[VoiceOps] Best Onsite Appliance PBX, Best Cloud PBX

[Nathan Anderson]

It has its weak points for sure, but I do like Asterisk, and not because it is "free", but because I have the source code.  Freeswitch might be better, but I just haven't taken the time to familiarize myself with it, and the ecosystem surrounding Asterisk still seems more rich today than Freeswitch's, even as well-regarded as Freeswitch is at this point and even though Freeswitch isn't exactly the new kid on the block anymore.

I think I have had this debate before (though maybe not on this list?), but I generally shy away from pure "cloud"/hosted solutions, so we don't offer them.  Just as it would seem silly to provision separate internet connections with an upstream provider for every machine in an office, it seems silly to provision separate "ports" on a remote phone switch for every phone in an office.  It's basically Centrex re-imagined.  And where the economics for a small business might have made some sense with a Centrex solution way back when, I don't really see what benefits a hosted PBX offers to the end-user today.  About the only situation where hosted PBX adds up is for an organization that is entirely decentralized and where every employee works remotely.  In every other scenario, having a PBX local to the office just (IMO) makes way more operational sense.  The big benefit is that calling extension to extension doesn't rely on one's internet connection.  Economically, it isn't hard to make SIP trunk pricing competitive with hosted PBX per-extension pricing.  Remote extensions aren't a problem either: it's called a VPN, and some handset manufacturers are even starting to include VPN client functionality directly in the firmware of the phones.  And if a customer is interested in a hosted solution because they think it will reduce their maintenance overheads, well, if somebody buys a PBX appliance from us, we offer to maintain it for them.  And we can do so remotely.

For on-site appliances, if it is pure IP end-to-end, we have taken to rolling our own.  For smaller offices, Asterisk running on an embedded system seems to perform shockingly well.  We could probably get by with something like a Raspberry Pi, but I have taken to using MikroTik Routerboard hardware, which has a great bang/buck ratio and which I can either wipe RouterOS off of and flash with an OpenWRT-based Linux (custom build), or leave RouterOS in place and use the MetaROUTER hypervisor to run a virtual instance of Linux and Asterisk (+ a web GUI) atop RouterOS.  If the requirements/load is low enough that I can get away with the latter for a particular customer, then I can hand them a single device to act as their internet gateway/firewall/PBX/VPN concentrator (for both remote data and remote voice access).  And if the customer needs a couple of analog ports for a fax line or whatever, we can drop in an ATA that registers to their local PBX.

-- Nathan

From: VoiceOps [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Erik Flournoy
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2016 8:49 PM
To: voiceops at voiceops.org
Subject: [VoiceOps] Best Onsite Appliance PBX, Best Cloud PBX

Ok Ok I know this will ruffle some feathers on the board, but what's you ladies and gents best onsite and cloud pbx system. Let me define cloud as a UC or Software based switch running a non specific provider based appliance. (meaning their sticker isn't on the outside of the box)

Best Freeware: Asterisk

Best Onsite Appliance PBX: Been so long for me since I'm hosting everything

Best Cloud PBX: I've been using porta-one via another provider for a few years.

Let's see where this goes. :-)



Erik F
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