Not only does FreePBX provide one of the most feature rich PBXs in the market, with a price that can’t be beat, it is has also been the key for thousands of businesses to escape the lock that traditional telephony providers have had on them for so many decades.
With SIP phone service so readily available, it has led to hundreds of SIP VoIP telephony providers and with that, a lot of confusion as to what providers to use and who is going to provide reasonable service and be ready to support a FreePBX/Asterisk based platform, or who is even going to continue to be around as many have gone out of business. Having worked with hundreds of customer systems, I can tell you that the reliability and technical knowledge amongst these providers varies across the board and choosing who to use or trusting what they are telling you when things go wrong can be a daunting task for the customer base.
With the affiliation of Bandwidth.com as the primary corporate sponsor of FreePBX, we decided to help our customer base by developing a service that would be mutually beneficial to FreePBX users looking for reliable SIP trunking services and for the FreePBX project to gain a revenue stream to further support its development efforts. Bandwidth.com has one of the best VoIP infrastructures in the US market with a nationwide network and multiple points of redundancy across the country. They are also a strong and financially healthy company, with three INC 500 awards from 2005-2008, one of only nine companies to win the award three years running. Of those nine privately held companies, Bandwidth.com was the 4th fastest growing overall and the only Telecom firm on the list.
Although Bandwidth.com has been supplying one of the best SIP trunking services in the industry, they have not offered their service using instant online activation nor is it available to systems that do not have static IP addresses. In order to address this we have created a new FreePBX branded SIP Trunking service delivered on Bandwidth.com’s network with the goal of seamless interoperability with FreePBX and available for quick and easy activation so you can be up and running in minutes. Our initial offerings will target the commonly requested Unlimited 2-Way SIP Trunk service complete with one or multiple DIDs on an account and E911 enabled service across the US.
Although our service will not be free in the same way that FreePBX is, we are striving to create an excellent service at a reasonable price and will evolve the capabilities as new customers come online and provide feedback for what they are looking for. One example of “reasonable” is the cost of DIDs (inbound phone numbers). We have found that many providers serving SOHO and small SMB businesses charge $5-$15 per additional DID per month! There is no good reason for that and as a result, we will price our DIDs for only $1 each per month, so purchase as many as you need!
Are you looking to obtain top quality SIP service that runs on one of the best VoIP network in the country, is designed to work with FreePBX and will directly support the further development of the project?
I signed up the other night. It was quick and easy to setup. Service so far is great, ATA device to my asterisk box be damned. I purchased two DIDs and I was off to the races. The speed in the processing of the order was truly amazing.
Any idea when inbound calling will be available? I have a static ip address so I was curious.
Is there a link to pricing, per minute termination, billing increment,etc.
Note: I went further and think I got the answer. $25/mo flat rate for one connection on each $25.00 line. I guess two DID working at the same time would require two $25 lines.
The number of DIDs and the number of ‘Simultaneous’ lines you can have are independent. A small office might only require 2-3 simultaneous lines but still want 10 DIDs. Or you may want one DID for you and one for your spouse, but only require one simultaneous channel. (Unless you have teenagers in the house and you are trying to ween them from the cell phone bill, then you might need more channels…)
we will have number porting but since that is an inherently manual process we are kicking off the new service and DIDs first and putting a few number ports through with early beta testers (I’m about to be one of those).
If you want to be one of the beta testers with a number port then feel free to sign up for some service and then ping us at the support email address to get you going.
One thing, we won’t be porting any toll free numbers yet since we have not finished the inbound toll free side of our SIP service.
what is the IP address of FreePBX sip servers. All they gave me was my sip name and password.
where do I tell my asterisk box to register this trunk with?
I can’t even find anywhere to get information from. any help would be great, thanks.
When you compare the charges with Teliax, they give you $49.99/M with single DID but with 4 Channels. That means you can have 4 people talking at the same time on either outbound or inbound calls. That seems like an ideal situation for a small business.
Reading this thread, I think the price is $25/month per channel. So effectively at $50/M you would get only 2 channels Vs 4 with Teliax ???
In any case I would still try out this service.
How is the call quality on a DSL line?
Do they support G729 codecs?
Thanks
The service is running on Bandwidth.com’s purpose built SIP network, the exact same network that their service runs on. They are also providing the billing (well technically the authorize.net secure billing gateway is doing that) as well as the customer service as described in the service agreement.
The profits of the venture support the operations and development of FreePBX. The operations, simply to run the site and repository mirror costs thousands of dollars per year. On top of that there is the staff provided developers which include me and other resources that we are putting on the project. This compliments the many other ‘community’ developers who also work on the project.
johnces:
The $24.99/month is the cost per channel per month. We are fine tuning how that works, but we will make sure that a typical single person SOHO who only requires a ‘single line’ will be able to have just one trunk while ensuring features like call forwarding and Follow-Me work effectively when a call comes into the PBX and needs to go back out to call your cell phone or other external number.
kumar007:
Be careful how you compare. As mentioned there are other caps that come into play. I assure you that our service will be competitive as we hear and see feedback like this. You also get the added benefit over other providers that you are supporting the project, and that we are working towards closer integration with FreePBX. The service is made to work with FreePBX!
Hi Phillipe,
First of all, my complements to you and the freepbx team for what you have done for the Open Source community. Due to it’s versatility, freepbx is by far the most widely used GUI in any asterisk flavor.
I agree with the caps that Teliax has on their service. Besides, I am not sure if Fax works well with Teliax.
Have you tested fax? Does it work? How is the quality?
I am using the service over DSL and I think it sounds as good or better then the other providers I am trying ( I test a lot.)
I have had Teliax the longest followed by Telasip, Vitelity, FonicaVoIP and I am trying out Sipgate and my plan is to do a “shoot out” in blog form in another month or so.
Thanks for your comments. As far as FAX, that is never something that you can depend on over VoIP as it is so dependent on the internet connection between you and the POP where the media will be delivered from (which does not have to be the SIP Server).
In most cases, the issues occur in the last mile, where the customer interconnects with their ISP. Solutions like T38 are evolving but still not really there yet and it requires special devices or other solutions that are just now evolving.
So on the fax front, it is delivered best effort and if you have fax needs that you need to depend on, you still want to look at other solutions though we are investigating options that we could try to provide. So how well it works you will have to purchase a trunk and give it a try on your end, that’s the only way to really find out.