Hi everyone I would like to bring freepbx to the cloud and manage both internal and external calls.
Then have a number for external customers which then connects with internal numbers.
To do this, imagine we need a cloud solution.
My questions are:
I’ll briefly explain what I have to do:
I have to connect 4 offices in different cities to each other; I therefore have to create a switchboard not only inside the company in our internal network, but also with external numbering. I would like to understand if with freepx this scenario can be implemented or if freepbx is only to create a switchboard inside the company.
FreePBX is very bad at multi-tenancy as it is a back-to-back-user-agent, it can efficiently connect two endpoints so company 1 ext 101 to company 2 ext 102 is two FreePBI and four legs. If any calls are being forwarded or bridged it gets to the point where a SIP proxy or a muti-tenant solution is likely a better option over n times x hardware. For a couple or three locations , many find it acceptable but you will have four boxes to individually manage.
Mist here would opt for cloud, the downside is your mostly tied to needing 24/7 100% network and no two locations can ever reuse a number elsewhere deployed.
IMHO a $12/month cloud solution can easily support 100 users or more
ok forgive me one last question to see if I understand. i go to a cloud i buy a voip service right? As a system I do not use freepbx, i.e. on the cloud I do not load an ubuntu instance with freepbx on it.
For example I saw a course on udemy on how to add freepbx in an aws cloud.
This solution I guess is not good.
Quite right?
I need to see some solutions that aws or other clouds can offer me
that is freepbx it is not convenient to install it on a cloud and access it via cloud eg aws
I don’t see any indication that the OP wants multi-tenancy (different organisations sharing a PABX as though each had an exclusive one).
I can’t see that FreePBX is any worse than traditional means when it comes to a tie lines solution with a PABX in each office.
Although in the cloud seems to be the preferred choice these days, a PABX per office could offer better resilience, to the extent that there is significant local traffic, and can make call quality better for intra-office calling.
No, you buy both at least one voip service and at least one cloud instance. The voip service(s) provide phone numbers and trunks to connect your extensions to the PSTN.
The cloud instance(s) has your PrivateBrancheXchange on it (which could be ‘Free’) and the PBX’s extend the TelephoneNumber space to your phones.
The PBX routes calls ‘last mile’ to and from the PSTN. The simplest is a star topology where all extensions ‘call home’ to be further connected to and from the final destination. If you involve more than one PBX then the topology gets more convoluted and the routing gets much more complex. It is almost always best to have as few legs as possible in any one call
Ok on the basis of what you said and now it is already clearer to me; so for higher quality of service is it possible to create two or three vps on one or more clouds and cluster them in a percent call load balancer?
You need to look at the threats to your business. You also need to look for single points of failure. I would suggest that multiple cloud switches would be over-engineering for most people. Components introduced for fault tolerance can often be the weak links, themselves.
In terms of resilience, the case I’m thinking of might be any business in Southern or Eastern Ukraine, at the moment. I’d suggest any business relying on cloud services there is going to be pretty close to dead in the water. But you also have to consider whether the nature of the business is such that it could otherwise survive in such circumstances.
On the other hand, if you are dependent on PSTN access locally, you need to consider that there is a current trend for the PSTN to centralise, with no ability for local fallback working, so using the cloud may not put you at much greater risk.
In terms of call quality, a cloud service is dependent on your internet connection being able, at all times, to deliver media with low latency and low loss, and it also relies on the servers being able to give you the resources you need at milliseconds notice. There is a thread on VMWare that might be worth watching. Early versions were not particularly real time friendly, but things may have improved.
As I said before, it does seem that most FreePBX users use cloud solution, although I think there is a tendency to use specialist cloud services, e.g. I’ve heard mention of Vultr, rather than the general purpose ones, like AWS.
You could if using a SIP proxy to great effect, but asterisk is not such an animal, remember that B2BUA thingy?
It might be worth noting that, since this forum started doing banner adverts, one of the most frequent is for Sangoma’s own special purpose cloud based offering of FreePBX (under the commercial branding of PBXact).
FreePBX as a PBX system can live comfortably on your premises or in the cloud. You can host it yourself, or you can pay someone to host it for you. Sangoma (the commercial sponsor of FreePBX and Asterisk) offers cloud hosting which you can read about here.
We have snom phones in the company and we would like to take advantage of the telephone line and connect the offices in the cloud obviously also company cell phones
I have a dozen clients all on cloud-based installations of FreePBX. Many of them have employees that work from home so they can take their phone home, plug it into their router and then make and receive calls just like they were at the office. (The Sangoma S705 has wifi capabilities so that works as well. And of course, there are some network settings in FreePBX that are required to allow this, but it’s pretty simple.)
I have one client with offices in three states. Incoming calls can ring at all three locations. Calls between the offices are simply just dialing an extension. Also, the cloud-based installations allow me to manage all of them from my office. No on-site phone equipment is needed except for the phone.
I have each client set up with a separate cloud account and SIP trunk. All phone numbers are set up through the SIP trunk provider. I port the numbers over to the SIP provider so clients can keep their existing numbers. Some clients only have their main number while others have multiple DID numbers. The additional numbers are about $1 each per month. But even though there may only be one number associated with the trunk, it handles multiple calls and I have yet to have a client max one out.
I would be glad to provide additional details if you like.
How do you have the phones set up to connect to a remote PBX? It sounds like each phone has its own SIP, but what do you mean by “separate cloud account?” How do you then connect the individual SIP to the PBX?
What do you mean by SIP? As noted before, a remote PBX, in the cloud, is probably what most FreePBX users use. From the phone point of view, this isn’t really any more complex than having more than one phone directly registered with a provider. The way the phones identify to the PBX is the same way as they would identify to an on site PBX. The only special consideration is that you might have to consider compensating for NAT in the router, but you’d have to do that for a direct registration with a provider.
I think it is the router provided by my provider that blocks the ports. I have noticed that the port test sees my router occupying port 5060 for its provider services. Could this be the problem? I have enabled the ports on the cloud.
Best security practice is to use a port number completely unrelated to 5060.
Even Better practice is to use TLS and not UDP nor TCP for your extensions, in which case the default port 5061 is pretty safe which makes routing and firewalls a little easier.
So to reassume I have to enable port 5061 of the firewall on freepbx and then on my smartphone I have to configure a connection only for the ip address from microsip right?