Cloud PBX

[petben]

Hello, has anyone got any recommendatiosn for a Cloud PBX? we currently use onsite 3CX which we pay sub £1000\year for. They have a 3CX cloud version but we have read bad things about reliability...but maybe that's not true, been fixed etc?

 

Gamma looks good (we have Gamma SIPS) but I feel it will be too expensive (quote incoming).

 

Any thoughts...

[Synkrox]

2.5 years into 3CX - hosted by them. No problems to report. Even migration from v18 to v20 went alright for me.

[STK91]

VoiceHost are very good. Never had any issues.

[petben]

2.5 years into 3CX - hosted by them. No problems to report. Even migration from v18 to v20 went alright for me.

 

what do you do for your SBC?

 

Thanks

[TechMonkey]

Migrated October to 3CX hosted with Clarion and not had any issues so far. SBC is a virtual appliance at the main site and T46U router phones on the smaller sites (max of 10 devices).

The hosting is something like £450 a year.

 

As mentioned elsewhere, the alternative I have seen banded about is the Yeastar CloudPBX hosted. I have not used it so can't comment.

[TheRobins]

2.5 years into 3CX - hosted by them. No problems to report. Even migration from v18 to v20 went alright for me.

 

About the same apart from ours is hosted by Co-Connect, worked out cheaper and they do our SDWan solution so made sense to keep it all on the network.

 

I run the SBC on a windows VM, its tiny and doesnt need any real resources. I have also just read they support RPI 5's now to be used as an SBC if you looking for something small and lightweight. We have a mixture of Yealink 46u's and 31g's and then a couple of Fanvil PA3's attached to some 100v line amp's and outdoor speakers for our paging system. All just works and has been ultra reliable. Some staff also use the 3CX mobile app and that also works well.

[timbo343]

We've reseached the 3CX system and been told that Recpetionist handsets that include a SBC suoport up to approx 10 basics where as a SBC on a RasbPi will support up to 50 basic phones.

[midweek]

Moved from Gamma Horizon to 3CX hosted via Fuse2. We have two sites so the SBC at our main site is a linux VM and the one at the nursery is a Yealink phone.

 

It's all been rock solid so far (had it for about 9 months). Far cheaper than Gamma and the management console is so much better.

[Synkrox]

You know I'd forgotten about it. It's running on a secondary DC on-prem. It's basically invisible and has zero impact on anything. We have 333 extensions registered, several receptionist Fanvil X210 phones with loads of BLFs too.

[kierans]

We self host 3CX in DigitalOcean with roughly 75 phones across two SBCs.

 

Hosting and licensing for the year is roughly £800

 

Never had any issues

[petben]

Thanks for all the replies. A concern we are having is if the SBC is onsite then our phone system is back to being dependant on an physical bit of hardware. Reboot/update this hardware and the phone system is down - seems like you lose the cloud benefit somewhat?

 

Can you have 2 identical SBC installs where the phones can use one or the other, hence getting redundancy?

[mavhc]

It's just software, the phones will be set to connect to a dns entry, if the hw the vm is on fails turn on a copy of the vm on another computer and update the dns. Bonus points for doing that automatically.

 

You could probably set the phones to have a backup server as another option

[Synkrox]

Thanks for all the replies. A concern we are having is if the SBC is onsite then our phone system is back to being dependant on an physical bit of hardware. Reboot/update this hardware and the phone system is down - seems like you lose the cloud benefit somewhat?

 

Can you have 2 identical SBC installs where the phones can use one or the other, hence getting redundancy?

 

If your servers are up, your SBC is up. Maybe host it on something redundant but not sharing a service that might require reboots during the day.

 

3CX Mobile apps don't use the SBC.

 

To plan for a full blown critical incident, the cloud based nature of it means that switching to mobile data or remote work is seamless. It's only on-prem hard wired stuff that drops off.

 

We had a closed day due to boiler breakdown, everyone worked from home and used their phones as normal, even receptionists answered the queues exactly as they would have in school.

 

When out on trips, staff use their phones as normal and can call reception via 3CX app just as they would if they were in school.

 

What I'm trying to say is... benefits vastly outweigh the risks.