VOIP systems and setups

General
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I am a bit of a computer nerd and have a business background. I know a lot about linux and have been gradually learning more about SIP, VOIP, and voip.ms.

I’ve gotten somewhat decent at it, and think with learning more (making an effort to learn), I could probably become an expert.

I have wondered whether there’s any way I could leverage these skills to make money, or if this something that is hard to make money doing. I am also not great at people networking and people-facing skills; I come across a bit awkward, but I realize it.

Part of the reason I am wondering this is that I first learned about VOIP about 5-6 years ago when I wanted to be able to keep a number even if I switched phone company providers or phones. I didn’t like my number being attached to a specific cellular provider, nor did I like that my data from 1 company that was able to collect a lot of data on me was being sold to so many people all at once. I ended up going down the VOIP rabbit hole, and getting rid of a traditional cell phone. When I went on this journey, it was a huge learning curve and took me a long time to understand different aspects to setup, latency issues, and other concerns.

I still do not have a great grasp on hardware, as I do everything with softphones.

I am also not sure if there is even a market for leveraging these skills. I am not sure if VOIP is actually complicated or if it just took me a long time to figure out the basics. Some of the more complicated stuff involved network configurations to decrease latency and increase sound quality. I am still learning.

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You can earn money with these skills because many small businesses need VoIP setup, SIP troubleshooting, and Linux based PBX support. Most IT workers avoid this area, so the niche pays well and fits someone who prefers technical work over people facing roles. A practical next step is offering VoIP setup or troubleshooting on freelance platforms or working with local IT shops that prefer not to handle VoIP.

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How do I find out if I am good enough to do that?

If I just made ads on craigslist or things on Yelp or meta ads and stuff like that, with no history, would people hire me likely?

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The best way to find out is to start with something small and see how you handle real world issues. As for getting clients with no history, people will still hire you, but usually for smaller jobs at first. If you can clearly explain what you do and show confidence, someone will give you that first job. After that, your experience grows quickly. You do not need a long resume to begin. You simply need to solve the first person’s problem well.

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Just go for it and make sure you give yourself plenty of time to figure things out as you go.

If you’re unfamiliar with hardware based phones, buy some to get started. I’m mostly familiar with Grandstream phones and love their remote configuration options and pricing.

I am a reseller for them if you need to purchase, you can buy them from other resellers. If you buy from Amazon or Ebay make sure you buy from an authorized reseller or they won’t honor the warranty.

For setting up business phone systems, you’re gonna need to be familiar with hardware based phones for sure. Buy at least 2 so you can learn about things like BLF, transfers and such.

Whatever you do, don’t get into reselling the phone services, just set them up with a VoIP.ms account directly. If you resell the phone numbers and minutes, you will be regulated by the FCC if you are in the US and you do NOT want to deal with all that as a small player.

Good luck and let me know if you have other questions.

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That is solid advice. Some people tried opening a reseller account only to place their family under one plan, and it became a nightmare for them. The regulatory obligations, tax filings, and FCC requirements that begin the moment you are technically reselling telecommunications create far more work than a small setup can manage. They also ran into problems with SMS registration and account certification, which pushed them into compliance territory they never intended to enter.

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Wow, so being a US-based reseller, even if using voip.ms, creates a huge amount of regulatory and compliance issues! I had no idea!

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I set up a reseller account in the portal, but haven’t sold anything yet. I am not sure if just creating the portal creates FCC compliance issues. I am in the US. I haven’t sold anything.

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There was some concern a couple of months back regarding the Robocall Mitigation Database certification. People who had set up reseller accounts just for family were told they could ignore the notification as long as they were not actually reselling service. Hopefully the same applies here since you have not moved forward with selling anything.

