What are great SIP Trunk providers for small business with five or less employees? I have setup FreePBX on a Lenovo SFF box via ESXI and would like trying out providers. The PBX is behind a pfSense firewall via a DMZ.
There are a lot of factors at play here. If price is your main concern something super bare bones like voipms may be the way to go. You sacrifice a lot but it is cheap
There is a provider list on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/VOIP/comments/rhynfp/2022_q1_voip_provider_list/
One from the forums
Sipstation and Clearly IP both have auto configuration modules for FreePBX
Cool, thanks for the fast response…Clearly looks interesting and of course, I am shopping on price to wet my feet first and gather some experience.
My list:
Telnyx
Clearly
Voip.ms
Thanks Leo85 for your list…it’s looking like its coming to Clearly and Voip.ms…I wonder whether I can try those both simultaneously on FreePBX!
Though I have no personal experience with Clearly, they have an excellent reputation and nearly all the comments about them on this forum are positive.
I’m not a fan of VoIP.ms . IMO, they handled their recent DDoS problem poorly. Once it was clear that the problem would not be solved within a few hours, they should have set up forwarding (either carrier-based on on a private server) so customers could receive calls on another number of theirs.
Also, their architecture lacks any kind of built-in diversity such as DNS SRV. If your server fails, you have an outage until it is fixed or an engineer manually updates DNS to point at another.
Their strong suit is an extensive feature set, with sub-accounts, IVR, spam filtering, voicemail and many others. However, this is of little value if you are running your own PBX.
I don’t expect you to read all the 1385+ posts, but at least skim through
I’m very curious why you rejected Telnyx. If you are in a fairly large city, they are likely a carrier there. Enter your area code and exchange at TelcoData.US: Search by Area Code / Exchange . Then, click on the Rate Center shown and you’ll see a list of all the carriers. IMO getting service directly from a carrier is important in case of an incoming problem, avoiding issues where the provider and the carrier each blame the other.
Thanks Stewart1 for responding…that telcodata is a long list indeed yet I learned something new today. I had saw the DDoS issue when I searched for Voip.ms. I didn’t reject Telnyx…I just decided to try Clearly (got admit I like their name) and Voip.ms mostly based on price I have seen when I visited their website.
Unless you see an obvious problem, give Telnyx a try. They offer a pretty good free trial. They are the only provider that I’m aware of with all these 4 features: Send/receive SMS, send/receive MMS, can send caller ID that is not yours (for example, to pass number of original caller when forwarding to a mobile), receive ANI (for example, so a customer with blocked caller ID can pass your spam filter or receive VIP handling).
Some low-budget services you may wish to explore:
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Localphone. US numbers at $0.99/mo. with 2-channels, unmetered incoming (though $0.01 for each call over 100 per day). Outbound to most US locations is $0.005/min. Unfortunately, no e911, caller name, SMS or MMS. There is 5-minute outbound-only free trial, so you can at least know that the trunk works before making a payment.
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AnveoDirect. Very inexpensive outbound calling; typical US pattern may average $0.0025/min. US inbound is $0.15/mo./number + $0.004/min. No e911, no MMS.
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Bulkvs. I have no personal experience with them, but have heard nothing bad and their prices are unbelievably low. If you try them, let us know the results.
SIPStation is the Sangoma offering if you want to support the FreePBX project, and it has a free trial you can use before you commit.
Here is my situation, I believe knowing this would help steer to the right provider. Currently, I use an iPhone solely for my office; however, I ran into a situation and discovered had I could easily record the office call conversations, the situation would have turned out best for both parties. That led me to FreePBX, and I set up the OS on a Lenovo SFF. Currently, I am using T-Mobile prepaid service $15 and change plus tax per month…don’t want to go over that. Of course, I would need to keep that service until the SIP trunk service proves reliably.
I really want “all calls are recorded for quality assurance” feature from FreePBX in this 21st century.
While this is the FreePBX forum and I will promote FreePBX all day long, I also want to share an alternative I have used for two very small businesses (1 phone, 3 phones) – Anveo (anveo.com). You can do PBX features including recordings, and forward to your cell phone, etc. Subscription Packages No FreePBX needed.
I’m personally using telnyx and voip.ms. These days you want to have few or more SIP providers to establish a stable communication.
I already bite the FreePBX bullet and invested in hardware.
Leo85, this makes great sense to have two…can you have both on one phone? How about Fax for those rare occasions when need?
You cannot usefully use two or more providers for more reliable incoming calls to geographic numbers, except manually (tell the customer to try number B if A doesn’t work). Pick a good carrier, one that offers automatic failover to e.g. a mobile phone if your PBX is down or unreachable.
Two trunks can provide redundancy for outgoing, but that’s usually unnecessary, since you could call from your mobile in the rare case when your provider is down.
Many providers offer a FAX API; no phone or fax machine needed. It is also possible to connect a fax machine via an ATA.
Great points also Stewart1; however, I was hoping to get rid of the office mobile and have the PBX forward call to my personal mobile without the caller knowing that number. So, I guess the office will have two numbers, one as a main and the other as failover. The PBX can handle two numbers to one extension, right?
I Use Twilio.
Twilio is more work to setup than the Sangoma SIPStation offering, but is really cheap and is pay-as-you-go.
We migrated to Twilio for our business infrastructure several years ago from POTS and I even run it for my home setup.
We also run SIPStation trunks.
I will say, getting the setup right takes some work for Twilio. If you are looking for the “easy button” with FreePBX, I would definitely suggest Sangoma’s SIPStation.
SIPStation has trunk limits that affect price (Simultaneous calls). Twilio is based on minutes used, not simultaneous calls. Our system regularly has many calls simultaneously with Twilio on the same trunks.
Not sure how they stack up price wise but for reliability and support Voipinnovations is awesome. Been using them for years and honestly not one complaint. When something does go sideways their support is awesome, always go the extra mile and always available.
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I think you can have two, not sure about fax thought.
I had used Twilio for the trial period before suspending the PBX project. I had difficulty receiving calls, but no problem sending calls…could have been a firewall issue.