A host of LIP 9020 IP gigabit terminals were installed , with a number of LCD DSS panels to provide extra visual monitors for key staff. Robert Baker and John O’Donovan were deligted to accept their prize and were full of praise for the excellent transition from old to new systems that  Adrianus and Jan from Vertel managed on their behalf.

The post O’Donovan Baker Solicitors- August Winner of the 30 Year TV Giveaway appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

Business Owners, CEO’s and IT Managers:

4 Key Reasons to Move to SIP from ISDN or PSTN Telephone Lines

1) Security – Check out the previous blog for the main reason to change today to IP

2) Cost Savings – The most obvious and relevant reason for moving to SIP, heres our previous blog.

3) Flexibility – SIp delivers an amzing opportunity to business owners to move into new markets, check out our blog on flexibility

Moving Premises

If your business is in the process of moving premises, this is the perfect time to choose SIP for your business voice communications.

Why..?

Its so much simpler and straight forward, up to now , this is a list of the steps you would have needed to carry out.

1. Check what exchange new premises is in
2. If Same exchange as existing premises move to step 3, otherwise you now have 2 choices
   1. Put a message on your old number to say you have moved and that your new number is ****, there is a setup cost and a rental cost for this service every month
   2. Virtualise the number and divert the number to the new numbers ordered in step 3, there is a rental cost every month for this service, but more importantly every call made to your old number will incur a local call charge to your business.
3. Order new phones lines, ISDN /PSTN Lines, €200 for each ISDN Line, €3000 for a PRI/FRA Line and €120 for a PSTN Line
4. Move can only happen when lines have been installed
5. Contact provider and get lines either diverted or moved if in the same exchange on the date you wish to move.

Whereas with SIP

1. Order 1 Phone line and broadband
2. Order SIP Trunks from GoldStar

GoldStar will port your numbers on the day you wish to move. SIP is a great enabler in terms of moving your phone number to a new location. What was and is a chore to move your phone number from 1 location to another, especially where your new premises is located in a different telephone exchange from your existing premises, can be made an extremely simple part of your business move when you decide to use SIP in your new premises.Porting your number to an IP carrier is the most effective way of moving your telephone number, this process can take as little as 24 hours to take once you authorise it. By porting your number you eliminate costly installation of new lines and possible call divert charges to your new numbers.

Choose SIP when moving premises.                 

I would encourage anyone interested in finding out more about what SIP Telephony can deliver for your business to contact us on 021-4300737.

The post Moving Premises : Reason 4 of 4 for Moving your Business Phone Lines to SIP appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

Business Owners, CEO’s and IT Managers:

4 Key Reasons to Move to SIP from ISDN or PSTN Telephone Lines

1) Security – Check out the previous blog for the main reason to change today to IP

2) Cost Savings – The most obvious and relevant reason for moving to SIP, heres our previous blog.

A SIP Trunk offers infinitely more flexibility for a business user over a standard TDM phone line such as ISDN or PSTN. For an Irish SMB being mobile, quick to market, scalable are all key features which every business aspires to be, while also ensuring that they are always contactable. SIP Delivers on all these crucial business requirements.

Disaster Recovery

In the event of a failure of service, whether it be act of nature like snow storms, a power cut , or a complete outage caused by a JCB outside on the road, your safe in the knowledge that an automatic failover is in place to route your calls to a destination of your choice, giving you business continuity and ensures you are always contactable by your key customers.

Geographic Offering

Whether your venturing into a new market, or would like to present a different geographic number to some customers, either within the Irish landscape of on foreign soil, having a geographic number in your target market is a key business tool to getting your customer to call.

For example, a Cork business might see Dublin as being the next obvious step to growing their business, a Dublin number for their business can be assigned to your Cork office in a matter of minutes. The Cork business now has a specific Dublin number to advertise to their prospective clients in Dublin all without the need for a second office, second phone system or an expensive divert. Dublin calls can be answered by key team members in the Cork office.

This is extremely easy to provision with SIP and new numbers can be assigned to you in minutes, meaning your business is able to adapt quickly to a potential opportunity in a new target territory.

You do not have to restrict yourself to Ireland either, an Irish company doing a lot of business in the UK can send a UK number to callers in the UK when dialling, many of our customer’s find this an incredibly useful tool.

Scalable

A quick turnaround in the provision of extra services is often extremely important to business owners, instead of waiting for an engineer to call and provision a new ISDN Line, extra IP channels can be deployed immediately.

For Seasonal businesses, where call traffic is high during certain months of the year only and requirement for extra Telephone capacity is only for these busy periods. SIP allows you to scale up and down as you need to, again without needing a call out from a carrier’s engineer to provision or remove services.