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Hi Sipper - an old friend of mine is a voip.ms reseller. However, he doesn’t push it because it’s just a tangential, incidental thing he does for his many internet customers. (He’s been hosting / doing websites since long before Al Gore “invented the internet.” LOL) — we’ve both been developers for over 50 years - oh gads :confused: … old programmers never die, they just core dump…

You certainly can make money doing this - and you don’t have to sell or mess with hardware — that’s one major headache you really won’t want. Same with regulatory $hit - as a mere reseller, you won’t hit that wall. And, as others mentioned, you can code things for people. So reselling mixed with custom coding… But that’s going to be a tough nut to crack … you will have to market a lot, have challenging deadlines (individual clients / customers are very demanding), have to revamp and maintain old code — you better get good at keeping clean code bases (use GitHub), and superb record keeping. All the while providing world-class customer support - longest response time cannot be more than 24 hours (!). [Can you tell I’ve been there done that ? — that’s why I have very little hair left - and it’s all grey.]

I don’t want to discourage you - just telling you from experience that the climb is steep - but doable.

Here’s one related avenue, a surprisingly open area: Interfacing content management programs, - or CRM’s as they are normally called - with telephony.

This is basic stuff for bigger companies that have many clients to support. On a small scale, think of integrating say, your Outlook contacts on your computer with your Voip phone. Here’s the workflow: A call comes in, the glue code looks up the inbound caller ID in the contact database, and then, when found, up pops the contact’s info in edit mode. Or if the ID is unknown, it opens a new, blank contact form to fill out as needed.

Similarly, you could integrate a scheduling program. Consider what a receptionist at a doctor’s office could use to make patient scheduling easier …

And, as others have mentioned, there are indeed niche markets available to you. Most of the professional content management systems for mid-sized companies are not cheap. And for larger companies, most (probably now all) PBX systems have built-in CRMs. So the market in the mid to large area is basically closed to you as there are entire software companies devoted to programming these PBX systems. (I know two people who did this for a living - and hated it because it was so tediously specific.) Your potential market is thus the small, mom and pop shop. I’d say 1 to maybe tops 15 employees. There isn’t much CRM + Telephony available there. Ask an AI for Linux CRMs that have telephony extensions — three come to mind.

You might also not want to limit your telephony choices to VoIP.ms (Well, so sorry Canada :P) … I say this only because the VoIP.ms API here does not implement an outbound call mechanism. You can’t trigger an outbound call from software. (Huh, WTF? Oh, Canada, you’re missing a potential salable biz feature!)

And RE the OS: Obviously Windoze is primary, but when Micro$oft once again shot themselves in the collective foot by forcing people to buy new computers that need the TPM gizmo, there was a major, mass migration to Linux. (LOL, but finally the world woke up — and, no, I’m not a penguin phreak — I’m OS agnostic and code / use them all. But Linux IS the programmer’s OS, like it or not.) So, it should work ideally on weinerdoze, macs, and linux. If you have a Win11 machine, you can parallel run Linux using Hyper-V, VMWare, and VirtualBox — for a simple CRM that talks telephony, Hyper-V is the path of least resistance. So you could run windows and a small Linux window at the same time — and if you set it up correctly your end user won’t even realize there’s an instance of Linux running — it’ll just look like a window. Conversely, there are many superb distros of Linux that can run windows programs or Linux-based versions of windows programs, such as Office. The tougher one to crack is probably Outlook, but there are two content managers on Linux that are great substitutes. BTW, the distro called Zorin is well worth taking a serious look at. With a single mouse click, you can make its UI look so similar to windows 10 or 11 that a normal windows user might not even realize they are using Linux. And it is faster than windows 10 or 11. (Don’t argue - I hammer tested it :P).

So that’s another potential market area - getting people off Windows … they can still use their old, still fully functional computers instead of having to buy a new one just to $upport windows 11. (FYI, there IS a Micro$oft approved windows 11 version that does NOT require the TPM gizmo ! Yes, you can make win 11 run on an older machine - but it’s very hard to find and sort of so so in install difficulty.)

HTH

- Howard in Florida