I have worked with phone for a long time since 1993. It 2002 my first VOIP was with 3Com. Where I worked at the time, I sold / installed the largest NBX system 3Com had ever sold.
I am mostly a computer guy though. But I have found a real niche with my customers. They want to keep their PBX in house, not out on the cloud. They are fine getting SIP Trunks from the cloud, or some of them get SIP from Spectrum around here, but they want to keep there own system and be able to manage it, and all the big phone system guy are all going cloud now.
I am finding their are just a lot of companies that donāt like cloudy days and want sunny days. And most of the FreePBX providers here, only sell cloud based for FreePBX now.
I have been getting one little customer after another that wants there own FreePBX phone system. I am going to have to go legit and start paying taxes soon.
āmost of the freePBX providers hereā¦ā???
What do you mean? Download the freePBX distro, buy an Intel NUC, install Linux Mint, install freePBX as a virtual machine (virtualbox), buy some phones (e.g. Sangoma P370), get a SIP-trunk and you are all set.
You might wanna buy the system admin moduleā¦just a few $s.
Yes. we been setting up FreePBX for about 5 years now for clients. The most recent one we are saving them $3,000 per month from their previous phone system. There is definitely a lot of opportunity with this.
I think ācloudā is not the best option for most companies actually and most are starting to see that. You can have āa cloud serviceā for $20 a month, per user, which for 25 users is $6k a year, OR you can have one of our appliances for $600, pre-configured and maintained for $70 a month or PAYG.
OR we can cloud host your FreePBX for $300 to $900 a year and thatās fixed whether you have 5 phones or 50, and its YOUR FreePBX, not a shared system with tens of thousands of users.
Trunking is another benefit, youāre not stuck with ātheirā tariff, you can shop around, change when you like, have two or more, etc. One thing thatās big here is mobile trunking, with mobile providers offering unlimited calls weāre deploying PorTech units with 2 or 8 SIMs and routing mobile calls over those, for free - and its a great failover route if the internet fails for example.
Iād say its not a choice really, but so many people are pushing the ācloudā with their endless cold calls and spam emails that businesses are sucked into it.
And Iām taking nothing away from PBXAct, we also sell those especially into larger businesses with more demanding needs, but FreePBX is a great solution for many businesses.
IMO. and donāt quote me on the pricing, I did like 5 minutes of research with a couple of cloud providers to get that, Iām sure you can find cheaper and more expensive but you get the picture.
youāre right, cloud is just a marketing gimmick sucking people in, thereās a blog fromā¦ looks upā¦ ok, 2020, but itās pretty accurate, that guys in the same country so its accurate for here even if heās in a far northern state, and the prices also after 5mins looking around are still fairly similar today, not too much change over the past 5 yrs https://bit.ly/4kqt2W2
I mean that write up is a little off in how it is presented. UCasS as per minute but trunking as unlimited, thatās already backwards in the general scheme of things.
If I found the provider they were comparing to for the hosted, then they also took the cheapest offering that charges per minute. So in their example, itās $56/day in usage or $1,120 per month. I mean that is out there. Or they could have opted for $29/month per user with unlimited. That works out to $9.60/day or $290/month and that is still $10 cheaper than the cheapest unlimited trunking for 10 channels.
So just by picking a different plan at the hosted company I saw a 74% savings and was cheaper than the unlimited trunking with the same amount of channels.
Most of my customer use DID4Sale or the used Spectrum SIP Trunks, and donāt pay anywhere near that much. DID 4 Sale is great in is .004 cents per minute.
The example in the blog was from Australia, so the pricing there is much different. Outside of the US/Canada most countries have different pricing for mobile vs landline/voip calls. However, the comparison is flawed. The cost the author was comparing was usage between an a la carte hosted service and a sip trunk with multiple unmetered channels and other features. In all comparison cases of hosted vs onprem itās the opposite. The majority of hosted providers charge you per user (line) and that line comes with unlimited usage and other features. While on the flip side, the onprem PBX is using a PAYG trunk with a la carte features.
It doesnāt matter if itās a SIP trunk channel or a hosted user line, $19.99/month is still $19.99/month. Just like it doesnāt matter if itās a SIP trunk or hosted line doing PAYG, youāre still paying the usage.
@BlazeStudios That might be applicable to you, but please do not fall into the fallacy that every person on this forum is an American, that would be pretty arrogant, also, that article reflects how things are in this country, one or two providers do offer unlimited 10-30 a month for hosted but it is strictly for residential and you usually have to have a broadband service with them, not allowed to use for business, if they find you out, they terminate you without warning or notice, they just cut you off cold, this country is a great land, a great land of opportunity, opportunity to be ripped off compared to USA and Europe.
I donāt but the entire article seemed skewed and based on flawed information regardless of country of origin.
Then I must have found the outlier in this rule. Australian Phone Company is not an ISP, therefore they donāt have broadband, and they offer unlimited business PBX services per user/line.
I also found at least another half dozen UCaaS/cloud providers in the Australia that were not ISPs in any form but they all did the same thing. They resold existing solutions such as Ring Central, 8x8, Webex, Teams and others. All of which have unlimited plans or plans that come with included usage and features.
So to recap, I did research based on the blog user comparing usage costs in Australia and found at least one (the others donāt post pricing) in Australia that offered an unlimited plan that would reduce the usage cost to below the unlimited SIP trunking. Of all the UCaaS/cloud providers I looked at not one of them were an ISP requiring their broadband and only one or two of them offered residential services.
so you list a few you claim dispute that blogs but you admit they donāt list prices, so IOW you have no idea
as for australian phone company, they donāt have a good reputation for reliability but you researched them, so you ought know that, but the sums, let me bring up that blog if I can remember where it is.
ok 10 staff thatās at APCās 70 dollars a day for per calls, geez the blogs reference was 56 day, the unlimit 29 a month so thatās 290 a month, so thatās 10 month cheaper then the examples the blog gave when it was written, in 2020, but then lets look at the obvious thing you missed with hosted pbxās, the T&C.
Under unreasonable usage for āPBX Unlimitedā plans we understand using of your āPBX Unlimitedā plan for any apart from normal office purposes like: Call Centers, Telemarketing, Calling Cards, Traffic terminations, Calls forwarding or aggregations from other networks, wholesale re-resale any of our services. We may identify these issues by type of connected device, calls profile or any symptoms that we may consider as reasonable. In case we find your usage unreasonable we contact to you by e-mail with a first and last warning. If usage continues in the same manner we switch you to business plan with no free calls option or your service may be
suspended without any money refund.
oh yeah kind of funny most the companies you listed where american, who dont do business here certainly have zero physical PoPās here anyway. so your kind of getting desperate, reaching for straws as they say, I do business in this market I know whats around, and I know who is trustworthy to use as any sort or VSP.
My desperation knows no bounds but that is moot. All those companies offer and provide services in Australia. You not being aware of this doesnāt change what I said.
certainly have zero physical PoPās here anyway. so your kind of getting desperate, reaching for straws as they say, I do business in this market I know whats around, and I know who is trustworthy to use as any sort or VSP.