My issue with these small appliances is lack of redundancy, my advise to anyone getting one of these is get a second box and setup HA or something close to it, worst case leave it off and have backups... last thing you want is having a box die and having to wait a few days for a replacement. This is why I prefer using a VM environment.
We usually take the clients old phone number forwarded to the new Temp number we setup on the new system. So when we go to deploy the phone system is in production while we wait for the port completed.
Maulik we roll the same way. In this method the whole install can happen in one trip. Typically the port takes a week. Unless it is coming from an old school telco company like AT&T or Windstream.
As we get geared up to roll out to be a VOIP solution provider to our clients, and having ported our own numbers across many carriers in the past, we get the system live and operational, installed, users trained on a temp number etc. Then put in a number forward request to the old provider before the port request. Generally a few days to a week before the port request.
I work for an international manufacturing company and we use Microsoft Teams at a number of our sites for their phone systems. The way I usually like to support paging systems is with an AudioCodes MP-114 FXS/FXO gateway. Most paging systems I work with have a "page port" or "station" port where you can plug in an RJ-11 cable. Then you can register the individual ports on the gateway up to your registrar whether that's a local or cloud based PBX (for us we use SBC's hosted in Azure to register our SIP devices)
Yes. But more likely they both use the same original design manufacturer who created a generic design they could tweak and develop software against by starting with that design as a base. Layer in some branding, their own custom firmware and it becomes a unique product. They spec out the features and the manufacturer modifies a generic design as a prototype. A few changes here and there and it's done.
I've been amazed at your review of the S505. We installed over 100 S500 and S505 before we dropped the product line. We were experiencing a 10% fail rate on the phone body and handset. We had about a 95% fail rate on the handset cord. Sangoma ended up shipping us a big box of cords we were going through them so fast. All of the service calls for the hardware really killed productivity.
I think FreePBX is good for hobbyist/small business however I find it hard to recommend as I have clients who have analogue/digital extensions and lines and the idea of having ATA's and Gateways for all these seperate components gives me a headache. I favor Panasonic or Avaya, they may be old school but I have 25 year+ old kits of these out there, I can't imagine one of these lasting that long. Your PBX installs sound very longwinded too, I dont want to sound rude but I usually get sent out to install a 30-40 extension install on the day of the port so we don't have anything like 2 phones on a desk etc, this has been how my company has done it for over 10 years and works for us, we maybe get an hour to do SIP trunk setup etc in our office but 90% of config is onsite as clients like to change their minds on the day
Being in a country where the internet sucks or just plain expensive and the transition from analog/digital to pure IP is not that applicable (cost wise & infrastructure) to some or most of the clients here, I also prefer panasonic & avaya. Good thing they have these hybrid systems where you can still utilize both analog ang IP based telephone systems. But great stuff, looking forward in using Sangoma/Freepbx/Asterisk in the near future.
Yeah, I've been installing and running PBX Deployments for over 20 years. All testing is done onsite, if there is a server like a Shoretel or Mitel you bring that up in the office before going to site for software install and updates to the OS. But you never waste the time of unboxing all the phones just to re-pack them to take to site. If you have a good configuration document or even a config template a lot of the "prep" work becomes un-needed too. You also need a good process and people who understand how the system works. I always hated asking the customer how their system today works, I always opened up by how they want the new system to work. Unless they are replacing it due to a system failure, there usually want it to do something different. Again, in my experience that is.
@@KeepGames3D I totally agree. This is one of the few times I don't agree with Tom. There is a tendency to think "It's just phones" but for many businesses no phones means no income and more efficient phones can reduce expenses. "How do you want your phone system to work" is the correct question. They'll lead the conversation into their old system for things they like and into other capabilities that they've thought of or heard about. Listen, take notes, and then you can recommend the solution including things maybe they haven't thought of. Call queues are a good example of this. Most customers see them as just extra complexity when they can provide tons of data about the use of the system as well spread the load of the calls evenly, escalate calls as needed, provide call back in peak call times, etc. All things the end user likely doesn't appreciate until the experience it.
@@JoaoSilva-gs5jb you could do that too I mention the 3 top players in Cloud services, but you can host it in any cloud provider or a local server if you like too. My point is to add a redundancy point in case the main local server goes down for whatever reason and to keep them operational until then, I believe that spinning up a VM with freepbx in a cloud provider and loading the settings from backup shouldn't take long. And it would be a good added service.
