Probably they will already have asked for it in the past, but I want to reformulate the question:
are you going to develop a VoIP package?
have you evere thought?
Mikrotik, with his knowledge and RouterOS with its versatility could make a diamond product.
You make the difference on the market today, compared to all the other poor solutions.
How do you mean? Like a PBX?
Yes, a PBX.
Initially similar like a FritzBox, in future powerfull like an Asterisk PBX
Would be a good feature to have however whilst Asterisk is available I doubt MT would spend the time and money developing it.
Asterisk should be easy to get running but of course then there is the task of building the RouterOS configuration interface that generates the Asterisk configuration.
No idea how much work that is, of course there already are many existing packages that are running in RouterOS and configured that way, but we cannot see how much work goes into that.
Unfortunately when this would be offered (as an optional package of course), the whining about having models with analog line interfaces (like on Fritzbox) will be next…
Do you think it’s not an interesting market for Mikrotik?
I see a market for a basic VoIP client and built in ATA (analog telephone adapter), so an end user can have a single box for Internet and Telephony, but I would object to a full blown PBX - It’s unnecessary bloat.
I would like to see Mikrotik VoIP support - which uses a built-in ATA -or- a mini-PCI ATA card.
I would give it a test and see where it could fit in my network.
North Idaho Tom Jones
It would be pretty neat to have a “pbx” menu where adding phones is as easy as clicking the blue plus sign, assigning a phone number to the new extension and MAC address, etc - but coming from someone who works in the industry, I can tell you that this is a real bottomless pit of features. SIP is such a loosely-defined standard and every vendor’s devices have their own quirks, and there’s all of this mess with auto-provisioning, etc.
If there was such a feature to appear overnight and it were flawlessly executed as a basic branch office PBX, then my company could probably make some interesting uses out of it, but I fear that this is pretty far out of Mikrotik’s wheelhouse. I’d rather see them spend their energy getting version 7 to come out and fix some of these long-standing problems with the core functionality than to see more bells and whistles grafted on, especially one as convoluted and prone to feature creep as VoIP.
Of course I do, it would be a fantastic string to the bow but look at how VOIP in general is going. With well polished production environments such as FreePBX and 3CX floating around which are all cloud deployable it asks the question of is it really needed? Add the hardware limitations of a lot of the lower end routers coming through. You end up specking a CCR for a basic office that wants a basic PBX.
Cloud hosted telephony is certainly the diresction to push into.
Whilst I do agree that it would be awesome to have a MT version and as before, a flawless button overnight that did it would be well used by the current market, I struggle to see how you’d swing a lot of the VOIP users away from their already well established platform.
That is right. Of course it would be possible to add Asterisk and copy FreePBX setup functionality (not really use it, I think, it is LAMP which is much to heavy for a smaller MikroTik, but copying it into the established RouterOS config system) but indeed there will be no end to threads asking for this or that special feature that “would make it a killer app”, and as we have seen the first whining about ATA-interface already came up 
I don’t understand where those people get those POTS phones from that they want to attach to their router, but I do not think it is a good idea that MikroTik add it to their routers.
Of course there are plenty of VoIP phones and external ATA boxes on the market.
But then, you can just take a Raspberry Pi, load a ready-made PBX image on it, and away you go. No need to integrate it into your router.
I would vote to have a simple router to use at a residents house that had an ATA built-in. This way we don’t have multiple devices to support and manage. It would be really nice if this ATA would connect to our current 3CX system. We service a couple thousand clients that don’t have cell service and want landline phones.
Get them a Grandstream GXP-16xx or a Yealink or similar.
How much power does a SIP 1 or 2 pots port ATA use ?
I’m wondering …
if a Mikrotik wireless client with two Ethernet ports could POE power an Ethernet SIP based ATA
-or-
if a single POE could power the Mikrotik and a SIP based ATA
and if all of it can be powered a single Mikrotik battery-backed-up POE injector
( What is a simple low cost solution for a Mikrotik Wireless client -and- for a Mikrotik copper/fiber connected client -where- there is also battery backup power for the client system (Internet & SIP based ATA) ? )
We currently do that. It would be nice to be able to remove the extra device and go to a single device for everything.
What extra device do you mean?
The original POTS phone is no longer required so it is not an extra device…
re: The original POTS phone is no longer required so it is not an extra device.
For my use of VoIP in my customer networks, I am wanting to do the following :
North Idaho Tom Jones
Three points:
Mikrotik need to focus on the fundamentals. Phone system probably doesn’t belong in RouterOS. Mikrotik could build an “app store” of third-party RouterOS modules, of which one could be a phone system, I guess?
The closest thing to a phone system that belongs in RouterOS is a) a SIP ALG and b) possibly an RTP proxy to help with complex topologies.
Perhaps there are some ISPs deploying RouterOS CPE who would find a router with an FXS port useful, but is 2017 the time to get in to developing this stuff? I suspect the POTS ship has sailed. On the other hand, if you can get a VDSL modem into an SFP, why not an FXS port in an SFP?
An FXS port as SFP is not the first thing that would seem obvious to me. More likely in a USB stick.
And what do you think, it exists!
http://amfeltec.com/products/piranha-usb-fxs-adapter/
The more you ask of a box, the more you invite problems and bugs. I don’t beleive in putting all my eggs in the same basket.
If you want an inexpensive and full featured pbx, get a raspberry pi. That’s what I have and it works great. Bunch of grandstream phones and that’s it!
When something goes South, I know where to look.
Cheers,
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