Monday, January 22, 2007
Telecoms for Village Halls
A fair bit of research has given us a low-cost solution to our Telecoms needs for our village hall in Derbyshire, which I thought might be useful to others
We wanted:
- An inbound-calls + emergency-outbound phone in the main hall
- A payphone in the entrance lobby
- Broadband for our public-user computer
- in a location where the Mobile Phone signal on most networks is marginal
And we didn't want to spend much. Our payphone income is about £5 a year, which made the £200-odd of line rental from BT a real drain on resources. But without that, how would we allow users to dial 999 in an emergency, and how would a parent ring the preschool supervisor to warn them that they were running late?
Our solution, which has worked well:
1. Get rid of BT landline
2. Buy a secondhand "Premicell" adapter which allows an ordinary phone to use a mobile phone connection. The unit (ours cost about £70 from an eBay auction) has an inbuilt aerial (you can add a bigger one if needs be) - in our case, by mounting the unit high up in the building, we get a good enough mobile signal. We then bought a pay-as-you go SIM card to go in it - someone just needs to remember to check the credit every few months (you can do this online if you register).
3. To make sure that calls can still be made in a power cut (or if the power goes off in a fire), we have bought a small UPS (uninterruptable power supply) designed for a computer (about £40) - this has a sealed rechargeable battery in it which will keep a PC going several minutes. Because the "Premicell" unit uses so little power, the UPS unit would keep it going for weeks without mains if necessary.
3. Connect your payphone into the Premicell. The "default" charging rate is probably less than we pay the mobile company for our calls, but on the volume we have it probably adds up to a loss of a pound or two per year - a lot less than the BT line rental.
4. Buy a special phone for any other areas where you want users to be able to take incoming calls, and where you want them to be able to dial 999. The only one I've found is the Interquartz 9281P EEPROM phone, which is expensive - about £85 by the time you have paid to have it programmed.
The phone can be set up with one or ten buttons, and there is a special chip in it which stores the numbers for each button. In our case, we have just one button, programmed to the digit "9". The instructions then say "In emergency, press button three times". You could offer other fixed-number calls (eg to caretaker) - if so, I would advise programming the calls to an 0845 number that you buy for the purpose - then you can re-direct the calls to the next caretaker rather than have to have the phone chip sent away from reprogramming (which costs an outrageous £25+vat).
5. For broadband, we needed a decent connection - but knew it wouldn't be used a lot. So we have done a deal with a neighbour where we pay most of the cost of their fixed-line Broadband connection, which we share using a wifi link from their house into our building. It took a bit of setting up (it doesn't take a great thickness of stone wall to wipe out the signal) but it has worked well - we get a sensibly-priced broadband connection, and they get a subsidised broadband connection for themselves in return for housing (and powering) a wifi router.
6. An enhancement you might want to consider (we may do it one day) is to add a Spiura 3000 VOIP adapter, which would provide Phone-via-Broadband (VOIP). This unit has connections both for Internet (for the VOIP connections) and for an external analogue line - and it drops back to the latter in the event of power failure. You can also program it to route calls over VOIP or analogue (in our case the mobile-via-premicell) - and you would need to set this up to route 999 calls over mobile in all cases.
The benefits of this setup are:
- probably better call quality
- certainly cheaper per minute cost of calls
- the building would be able to receive incoming calls on a "proper" telephone number*
* Companies such as voip.co.uk can provide phone numbers on any UK exchange at minimal cost - just be aware that the first few digits of the "local" number will be in a different number range from that used by BT. For example, in our village, all BT numbers are in the 01629 650xxx format, whilst VOIP numbers are in different ranges, eg 01629 888xxx).
Crucially, you still need the Premicell - to provide the via-mobile route for outgoing 999 calls (and other calls during a power failure): VOIP systems do not generally offer 999 calls and your Broadband will stop working when the power goes off.
If anyone does set this up, please let me know how you get on.
We wanted:
- An inbound-calls + emergency-outbound phone in the main hall
- A payphone in the entrance lobby
- Broadband for our public-user computer
- in a location where the Mobile Phone signal on most networks is marginal
And we didn't want to spend much. Our payphone income is about £5 a year, which made the £200-odd of line rental from BT a real drain on resources. But without that, how would we allow users to dial 999 in an emergency, and how would a parent ring the preschool supervisor to warn them that they were running late?
Our solution, which has worked well:
1. Get rid of BT landline
2. Buy a secondhand "Premicell" adapter which allows an ordinary phone to use a mobile phone connection. The unit (ours cost about £70 from an eBay auction) has an inbuilt aerial (you can add a bigger one if needs be) - in our case, by mounting the unit high up in the building, we get a good enough mobile signal. We then bought a pay-as-you go SIM card to go in it - someone just needs to remember to check the credit every few months (you can do this online if you register).
3. To make sure that calls can still be made in a power cut (or if the power goes off in a fire), we have bought a small UPS (uninterruptable power supply) designed for a computer (about £40) - this has a sealed rechargeable battery in it which will keep a PC going several minutes. Because the "Premicell" unit uses so little power, the UPS unit would keep it going for weeks without mains if necessary.
3. Connect your payphone into the Premicell. The "default" charging rate is probably less than we pay the mobile company for our calls, but on the volume we have it probably adds up to a loss of a pound or two per year - a lot less than the BT line rental.
4. Buy a special phone for any other areas where you want users to be able to take incoming calls, and where you want them to be able to dial 999. The only one I've found is the Interquartz 9281P EEPROM phone, which is expensive - about £85 by the time you have paid to have it programmed.
The phone can be set up with one or ten buttons, and there is a special chip in it which stores the numbers for each button. In our case, we have just one button, programmed to the digit "9". The instructions then say "In emergency, press button three times". You could offer other fixed-number calls (eg to caretaker) - if so, I would advise programming the calls to an 0845 number that you buy for the purpose - then you can re-direct the calls to the next caretaker rather than have to have the phone chip sent away from reprogramming (which costs an outrageous £25+vat).
5. For broadband, we needed a decent connection - but knew it wouldn't be used a lot. So we have done a deal with a neighbour where we pay most of the cost of their fixed-line Broadband connection, which we share using a wifi link from their house into our building. It took a bit of setting up (it doesn't take a great thickness of stone wall to wipe out the signal) but it has worked well - we get a sensibly-priced broadband connection, and they get a subsidised broadband connection for themselves in return for housing (and powering) a wifi router.
6. An enhancement you might want to consider (we may do it one day) is to add a Spiura 3000 VOIP adapter, which would provide Phone-via-Broadband (VOIP). This unit has connections both for Internet (for the VOIP connections) and for an external analogue line - and it drops back to the latter in the event of power failure. You can also program it to route calls over VOIP or analogue (in our case the mobile-via-premicell) - and you would need to set this up to route 999 calls over mobile in all cases.
The benefits of this setup are:
- probably better call quality
- certainly cheaper per minute cost of calls
- the building would be able to receive incoming calls on a "proper" telephone number*
* Companies such as voip.co.uk can provide phone numbers on any UK exchange at minimal cost - just be aware that the first few digits of the "local" number will be in a different number range from that used by BT. For example, in our village, all BT numbers are in the 01629 650xxx format, whilst VOIP numbers are in different ranges, eg 01629 888xxx).
Crucially, you still need the Premicell - to provide the via-mobile route for outgoing 999 calls (and other calls during a power failure): VOIP systems do not generally offer 999 calls and your Broadband will stop working when the power goes off.
If anyone does set this up, please let me know how you get on.
# posted by John Geddes @ 9:00 am 
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