@@JoaoSilva-gs5jb regardless this would be a backup server in case it fails and depending on the tier it is not that expensive. And since it could be billed by the use only you don't have to keep it on 24/7.
We liked phone systems that allowed for digital phones as well as IP. You might lose some money for wiring but you also did not put addiional traffic on the network.
Hey, I'm curious about your cyber data paging adapter. We have one of those but cannot get it to work with our paging system. We have a Bogen PCM2000. There are three zones that must be selected via DTMF. That's the part that doesn't work. What paging system is at this site?
Nine times out of 10, we are able to assign a temp number to a system, install it and forward their current phone(s) to the temp number(s) so that when the port happens we don't have to be on site. Calls are already hitting the new system and ready to go.
I had a business running on FreePBX back in 2009. It was incredibly feature rich back then, and has only gotten better. Curious that the cloud still hasn't won everyone over yet ;-)
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS We've moved to a Netsapians based hosted service. We found that we can now handle twice as many customers with the same number of technicians and at a higher service level. We spend far more time improving and installing vs maintaining and troubleshooting like before. We will never go back to FreePBX/PBXact/Sangoma. For reference our Asterisk/Freepbx experience goes back to about 2009 with Trixbox. Switch to Freepbx distro shortly after it came out.
@@supercow75 It's the same as any other facet of the tech industry, you either build a team that can handle doing the work or you outsource the work to another company. It's about what ever works for you.
@@supercow75 So you were always using system of other companies instead of preparing asterisk on your own, well now you are left with hosting company. Just like not all companies want appliance of prem, some don't want hosted pbx.
@@Steveos312 The scale of the system depends on how powerful the underlying hardware is, you can either bring your own hardware with FreePBX, which I've done plenty of times at a call center with over 1000 seats. You can also purchase sangoma's hardware which is very low fuss and give you some peace of mind the software was validated against that hardware. Sangoma has hardware going up to 4,000 simulations calls on their highend hardware. Keep in mind you can have more seats than that. It comes down to ensuring you have enough processing power, disk I/O and network I/O. The funny part of that would be having a SIP trunk big enough to handle that as well. You can also handle routing through various providers as well if you wanted to split up your tunnels.
@@Steveos312 @Steven Clickford lol that's funny because the telco lines are all failing and shit. Call up Verizon and they won't even fix them. The entire infrastructure from the carriers moved off the old outdated crap decades ago. Freepbx, and it's underlying platform asterisk, is a pbx and functions extremely well at that layer. Asterisk can indeed even be scaled outwards and grow to massive sizes, but it's not how it would be typically used. Instead something like kamailio or opensips would he placed in front of it as a sip proxy and other things. That's how it's handled at your big telco providers as well (along with SS7). You sound like a massive tool with these comments. I get you lost your job because the old telco crap isn't used anywhere anymore, not even by at&t, verizon, comcast, or any other provider.
@@wiziek nothing actually.. I was trying it "for fun" and for learning (I don't have IP phones so I was using a generic VOIP app for android). If I remember correctly the system would just stop working completely even though the panel said everything was functioning..
Are you joking? What is sangoma os anyway, freepbx? People are selling it and you can't get it to work, you are most likely the problem, not system itself.
You have to make a list of of whitch functions they now use... well not so easy if even they dont know what their actually using... but later after deployment completed they yelling about sth not working any more. 😭😉
My issue with these small appliances is lack of redundancy, my advise to anyone getting one of these is get a second box and setup HA or something close to it, worst case leave it off and have backups... last thing you want is having a box die and having to wait a few days for a replacement. This is why I prefer using a VM environment.
Yeah, I have been including the hot-spare option with the config and file backup so it is plug and play
We usually take the clients old phone number forwarded to the new Temp number we setup on the new system. So when we go to deploy the phone system is in production while we wait for the port completed.
We have done that but some companies it can be really challenging to get them to do that.
Maulik we roll the same way. In this method the whole install can happen in one trip. Typically the port takes a week. Unless it is coming from an old school telco company like AT&T or Windstream.
