CounterPath Bria for iOS
It has always been a dream of mine to be able to use my smartphone as a Hosted PBX extension that was always with me. Callers wouldn’t know that I was not at my desk. And it would solve the issue of frequent missed calls when I was working with one of our customer service representatives in another office.
I am an iPhone user and while there are many SIP clients available for iOS, none seemed to actually do the job in such a way as to encourage me to actually adopt them as a regular part of my day. Problems such as the need to manually start them, poor call quality, unreliable inbound calling and massive battery drain were all reasons to not bother. I’ve tried CounterPath Bria and Acrobits GroundWire, among others.
Recently, I gave it another try and discovered that Bria actually works very well on my iPhone 4S–with some caveats that I will explain below:
First, I found that disabling Allow 3G Calls makes a huge difference to my battery life. With this feature enabled, I was unable to make it a full day. Since I found that receiving calls on 3G did not really work reliably anyway, I disabled it.
Second, I enabled Alert Answer which lets you answer an incoming call with a single swipe of your finger–just like you can with a normal mobile phone call.
Lastly, I disabled Alert Missed because I am frequently receiving calls on the Polycom SoundPoint IP that sits on my desk and I do not want to see all those missed calls on my iPhone.
Amazingly, when I walk into range of a known wireless network (Wifi), the Bria re-registers and I start receiving calls. My battery life is adequate and the client is even active after a reboot of the iPhone. Although these settings are really not material to how a mobile softphone works, they made the difference to allow me to use it regularly.
Give it a try and tell me if it works for you! As always, if you need assistance, please contact the Versature customer service team by dialling 611 on your Versature Hosted PBX extension or simply calling 877.498.3772, Option 3.
Adam Sherman - Chief Technology Officer
Adam is a co-founder and CTO of Versature and is responsible for the company’s technological direction and product development. He has over 15 years of experience in the hosted service industry, which is way back before anyone cared to call it the cloud.
Comments
Thanks Aaron .. Did you have to call Telus support to enable this option? Is there a specific name for the service that other customers should ask for? Please tell me they are not charging for this!
If you want to use Bria software on your Telus phone, there is a feature you can get that will allow all ports to be open, allowing the Bria service to connect to Versature with no issues. If you try to use Bria on the 4G/LTE network without this feature it will not work. If you are on a WiFi connection, it will work no problem.