Newbe looking for some guidance and advice in UK

General Help
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Hi all, I’m based in the UK. I’m ditching my 4 analogue and system lines (all on same number) and hope to install FREEPBX on a PC in the office and then subscribe to a trunking service. to connect to the outside world. I currently do home automation (loxone) so have the knowledge for programming etc.

My questions are

1 Can i use a PC to act as server. It has 4Gb ram and is quade core i5 or betters as per min spec from FREEPBX.
2 Is the FREE PBX software free? Or do i buy in, If so what the best option and what should i pay

3 We will have a maximum of 6 phones for speech only and will use something like yealink or cisco budget phone (£100 each).

4 Im getting new broadband with 100Mb up and down.

5 Who is best for the UK to supply the trunking service and what would i expect to pay.

6 My understanding is that, if i use my own PBX apposed to cloud, i don’t need to tell the trunking service how many handsets.

7 Who, and how do we get our analogue numbers converted so traffic points to the trunking service. I’m guessing that’s some kind of porting with the telephone provider?

8 I want to be able to record calls

9 i want to be able to direct calls and have a contingency if the system fails

Any help or white paper links / sticky’s would really be much appreciated.

I have found a provider that can give me this on a cloud service with a monthly cost of £260 per month including the broadband, but I’m tied in for 5 years contract.

Thank you in advance.

ray

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Your analogue lines are likely to get converted to VoIP within 3 years, by your existing provider, as all analogue services are being shutdown in or before 2025.

I assume you really meant 4GB, not 500MB. You haven’t said how much local traffic you are generating, but it seem likely that you are so small that almost anything you could have bought in the last decade will work.

FreePBX is a mixture of open source (and free of charge) software, proprietary, but free software, and proprietary and paid for software. If you requirements are simple, you can use it with just the first two. More technical users can use it with just the first.

Experience of using Cisco phones on anything but Cisco systems seems to be poor. Also £100 each doesn’t sound like budget prices, to me.

Many, probably most, cloud users of FreePBX use it in a way where they only pay for the hosting, so the number of trunks and extensions doesn’t affect the pricing, although the traffic volumes might. Cost for the trunking are the same as for in house hardware, and, whilst I’ve never really been involved at the commercial end, is I believe based on number of distinct phone numbers and call volumes, although there may be limits on simultaneous calls.

I’d expect all UK providers to offer that service for, at most, a token fee. A lot of people will be moving to third party VoIP when the analogue network is shut down.

This supported by free of charge features.

Again, I’ve not been involved with the commercial side of things, but that sounds extortionate, unless you are getting large volumes of bundled calls.

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Hi

Take a look at https://freepbxhosting.co.uk we are the official hosted partners for Sangoma in the UK.

We are able to off hosted systems as well as SIP trunking.

Both are available on 30day rolling contracts with Free Trials available.

Thanks

Richard

2 Likes
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My advice would be to download and install it on an old PC and have a play around with it.

Get yourself some Sangoma phones and you can us the Endpoint manager for free, Endpoint manager makes it very easy to manage the phones. (If you just want to test plenty of S500 phones on eBay). We use 25 Sangoma S500 phones.

For testing get a single SIP channel from Voipfone, will cost you £1+VAT per month, great for testing and also handy as a backup.

100Mb up and down will be fine, we have 25 extensions and probably around 10 concurrent calls and we are using 100Mb up and down.

We use a company called Network Connect, who resell Gamma.

I can’t remember how much we pay but it is probably around £10/£12 per sip trunk/channel.

The SIP trunk provider will port your numbers.

Nobody cares about the number of handsets you use.

Don’t use BT for any SIP channels/trunks.

So just install it locally, with a couple of Sangoma handsets and sip channel from Voipfone should give you an idea if it is going to work for you. For testing it should also work with whatever internet connectivity you currently have.

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Hi @RayAnderson
If you are base at the UK. My suggestion is to contact with @rsmithuk and start to try 30 days Free Trial FreePBX at Cloud. My first cloud FreePBX trie was the https://freepbxhosting.co.uk

Regards,

Shahin

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