As we get geared up to roll out to be a VOIP solution provider to our clients, and having ported our own numbers across many carriers in the past, we get the system live and operational, installed, users trained on a temp number etc. Then put in a number forward request to the old provider before the port request. Generally a few days to a week before the port request.
I work for an international manufacturing company and we use Microsoft Teams at a number of our sites for their phone systems. The way I usually like to support paging systems is with an AudioCodes MP-114 FXS/FXO gateway. Most paging systems I work with have a "page port" or "station" port where you can plug in an RJ-11 cable. Then you can register the individual ports on the gateway up to your registrar whether that's a local or cloud based PBX (for us we use SBC's hosted in Azure to register our SIP devices)
Let me guess... the company’s old phone system from the 1990s was a Nortel or Avaya/Partner system?
Do you recommend an SBC to your customers?
They look like rebranded Yealink phones.
Yes. But more likely they both use the same original design manufacturer who created a generic design they could tweak and develop software against by starting with that design as a base. Layer in some branding, their own custom firmware and it becomes a unique product. They spec out the features and the manufacturer modifies a generic design as a prototype. A few changes here and there and it's done.
I've been amazed at your review of the S505. We installed over 100 S500 and S505 before we dropped the product line. We were experiencing a 10% fail rate on the phone body and handset. We had about a 95% fail rate on the handset cord. Sangoma ended up shipping us a big box of cords we were going through them so fast. All of the service calls for the hardware really killed productivity.
I think FreePBX is good for hobbyist/small business however I find it hard to recommend as I have clients who have analogue/digital extensions and lines and the idea of having ATA's and Gateways for all these seperate components gives me a headache. I favor Panasonic or Avaya, they may be old school but I have 25 year+ old kits of these out there, I can't imagine one of these lasting that long. Your PBX installs sound very longwinded too, I dont want to sound rude but I usually get sent out to install a 30-40 extension install on the day of the port so we don't have anything like 2 phones on a desk etc, this has been how my company has done it for over 10 years and works for us, we maybe get an hour to do SIP trunk setup etc in our office but 90% of config is onsite as clients like to change their minds on the day
Being in a country where the internet sucks or just plain expensive and the transition from analog/digital to pure IP is not that applicable (cost wise & infrastructure) to some or most of the clients here, I also prefer panasonic & avaya. Good thing they have these hybrid systems where you can still utilize both analog ang IP based telephone systems. But great stuff, looking forward in using Sangoma/Freepbx/Asterisk in the near future.
Yeah, I've been installing and running PBX Deployments for over 20 years. All testing is done onsite, if there is a server like a Shoretel or Mitel you bring that up in the office before going to site for software install and updates to the OS. But you never waste the time of unboxing all the phones just to re-pack them to take to site. If you have a good configuration document or even a config template a lot of the "prep" work becomes un-needed too. You also need a good process and people who understand how the system works. I always hated asking the customer how their system today works, I always opened up by how they want the new system to work. Unless they are replacing it due to a system failure, there usually want it to do something different. Again, in my experience that is.
@@KeepGames3D I totally agree. This is one of the few times I don't agree with Tom. There is a tendency to think "It's just phones" but for many businesses no phones means no income and more efficient phones can reduce expenses. "How do you want your phone system to work" is the correct question. They'll lead the conversation into their old system for things they like and into other capabilities that they've thought of or heard about. Listen, take notes, and then you can recommend the solution including things maybe they haven't thought of. Call queues are a good example of this. Most customers see them as just extra complexity when they can provide tons of data about the use of the system as well spread the load of the calls evenly, escalate calls as needed, provide call back in peak call times, etc. All things the end user likely doesn't appreciate until the experience it.
Wasn't Panasonic out of buissnes when you did it? Also they did ATAs, just integrated.
Hey Tom have you considered hosting Freepbx in a cloud provider like a AWS/GCP/Azure as a backup?
Why wouldn't you run at Linode/Vultr?
@@JoaoSilva-gs5jb you could do that too I mention the 3 top players in Cloud services, but you can host it in any cloud provider or a local server if you like too. My point is to add a redundancy point in case the main local server goes down for whatever reason and to keep them operational until then, I believe that spinning up a VM with freepbx in a cloud provider and loading the settings from backup shouldn't take long. And it would be a good added service.
