So I have seen several discussions here about VTLR vs Digital Ocean and then a scary mention by “voipgenius [Aaron]” that “for my really important PBX’s I put them on CyberLynk”? Well, I am fed up with Cyberlynk and was considering moving to Digital Ocean or VLTR until I read this. I really want VoIP with rock solid audio. I dont know if its noisy neighbor or what, my cyberlynk PBX’s seem to max out with relatively few extensions (even when I have 4 cpu, 8-16G ram, ssd disks) and I suspect its inconsistent vCPU. I would switch to dedicated but then you cant move servers if there is an issue. I have provided proof to Cyberlynk that there is definitely an audio issue (dead of night, only 1 active call, place it on hold and listen to music on hold and every minute or so there is a notable glitch. ONE CALL on otherwise inactive system! They try to blame my carrier but here a hint, the carrier isn’t involved in my extension to extension call placed on hold!
I want a hosted solution where I can put a lot of extensions on a server (like 1000 not 10) with perfect audio.
The most I have on a $5 Vultr system is 104 extensions averaging 10 simultaneous calls all day.
That’s 1 vCPU and 1GB RAM and I do not have any call issues from that system.
I have one off helped a company with ~300 extensions running on the $10 system (1vCPU 2GB RAM). No idea what their concurrent call ended up being, as I only helped with initial setup.
The largest system I have worked on is 900 extensions with 4000 DID and ~40 concurrent calls for 9 hours. But that is on a VMWare hypervisor in a datacenter, not Vultr or DO.
Thanks for that. I currently have 8 PBX with a total of about 300 extensions. I cant put everyone on 1 pbx for various other reasons but I can can see within a year having several PBX with hundreds of extensions and a few with <30 each. I have 40 years in telecom (legacy PBX) and about 3 on VoIP. When you say “no audio issues” are you listening to calls with a 21st century ear or a 20th century ear? I say that because a lot of people with “younger” ears from the cell phone generate are a lot more forgiving on what they consider “call quality” issues. I remember the MCI commercials with “you could hear a pin drop” messaging and I am trying to build VoIP solutions with the highest quality call audio. One solution is to install T1 MPLS links from my server site tot he end user but FCC order 10-72A1 all copper POTS, T1, and DSL lines are going away so I guess I could go with Fiber T1 but copper T1’s were cheap.
I’ve been dealing with dial tone in a professional capacity since 1991, though not always at a telecom company. But if you think calls were cleaner on POTS, you are wearing rose colored glasses.
I dont mean POTS from the CO, I mean on a PBX connected to T1 or OCx. IN any case younger generations used to cell phones especially those that dont even use land lines anymore are a lot more “forgiving” to audio quality issues that drive me crazy. POTS occasionally had noise but without the noise the audio didnt have the same quality issues that VoIP does (drops/jitter, sounds like its under water). When I was on the old phones I didnt have to say can you repeat that you dropped out a second…or it was garbled. Noise was more likely a hiss, echo, clicks but otherwise pretty clear especially on a good connection without any noise (more typical).
I used to run a project that ran quite a lot of users and simultaneous calls through modest DO instances. No audio issues.
These days I tend to prefer Vultr.
For either of them, pick one of their sites that is closest to you and test them out. The only way you’ll be able to tell is by trying.
You can launch FreePBX 16 from the DO marketplace apps and you can spin up FreePBX on Vultr from an ISO. In either case you can have a system ready to test in about an hour.
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