Perhaps the most important part for our customers, where voice is mission critical. Having a twin pronged approach to your telephony providers may be a very sensible strategy for those businesses.

A business may want all inbound calls to come in over their normal ISDN lines and route all outbound traffic out over SIP, meaning in the event of a failure of loss of service with either carrier, you still have a failover option to provide that business continuity which is so important.

So in conclusion, SIP delivers for customers looking for Business Continuity in the case of a failure, it delivers to owner managers looking to grow into markets further afield and SIP is also highly scalable and ultimately offers businesses a very flexible solution over and above your normal phone lines.

Contact our office on 1890 911 611 , to get more pratical advice from our experienced Sales and Engineering teams.

The post Flexibility – Reason 3 of 4 for Moving your Business Phone Lines to SIP appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

To celebrate Ericsson LG’s 30^th year in the Irish market, GoldStar Telecom, Ericsson LG’s Sole Distributor are giving away a new 43” LCD Screen every month for 12 months.

The 1^st winner of the new 43” 4K UHD are the Corrib Oil Group, headquartered in Parkmore, Galway. They recently upgraded their existing Ericsson LG Phone Network to the latest models across 32 of their nationwide sites.

Alcom Voice and Data handled the upgrade which included a rollout of eMG80 Hybrid IP to the branch network and a UCP 100 IP PBX for headquarters , Mike Geraghty IT manager for Corrib Oil confirmed that the successful upgrade will save the group over 100,000 € over the coming 3 yearsm, through a transition of their phone lines to SIP.

Presenting the new LCD screen to Mike Geraghty, John McGrath of Alcom Voice & Data , highlighted the tremendous success the recent rollout had been, which included integration into Corrib Oils Codas CRM system.

Liam Tracey from GoldStar Telecom commented that GoldStar were delighted that the 1^st winners were a long standing customer and it demonstrated Corribs belief in the strong product line-up from Ericsson LG

The post 1st Winner of the 12 Month 43″ 4K LCD TV – 30 Year Celebration Giveaway appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

Business Owners, CEO’s and IT Managers:

4 Key Reasons to Move to SIP from ISDN or PSTN Telephone Lines

1) Security – Check out the previous blog for the main reason to change today to IP

2) Cost Savings

This reason is still as relevant today as it has been since SIP and VOIP was first introduced over 10 years ago.
Cost savings can be 2 fold , where savings will be achieved by reducing or eliminating your existing line rental , and on-going call charges will also be greatly reduced when migrating across to SIP.

Expect to see reductions of upto 75% on your line rental and cost savings of 20-60% on your call charges depending on existing provider and tarrif applied. Instead of having ISDN Line rental of €32.00 per ISDN Line which gives you 2 phone channels, switching to 2 IP Lines will save you upto €384.00 annually.

Your outgoing destination profile is key to your overall cost savings, whereby expect to see large scale savings on International calls and smaller savings on National Irish Landline Calls and Irish mobile calls.
Before you change from any provider, please ensure you get your existing phone bill analysed, giving you a clear expectation of cost savings.

There is also the cost of Not implementing a SIP solution, business continuity is vital today in the ever changing market place that we all work in. Being without your data systems as previous Cyber attacks have shown, can mean huge losses during the period where Businesses are effected.

Likewise an outage on your main Telecom provider can lead to lost business as customers are unable to contact you when they need to. Having SIP as a dual approach to your Business voice service will mean down time is kept to an absolute minimum, where your competior may be down because of the outage, you’ll still be taking calls and keeping your business going.

Please contact us today to see how much you can save by moving to an IP Voice Service from GoldStar.

The post Cost Savings – Reason 2 of 4 to Move your Business Phone Lines to SIP appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

Business Owners, CEO’s and IT Managers:

4 Key Reasons to Move to SIP from ISDN or PSTN Telephone Lines

You might say “Security is a reason to move to SIP ? Really?”

“Surely ISDN and PSTN are more secure than anything in an IP world?”

That’s not the case however, as our main traditional voice carriers in the Irish market continue to be asleep at the wheel in respect of providing security checks and balances for their customers when it comes to phone hacking.

These voice Telcos in some cases have measures in place to alert internally of problems with a customer, but alerting the customer and shutting down connectivity is still a manual operation. Whilst others are completely oblivious to a customer’s phone system being compromised.

In complete opposite our independent VOIP voice carriers within the Irish market are so conscious and paranoid about security and customer safety that the ones we operate with all have extremely complex security algorithms in place in order to ensure any suspicious behaviour is not only identified but also stopped.