@@dreagnore but I do think he offers cloud freePBX instances, just said that because the top 3 are way to expensive for what they offer
@@JoaoSilva-gs5jb regardless this would be a backup server in case it fails and depending on the tier it is not that expensive. And since it could be billed by the use only you don't have to keep it on 24/7.
@@dreagnore so you mean like just the backup of the server?
Thanks for this informative video. This is something I need to dive into, and add this knowledge to my tool kit.
We liked phone systems that allowed for digital phones as well as IP. You might lose some money for wiring but you also did not put addiional traffic on the network.
Hey, I'm curious about your cyber data paging adapter. We have one of those but cannot get it to work with our paging system. We have a Bogen PCM2000. There are three zones that must be selected via DTMF. That's the part that doesn't work. What paging system is at this site?
Nine times out of 10, we are able to assign a temp number to a system, install it and forward their current phone(s) to the temp number(s) so that when the port happens we don't have to be on site. Calls are already hitting the new system and ready to go.
I had a business running on FreePBX back in 2009. It was incredibly feature rich back then, and has only gotten better. Curious that the cloud still hasn't won everyone over yet ;-)
The recurring costs being that much higher does not make it as good of an option.
Additionaly with cloud or broadbands fails you can't even have internal calls.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS We've moved to a Netsapians based hosted service. We found that we can now handle twice as many customers with the same number of technicians and at a higher service level. We spend far more time improving and installing vs maintaining and troubleshooting like before. We will never go back to FreePBX/PBXact/Sangoma. For reference our Asterisk/Freepbx experience goes back to about 2009 with Trixbox. Switch to Freepbx distro shortly after it came out.
@@supercow75 It's the same as any other facet of the tech industry, you either build a team that can handle doing the work or you outsource the work to another company. It's about what ever works for you.
@@supercow75 So you were always using system of other companies instead of preparing asterisk on your own, well now you are left with hosting company. Just like not all companies want appliance of prem, some don't want hosted pbx.
The premise is its about on-premises.... its on-premises
A topic I always curious about.
Honestly I've deployed Freepbx/Sangoma for years and it's been ROCK SOLID!
@@Steveos312 The scale of the system depends on how powerful the underlying hardware is, you can either bring your own hardware with FreePBX, which I've done plenty of times at a call center with over 1000 seats. You can also purchase sangoma's hardware which is very low fuss and give you some peace of mind the software was validated against that hardware.
Sangoma has hardware going up to 4,000 simulations calls on their highend hardware. Keep in mind you can have more seats than that. It comes down to ensuring you have enough processing power, disk I/O and network I/O.
The funny part of that would be having a SIP trunk big enough to handle that as well. You can also handle routing through various providers as well if you wanted to split up your tunnels.
@@Steveos312 Yes with any service you have to keep bottle neck in mind.
@@Steveos312 @Steven Clickford lol that's funny because the telco lines are all failing and shit. Call up Verizon and they won't even fix them. The entire infrastructure from the carriers moved off the old outdated crap decades ago. Freepbx, and it's underlying platform asterisk, is a pbx and functions extremely well at that layer. Asterisk can indeed even be scaled outwards and grow to massive sizes, but it's not how it would be typically used. Instead something like kamailio or opensips would he placed in front of it as a sip proxy and other things. That's how it's handled at your big telco providers as well (along with SS7).
You sound like a massive tool with these comments. I get you lost your job because the old telco crap isn't used anywhere anymore, not even by at&t, verizon, comcast, or any other provider.
I've had so many headaches with Sangoma OS... I had to give up after days of trying to make it work..
What are you using instead? 3CX? Most likely not pure asterisk.
having problems with the Sangoma hardware or PBXact?
@@wiziek nothing actually.. I was trying it "for fun" and for learning (I don't have IP phones so I was using a generic VOIP app for android). If I remember correctly the system would just stop working completely even though the panel said everything was functioning..
@@durakis Sangoma OS, the software. it was running on an older bare-metal pc.
Are you joking? What is sangoma os anyway, freepbx? People are selling it and you can't get it to work, you are most likely the problem, not system itself.
You have to make a list of of whitch functions they now use... well not so easy if even they dont know what their actually using... but later after deployment completed they yelling about sth not working any more. 😭😉
lol sangoma
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_healers_of_Southern_Africa
on prem > cloud
YES!
Tom' you look like you are going to fly away with all those hand movements :P
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