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+--- Forum: Wishlist (/forumdisplay.php?fid=13)
+--- Thread: Softphone VPN (/showthread.php?tid=36613)
Softphone VPN - AaronL - 11-08-2016 04:55 AM
You guys are so close. Although I am very impressed by you phones, I have deployed at least 40,(small time) I have a need for a softphone solution of which I think you are the closest to provide. I am not the only one that needs this and I think you can do it relatively easily building on what you have already done.
I need a softphone with a BUILT IN VPN CLIENT. Preferably ,Open VPN. You have done this on your phones already, you have a softphone built (kinda) and the hardware on current smartphones can handle it.
No one that I can find has a softphone with a built in VPN client. I know they all "support" VPN but I specifically need it to handle at the softphone level. I don't care to have clients personal smartphone web traffic surfing across my network. That's the last thing I want to monitor.(as is required in my industry)
Please build this!
I love your your products and although your documentation can be lacking, at least you have some...
RE: Softphone VPN - Klaus_Yealink - 04-28-2017 10:31 AM
Hello,
Now Yealink support 3 soft phone: VCM/VCD/sfb mobile client.
But it can not support build in VPN， so if you have special scenario of special request, you can send an request to support@yealink.com.
BR
klaus
RE: Softphone VPN - Graham25 - 03-05-2019 09:06 PM
(04-28-2017 10:31 AM)Klaus_Yealink Wrote: Hello,
Now Yealink support 3 soft phone: VCM/VCD/sfb mobile client.
But it can not support build in VPN， so if you have special scenario of special request, you can send an request to support@yealink.com.
BR
klaus
We sell a cloud PBX product that we use the Yealink desk phones with because they have the Openvpn baked in. However more and more customers want to use a softphone on their laptops or mobile devices as this allows them to truly "cut the cord" and not be tied to a desk.
The all in one solution makes a much better product for non technical people to use and reduces the amount of support required.
Has Yealink done any development in the "Softphone with a built in VPN" space?
RE: Softphone VPN - jolouis - 03-11-2019 07:15 PM
Unfortunately this is not something that will likely ever happen/exist.
The VPN on the Yealink phones works so well because the Yealink phone is an entire dedicated piece of hardware (complete with underlying operating system, kernel, applications, etc). When you talk about a soft phone, you are dealing with a single user-level piece of software running on an otherwise multi-use device.
Networking is still, on virtually every modern device I've ever seen, handled at a Kernel/operating system level. You can build applications, like OpenVPN itself, that extend or apply layers ontop of that, but they are extensions to the underlying system with the goal of exposing themselves as a full part of it. In order to achieve a soft-phone app that would carry only the related traffic from itself over a VPN, you would need to:
a) Create an entire from the ground up implentation of OpenVPN or some kind of VPN encapsulator/traffic system that instead of talking to the Kernel and OS spoke only to the soft phone app itself.
then B) Make that work universally on all supported devices
then C) Integrate it into your own custom softphone app, and code your app to only communicate over that built in software tunnel.
This is not a trivial thing, especially given that to implement A) you are not only rebuilding OpenVPN, but essentially re-creating your own virtual networking stack to support the protocols and handling that would normally be done by the shared networking components in the Kernel itself.
Sorry to say that the time, effort and resources required just aren't worth the user gains. Yealink would not sell any more phones because of it, and while there might be some interest there is no way they would be able to charge enough for the softphone to offset the costs of developing and maintaining such a beast.