So whether it be suspicious number calls to a non standard destination or a customer exceeding their allowed balance , you the customers outbound voice service will be suspended until the threat has been resolved.

Why is this so important..?

It turns a potential liability to you from multiples of 1,000’s to pretty much nil. Not only is there the financial impact of the threat but also there is the time spent dealing with Gardai and your traditional voice carrier and in many cases Comreg also in order to reduce your liability.

We’ve all heard of the malware and cyber attacks that are rampant at present, voice hacking is on the increase , so it really is time to ensure your business is secured.
So security rather than being a barrier to moving to SIP and VOIP is now a reason to , and a very critical one at that in terms of business continuity and peace of mind.

Security with SIP

IP Carriers will automatically shut down your outbound calls if there is a “suspected” issue
Your account can have a maximum call amount which will trigger suspension if exceeded

If your in any doubt in relation to your phone system security , please give any of our team a call at 1890 911 611

Your Trusted Communications Partner…

The post Security – Reason 1 of 4 to Move your Business Phone Lines to SIP appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

There were 2 types of business customers effected, 1) Those customers whose line rental was with Eir and their Outbound call traffic was with magnet, and 2) Customers with Line rental and call charges with Magnet.

Those customers whose line rental was also with Magnet had no other option but wait until Magnet fixed there issue. For customers whose line rental was with Eir but using Magnet to route their outgoing calls, then using the Eir (Eircom) Carrier Preselect Code – 13666 were able to bypass the Magnet issue and make calls out. We were able to help a number of customers by advising of the code.

All Irish Telcos have issues from time to time and in fairness Magnet did have a message on their website, so this isn’t a bash Magnet Blog, more a what to do to if it happens again for Magnet or any other telco other than Eir.

In past posts you will have seen our advise is to always keep your line rental with Eir, and use ourselves or a provider of your choice for your outbound calls. This means that if an instance like this morning happens, then you still can make external calls, by using the bypass code 13666. Otherwise having your line rental and call charges with 1 vendor means you have no option but to wait until the Telco has fixed their issue.

So, the advise hasn’t changed if your not using SIP for your phone lines, then keep your line rental with Eir. Gives you ever chance of maintaining uptime when other Irish Telcos have problems.

GoldStar Telecom – Your Trusted Communications Provider.

The post Telco Outages appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

The PM meeting covered the existing product lineup and outlined new functionality and features being proposed for the coming 12 months, including Cloud enhancements and User Experience Improvements. This year 30 Product Managers from North America, Middle East , Africa , Europe and Asia were in attendance with GoldStar Telecom also being represented.

The post Ericsson-LG PM Meeting 2016 appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

On behalf of everyone at GoldStar Telecom we wish you and your families a very peaceful and prosperous 2016.
To all those effected by the recent Flood Damage, we hope that 2016 brings renewed focus on resolving the flood destruction impact, and we wish you a happier 2016.

The post Happy New Year to All appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.

Christmas Breaks have often proved a very lucrative time for unscrupulous PBX hackers out there. The majority of businesses providing an out of hours answering service for their customers, which hackers thrive on.

There are a number of things that you can do to ensure your system is secure.

1) Ensure your voicemail boxes are not accessible remotely

Allowing access even by passwords to your voicemail box remotely can allow hackers the opportunity to make calls from your mail box. It is certainly best to use a voicemail to email service rather than allow remote access to your voicemail.

2) Ensure that all your system passwords are strong and no default passwords are in use anywhere.

Default passwords are like a Christmas present to hackers, they can even from prompts on the system recognise which vendors system it, their 1st easy step is to try that vendors default set of passwords

3) Verify that external access is not possible from your Main System Greeting

A simple check that you can do yourself, where you use a greeting like : Thank you for calling “Business A” please dial 1 for sales etc. , ring in to your greeting and dial the code you would normally do for dialling an external number, if you get an immediate disconnect tone, on dialling a digit, this is correct behaviour. However if you get prompted to enter a password, this is a potential vulnerability and one you should have closed for you.

4) IP/SIP Line Security:

The majority of present day phone systems have VOIP/SIP Lines as part of the system, so it is crucial that these lines are secure also.
a. Make sure your system only accepts invites from the VOIP Provider you use
b. Ensure the password on the account is strong and secure
c. Verify your VOIP Line provider has a limit to the amount of calls you are allowed make per day

By implementing the steps above, they will help to keep the hackers out and that you Christmas and New Year’s breaks are not spoiled by a very large phone bill on returning.

If you are unsure of any of the above, please do not hesitate to contact us on 021-4300737

The post 4 Tips to ensure your Phone System is Secure this Christmas appeared first on Goldstar Telecom.