I know this is the wrong place to poke the bear about other platform providers, but I had an interesting dumpster fire yesterday. One of my remote sites has an End of Life ShoreTel system. Was installed by someone other than me, since I had an inkling that the choice was a mistake…lol. Well, the ShoreTel couldn’t even connect to the phone provider via SIP trunking. Due to supposed incompatibility between the SIP standards of the phone provider and the ShoreTel SIParator. So the phone provider had an old Adtran 916-E breaking out PRI to handoff to the ShoreTel.
Anyhoo, the ShoreTel Director finally gave up the ghost. And the current authorized ShoreTel support company had no equipment to replace it. So I was in a pinch, with a site down and no replacement that we just could plug in and restore backups to.
I remembered I had setup a testing/development OnSIP account years ago. Hadn’t looked at it in at all in the least 3 years. Well, I was able to grab some boxed Yealink T29G’s we had here, grab a Cisco SPA112 we had boxed up here, and within 3 hours I had the entire site configured in OnSIP. From the users to the devices to the call group to the auto attendant to the recordings to the operating hours. So today I’m shipping out the hardware and they should be on their way.
Looking at their platform, they appear to implement OpenSIPS and FreeSWITCH on CentOS. Wonder how well they are going to handle the recently announced changes that are to come for CentOS? I haven’t even looked into how reasonable the monthly costs are going to be for service now that it’s all built out for the remote site. But seeing they were paying $579/month for the SIP/PRI service I doubt it will reach those prices for a 7-person smaller remote office!