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
thanks for replies to all of you.
i’ve worked with elastix in the past (self-hosted) and 3cx (cloud), elastix was again on some crappy machine that also had problems. why companies always re-use old pcs for running pbx is beyond me. 3cx was okayish and worked mostly as long there was internet running, but now that i wanted to self-host 3cx, i saw their subscription cost and said no fucking way to pay that much. 2 years of 3cx covers the cost of 2 ucm machines.someone mentioned backup to a network place - yes we’ve got them. as for firewall the ucm, i don’t need internet on it and the ISP don’t have internet on the voip port anyway. so the machine can be completely offline. not sure the lan port on the UCM can support a hybrid port (native untagged vlan and a different tagged vlan) - the UCM have 3 ports (wan, 2 x lan - but the 2nd lan must be connected to the 2nc UCM for HA). i can do nat tho. or option 2 is not to use HA, and have the 2nd UCM in spare sitting nearby unplugged and when the 1st dies to simply unplug it and plug the 2nd unit. this is a more real outcome, that way i can do automatic backups too because the NAS are not in voip vlan, but in native subnet.
freepbx is , to me, complicated. it’s not as logical as elastix was, and far far away from the 3cx logic. we also don’t need softphones as everybody that is out of office has a mobile phone with ISP VPN so we all have a short 3 digit phone number as when we’re in the offices, plus the gsm gateway plays a role to bridge the pbx to mobile phone. since the whole service is from the same ISP, we pay a fixed monthly price regardless of landline or gsm minutes, sms, internet usage. so i don’t need to think about it.
so oveall - if the UCM is not a good choice for us, but we want to stay local, what is that other choice - the machine that runs freepbx ? what is that called and is it available in europe? everything we buy must be from from inside the country but perhaps a distributor can import it from europe. i bet the price would be high for such a machine and not 300eur like the ucm costs.
asterisk is a good option. easy and stable.
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.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.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.
The Grandstream UCM will work fine for you …. I’ve had good luck with them. It is running Asterisk, just like FreePBX.
You might want to consider the commercial version of FreePBX (and even the corresponding supported hardware if you like), I’m not allowed to mention it by name directly due to crazy overzealous enforcement of Rule #1 I will never understand. In any event, having used both I find it is quite a bit nicer than FreePBX because it comes with so many additional and useful modules although the HA failover capability is an extra cost option but I think it’s also a “hands off” or automatic thing so if the primary system fails the second one takes over without someone having to do something to make that happen.
The device you mention is basically the same thing but with a different skin that will take more getting used to, by using the commercial version of FreePBX you would basically have what you have now except a little more (but still totally familiar) and running on modern, supported hardware.
What you suggest will of course so exactly the same thing but have more of a learning curve.
He’s already using FreePBX — whether it is the commercial version or the free version, it works the same (and it sounds like he doesn’t want to stay with it).
i have installed over 50 ucms from grandstream they are extremly good and cheap.
Really good product
I install Grandstream PBXs, i probably installed 100s, from 6102 to HA 6510 with HA100.
I do not really recommend this product, use a workstation computer with VitalPBX.
CDR issues, backup issues, storage issues, grandstream has a tendency to send unfinished products to market.
I’m grandstream certified, vitalpbx reseller, DM if you need any further infos or help
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Any suggestion that a user should engage with a particular business or use a particular product or service is a violation regardless of whether or not you are affiliated with that business, product or service.I would agree with you on their older product’s but grandstreams GRP phones combined with a 6300 series PBXs have been like the easiest fucking thing in the world for me especially with their zero config. I have 20 that I manage and everything you’ve just said with the 6300 ecosystem has yet to happen to me. Their phones are kind of shitty compared to yealink but my largest system is paired with Yealinks with no issues. I just can’t say anything bad about the pbx yet. Its been 2 years now and I NEVER have to work on them except firmware updates. I haven’t even had a firmware update break anything yet.
Managing these PBX systems which maybe is conservatively 30 hours a year so far after they have been installed has easily saved me atleast 27k in yearly revenue and thats just because I’m not paying some asshole company in the cloud per extension anymore. Twilio does all the compliance so im not at threat of being shut down.
It does lack advanced features I will give that to you but most companies with 30 extensions aren’t asking for those advanced features. As long as they can listen to their voicemail and forward the phone to their cell when they leave they are happy.
This is how I feel - I’m not a vitalpbx guy but I am certified with Grandstream. Grandstream makes great products but I found their PBXs lacking in some areas. Genuinely you’d be better off just upgrading the computer and doing a Freepbx reinstall and setup.
Same I’m certified as well. One if my major issues with them is secruity. Their ucms are hacked a lot. I had one system that had all the secruity options enabled fail to ban etc. Admin password was 25 characters long, aplha numeric etc. Someone hacked in. Tried to make international calls. But lucky enough I had it blocked on the carrier side.
System was fully updated. Now I only sell hosted. Cost is more but less headaches. Only a handful of clients with grandstream systems now. Just waiting for contracts to end before I switch them to hosted.
Why? Do you hate your self and others?