OnSIP Thoughts?

(Greg Kujawa) #1

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!

(Aaron) #2

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(Itzik) #3

Can you elaborate a bit more?

(Greg Kujawa) #4

After almost a week live I have a couple of observations, especially after having literally an hour of previous exposure to this platform and provider.

  • Customer Support is fairly timely, but not terribly technically adept. Of course that’s typical for the initial tier that field and triage support requests.

  • A simple feature like Music on Hold has a rather convoluted implementation. Specifically, while announcements such as auto attendant greetings are stored in the cloud with the PBX, Music on Hold is different. Either a handful of canned options stored with the PBX can be chosen, or else an external URL can be specified. You cannot “upload” a MoH media file to the PBX.

  • This external URL MoH option can break certain applications, such as Call Park/Park Retrieve. We couldn’t park calls or pickup parked calls unless the MoH source was a canned option. Kind of quirky, but it’s a known bug that is supposedly on the development radar.

  • Admin UI is pretty basic, but makes it easy to administer and manage things. Lack of granular control and the ability to dig in at the CLI level of course. But it’s meant to be a basic solution “for dummies” in the way the provider has exposed the platform.

  • Pricing so far doesn’t look bad. Maybe $100/month for all the apps, features, etc. and then calls are billed at $0.029/minute. Since the site doesn’t spend a ton of time on long calls it’s not bad. Will look into a bundled calling package later perhaps.

Random thoughts, but guess I’ll put these out there!