple areas all coming to your phone, being able to answer your phone from anywhere there's an Internet connection etc.

Of course since we sell hardware I'll pop a couple of links here :) If you're interested in getting started with VoIP here's a couple of quick suggestions (I'll cover this more in depth in another post). The Linksys PAP2T analog telephone adapter allows you to connect up to a VoIP provider and plug your normal old phone in to make calls. The snom 300 or Linksys SPA922 will plug directly into your broadband router and allow you to make calls (they also have more advanced features like transfer buttons etc.).

Dealing with VoIP on a daily basis has the side effect of making me overlook some of the most obvious and useful features it offers so I'm sure I've missed something. If you think of something I've missed or have a question that isn't covered then by all means leave a comment below.

All the best - hads

There are a couple of benefits to using a dialplan on your IP phone, one of the main ones being that it allows the phone to know when you're finished dialing so it can put your call through without a delay or the need to push an extra button.

The snom desktop phones (snom 300, snom 320, snom 360, snom 370) support a powerful regular expression based dialplan.

This post shows you how to build a dialplan to handle most of the numbers in the New Zealand numbering scheme. So lets get started.

First off we'll handle local and national numbers, this will work for the whole country.

!^([2-9][0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d
!^(0[34679][2-9]{1}[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d

Next up is free calling (0800, 0508) and subscription (0900) services.

!^((0800|0508)[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d
!^(0900[0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d

Starting to get a little more complex now is Vodafone. There are a couple of oddities to their number which require a few rules.

!^(02102[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d
!^(021[346789][0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d
!^(0210[^2][0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d
!^(021[^0][0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d

The last two entries here could be simplified into one if the phone supported negative lookaheads, which it appears it doesn't.

This will handle 2Talk VoIP mobile numbers.

!^(02889[0-9]{4})$!\1@\d!d

and all other mobile numbers can be caught with the following

!^(02[479][0-9]{7})$!\1@\d!d

If you happen to use the paging service this pattern will catch that The paging service is a mixture of 6 and 7 digits long;

!^(0261[0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d
!^(0262[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d

Here's the final dialplan in a format ready to be pasted into the "Dial-Plan String" field on your snom phone. This can be found in the web interface under "Identity 1" (where 1 is the identity you're using) in the SIP tab.

!^([2-9][0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d !^(0[34679][2-9]{1}[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d !^(1[0-9]{2})$!\1@\d!d !^((0800|0508)[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d !^(0900[0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d !^(02102[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d !^(021[346789][0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d !^(02889[0-9]{4})$!\1@\d!d !^(02[46789][0-9]{7})$!\1@\d!d !^(0261[0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d !^(0262[0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d !^(0210[^2][0-9]{5})$!\1@\d!d !^(021[^0][0-9]{6})$!\1@\d!d

There's a couple of cases that we don't handle here; one is International numbers, these are a variable length and we can't really tell when they're finished being dialed. The other is some short service codes such as 018 etc. All this means is that you'll have to push the OK/tick button to initiate the dial.

Questions, criticisms, comments and suggestions are most welcome in the comments section below.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the service/emergency codes which is included in the full dialplan above which is

!^(1[0-9]{2})$!\1@\d!d

After some furious in-house development we're happy to launch our new website. We had a lot of positive comments from our old site, and a few comments on how we could make things even better. We took these on board and tried to address them with this new site.

We spent most of our time streamlining the existing functionality that we had with the old site, we've also added some new features too. Obviously we have added this blog so we can keep you up to date on what's happening with us.

Some of the other features; You can now tag products (and of course browse by tag). You can add your comments on products (let us know what you think of them - good or bad), along those lines you can also add ratings to products. The more people who use these systems the better they'll work for everyone so please do feel free to go click/type away!

We've made it easier for you to get through the checkout process by making you enter less details and providing you with more information during the whole process.

There's also a lot of details you won't see, we've spent a considerable amount of time developing our backend systems to streamline the ordering and shipping process. This allows us keep our administration costs down while we expand to cope with increasing demand. By us keeping our administration costs down it means you continue to get the cheapest prices.

Let us know what you think, either using the comment section below or our usual contact details. The new site framework makes it quite easy for us to add new features we will be introducing more in the near future. If you have any suggestions or requests do feel free to let us know.

For those who are interested in the gory details of how the nicegear site works...

Obviously being strong believers in open source software we've based our site on open source technologies. Doing so has allowed us to achieve a high level of functionality in a short amount of time. It's also allowed us to contribute patches back to the projects where we find that something is either missing or broken for what we need to do.

First things first, the site is developed in Python, a flexible language that's great for web development (amongst other things). There's a bunch of Python modules we use to speed up development; Werkzeug, a library handling requests and routing etc., Jinja for templating, SQLAlchemy, the well known database access and ORM, and finally WTForms, a new form handling library.

For powering the site search we're using the excellent Xapian Search Engine Library with it's bundled Python bindings.

All of these technologies are hosted on an Ubuntu Linux server which runs the Apache2 webserver with the mod_wsgi Python module. The database backend is driven by PostgreSQL.

On the client side of things, the jQuery JavaScript library and various plugins allowing for faster tidier development.

We're also looking at releasing the source code for the shop platform that we've built at some stage. Since there's a bit of work involved extracting a generic platform from the nicegear site it may take some time for this to come to fruition.

I do hope people find the new site easy and fun to use, if you've got any comments please feel free to leave them below. All the best - Hadley Rich and the nicegear team.