3CX Phone system

[gooner2004]

I was wondering if anyone could help me please regarding moving to a 3CX telephone system. I’m a business manager in a medium size primary school with a current analogue system, 2 lines coming into the school and 10 handsets. A local provider has quoted me for new handsets and a 3cx system based on a 5 year contract. The price is quite steep for a small school and would like to go down the route of buying our own handsets, buying sip trunks and setting this up ourselves. How easy is it please to move away from your current telephone provider and to set this up yourself?

[SpaceInvader83]

I was wondering if anyone could help me please regarding moving to a 3CX telephone system. I’m a business manager in a medium size primary school with a current analogue system, 2 lines coming into the school and 10 handsets. A local provider has quoted me for new handsets and a 3cx system based on a 5 year contract. The price is quite steep for a small school and would like to go down the route of buying our own handsets, buying sip trunks and setting this up ourselves. How easy is it please to move away from your current telephone provider and to set this up yourself?

 

Definitely doable, your new SIP trunk provider will assist with porting any numbers over, as for your 3cx instance I'd probably recommend a hosted solution so you could go direct with 3cx which is super cheap (Free for the most basic to tinker with) or go with someone like spitfire (as an example) who will hold your hand and do the lot, aswell as provide a separate SDSL connection just for your SIP traffic if you needed it, but if you have a decent internet connection it would probably be fine.

[sister_annex]

For all those using lots of handsets, what back end networking infrastructure (switching etc.) are you using? I am looking at moving away from our aging Mitel system to 3CX (or others) here but we have upwards of 180 phones (single site) some of these are IP based office phones which could be replaced with the soft client or newer handsets, however, around 75% are in classrooms which are currently analogue connections back to the Mitel controller so if I'm doing this change the Network stack will need looking at too.

 

TIA

[DrCheese]

For all those using lots of handsets, what back end networking infrastructure (switching etc.) are you using?

 

Ours is just on our normal switch gear that goes to all classrooms. The handsets are on a separate VLAN to keep the traffic separate.

In area's where we have limited network our phones have passthrough on them - So you plug your network into the phone & then plug the PC into the phone.

[SpaceInvader83]

For all those using lots of handsets, what back end networking infrastructure (switching etc.) are you using? I am looking at moving away from our aging Mitel system to 3CX (or others) here but we have upwards of 180 phones (single site) some of these are IP based office phones which could be replaced with the soft client or newer handsets, however, around 75% are in classrooms which are currently analogue connections back to the Mitel controller so if I'm doing this change the Network stack will need looking at too.

 

TIA

 

 

We have 100+ handsets on 3cx but we already have POE throughout, actual simultaneous usage is small and I'd probably expect yours to be the same so I wouldn't expect any bandwidth issues no matter what your setup is. We have 1Gb to all ports and 10Gb between switches but the actual usage is going to be tiny from the phones.

[localzuk]

For all those using lots of handsets, what back end networking infrastructure (switching etc.) are you using? I am looking at moving away from our aging Mitel system to 3CX (or others) here but we have upwards of 180 phones (single site) some of these are IP based office phones which could be replaced with the soft client or newer handsets, however, around 75% are in classrooms which are currently analogue connections back to the Mitel controller so if I'm doing this change the Network stack will need looking at too.

 

SIP is very low bandwidth. Even if all 180 handsets were engaged in external calls at the same time, you'd only be using 18Mbps. We have 120 handsets connected to our system and I've never seen more than 8 calls at the same time. So less than 1Mbps of bandwidth in use.

 

When our network infrastructure was installed, we planned it so every network cabinet had a provision of PoE ports, to handle Wifi and phones, so rolling it out has not needed any changes to our network stack here. The only thing we did do was put in place a VLAN specifically for phones, to split them off a bit.

[supportman]

We replaced all switches with Unifi POE a while back and when we moved to Microsoft Teams based phonelines just moved most people over the teams client on their laptops.

 

We only have about 10 actual handsets now as poeple find it much easier just calling from the laptop. We did buy microsoft teams headsets for all phone users.

[Zoom7000]

I've been using a demo of 3CX for a few weeks now and I think the admin aspect of it is excellent. The portal is great, really easy to get around and it's super intuituve.

 

However, does anyone else think that the frontend UI for general phone users is terribly poor? Compared to the likes of 8x8, RingCentral, Gamma Horizon, Zoom Phone & Google Voice, all of those look so much more polished than 3CX. Ironically, I feel like the UI for the admin portal for 3CX is better than the admin panel for all of the above!

 

Really wish they would just make the general UI look and feel a lot more modern!

 

Ultimately, we'll probably go 3CX for ease and price, but that's my main gripe. The app and web UI need a LOT of work!