Hi,
i’m managing a voip system in the company where i work (i inheritted the system). We have a freepbx system running on an old pc which sounds like it’s going to give up anytime soon. also i don’t like how slow and limited the machine is (takes 5+ min to access the web gui, freepbx not activated, no admin console and overall i never worked with freepbx). first idea was to get a new machine and run 3cx self-hosted, but their yearly subscription went thru the roof recently. i was managing 3cx before and i know to admin it, but pricing is uff.
so option 2 is a hardware dedicated voip central - grandstream ucm6301 sounds like what we need - we have 30 extensions, a few call groups, a simple IVR with 5 selections, work hours and out of work hours recording and routing, plus a few rules for internal calls going out thru the gsm gateway.
all extensions are 3 digit, cisco and yealink ip phones. no analog phones. 2 sip trunks to provider. No mobile phone app needed.
i’d buy 2 and use them in HA mode.
also we have a video door phone that works well with a yealink phone, so not sure if i need a grandstream that supports video, but the price difference between ucm6301 and ucm6300A (audio-only model) is not big…
system is running on it’s own subnet on a vlan. trunks are connected to a provider directly with no internet connectivity (dedicated voip port on the ISP gateway).
any advice on this ? IS this a good choice of hardware and overall upgrade?
thanks
You might want to consider the commercial version of FreePBX (and even the corresponding supported hardware if you like), I’m not allowed to mention it by name directly due to crazy overzealous enforcement of Rule #1 I will never understand. In any event, having used both I find it is quite a bit nicer than FreePBX because it comes with so many additional and useful modules although the HA failover capability is an extra cost option but I think it’s also a “hands off” or automatic thing so if the primary system fails the second one takes over without someone having to do something to make that happen.
The device you mention is basically the same thing but with a different skin that will take more getting used to, by using the commercial version of FreePBX you would basically have what you have now except a little more (but still totally familiar) and running on modern, supported hardware.
What you suggest will of course so exactly the same thing but have more of a learning curve.
He’s already using FreePBX — whether it is the commercial version or the free version, it works the same (and it sounds like he doesn’t want to stay with it).