Hi,
i’m managing a voip system in the company where i work (i inheritted the system). We have a freepbx system running on an old pc which sounds like it’s going to give up anytime soon. also i don’t like how slow and limited the machine is (takes 5+ min to access the web gui, freepbx not activated, no admin console and overall i never worked with freepbx). first idea was to get a new machine and run 3cx self-hosted, but their yearly subscription went thru the roof recently. i was managing 3cx before and i know to admin it, but pricing is uff.
so option 2 is a hardware dedicated voip central - grandstream ucm6301 sounds like what we need - we have 30 extensions, a few call groups, a simple IVR with 5 selections, work hours and out of work hours recording and routing, plus a few rules for internal calls going out thru the gsm gateway.
all extensions are 3 digit, cisco and yealink ip phones. no analog phones. 2 sip trunks to provider. No mobile phone app needed.
i’d buy 2 and use them in HA mode.
also we have a video door phone that works well with a yealink phone, so not sure if i need a grandstream that supports video, but the price difference between ucm6301 and ucm6300A (audio-only model) is not big…
system is running on it’s own subnet on a vlan. trunks are connected to a provider directly with no internet connectivity (dedicated voip port on the ISP gateway).
any advice on this ? IS this a good choice of hardware and overall upgrade?
thanks
Outsource the problem to a hosted VoIP vendor, you will save yourself time, energy and frustration rather than spending $800 only to be dealing with lowest end Grandstream UCM, looming GSM network sunsets, port forwarding, potentially needing static IPs from your ISP, staying on top of system backups, documenting what you have setup, and dealing with the various quirks and bugs of Grandstream’s PBXes and how they interact with your Yealink phones and your doorphones.
A competent vendor should deliver a hosted PBX that can meet your organizations needs, and handle firmware updates for the hardware onsite, call routing issues, and take on any support or changes needed on your behalf, allowing you to focus on the businesses other IT needs, rather than chasing Grandstream’s helpdesk and forums for answers on how to make their hardware do what you desire.
If your deadset on keeping this in house, get a virtual machine from a vendor like DigitalOcean (or your local equivalent that supports nightly backups), install FreePBX, FusionPBX or the software of your choice, and onboard your phones to this platform. Your monthly cost should end up being less than the power to run your current onsite FreePBX instance ($5 to $12 a month), in the event anything happens your ability to rollback to a known good backup is much easier, and you get a much better PBX to boot.
The pitfalls of self-hosting a PBX on-prem or in the cloud are when you leave for a different firm, are incapacitated or unavailable no one will be able to adjust anything, and the PBX will eventually become a security issue when a vulnerability affects the software stack used and no one updates this oddball server that everyone is afraid to touch.
we’d like to have this in-house like we had till now. cloud pbx is not an option, as we need telephone service in case of internet outage, and we have them. infrastructure here is what it is. it’s also a reason we have gsm gateway. we can’t depend on internet for telephony. (we also run our servers locally and nothing is online because of internet instability).
i don’t see the pbx system as security issue if the system is completely offline from internet. for telephony we do and always will depend on ISP to provide numbering and trunks, it’s a business agreement that we have to keep landline internet, voip and mobile phones on them to get an overall cheaper service. we’re a business client and have SLA with them too.
so nobody wants to go cloud, but i’d like something that is easy to maintain. i was considering engaging an outside company to make the move from freepbx to grandstream and afterwards i’d only be managing it from time to time, setting up holidays on the machine and changing extensions when people come and go, like i do now.
why would grandstream ucm be a bad idea? 30 ext, max 5 cc… i saw yeastar centrals for triple the price and while working on a s20 i didn’t see it’s offering anything more than a grandstream, except maybe softphones, which we don’t need.
What country are you in? Is bonding multiple differing circuits not a possibility?
https://www.openmptcprouter.com can handle connection bonding, or you can use a service like Speedify or SpeedFusion (which is just a hosted version of this software) to get a reliable pipe to the internet from multiple unreliable connections.
With 30 extensions, on-prem is probably the better solution for you. The Grandstream UCMs are very easy to configure and manage.
If you really wanted to make life easier, just backup your current FreePBX, install the latest FreePbX on a new box, then restore — everything will just work. However, it sounds like you prefer not to work with FreePBX.
Even better, install FreePBX to a new box. 5 minutes for a web page sounds like a hard drive going bad.
Cloud PBX companies are a money grabbing scam. You will still have outages, you will still deal with people not knowing what they are doing. I have 20 Grandstream PBX systems throughout my customer base and combined with twilio elastic sip I’ve had ZERO outages in 2 fucking years. With our previous hosted PBX in the cloud, I won’t name the company but they are one of the biggest, I had 2 outages in the last year and it effected every customer. They work perfectly fine with yealink phones. For backups Have the grandstream ucm back itself up to your file server or some other box and off-site it. Users that need a remote phone, have them use VPN and the free app. Also if it’s super critical to have redundantcy buy 2 switches and set them up in HA.
Anyone with networking experience can configure the firewall for VoiP and also QoS. The systems are set and forget. Do a backup and update the firmware every so often. Like it’s barley an hour of work a month and sometimes 0 hours of work per month. Your company isn’t going to be asking for changes to the phone systems daily or even monthly. Most companies in the cloud are 10 to 15 dollars an extension plus minutes. What an absolute fucking scam.