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

  • Igorrr52OPBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.