Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice
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@wirestyle22 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
Do you follow the 1 trunk for every 3 employees rule? I've been reading about VoIP and this seems to be a common thing mentioned.
I've never even heard of that rule, but it's a really bad one. Every company is completely different in how they use phones and any rule like that would be useless. It might be a median or something, but that just makes it kind of a starting point for discovery, not a useful guideline. You can easily need one for each employee.... or one for every one hundred.
Also, they mean "line" or "concurrency", not trunk. You only need one trunk for unlimited users. Trunks carry as many calls as you want. So you never need more than one trunk no matter what. You easily might have tons of them, but you don't need more than one.
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@DustinB3403 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@wirestyle22 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
Do you follow the 1 trunk for every 3 employees rule? I've been reading about VoIP and this seems to be a common thing mentioned. I know very little about it, but seems to be the type of work your doing would influence this more than the amount of employees.
We have a DID for every employee where I'm at currently, and it's completely overkill in my opinion. But it looks great on a business card. (ha)
Actually, it looks like they are out of touch and wasting money which, in turn, means that they are not business savvy. Only looks good to non-business or consumers. Like good to family members, bad to other businesses. Makes you look small.
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@Dashrender said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@DustinB3403 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice
With an appropriate amount of lines, and properly configured PBX no employees need a dedicated DID.
What? What's wrong with dedicated DIDs? Sure you could have an autoattendant that allows an inbound caller to dial an extension, but the convenience of a DID is sometimes warranted.
A lot. In most cases it is a silly waste of money. You don't use a dedicated IP address for each person, right? DID is just a telephone address. DIDs are not really a convenience in the modern world, once you are dialing numbers by hand you've already left convenience behind.
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@Dashrender said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@DustinB3403 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@Dashrender said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@DustinB3403 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice
With an appropriate amount of lines, and properly configured PBX no employees need a dedicated DID.
What? What's wrong with dedicated DIDs? Sure you could have an autoattendant that allows an inbound caller to dial an extension, but the convenience of a DID is sometimes warranted.
Sometimes, but not to this extreme. We have 120 employees all with their own DID. Sadly I don't have any reporting to back up this statement, but we are not on calls so often to warrant spending as much as we do for these lines.
Lines? So you have 120 trunks? or you have 120 DIDs? We pay $5/month for 20 DIDs, so for you that would be $30/month. Sure it might not be really needed, but it's a drop in the bucket.
Now if you're saying that you have 120+ trunks, OK, yeah that seems like overkill.
The REAL cost of DIDs is not your monthly fees. It's the lock in, confusion, management overhead and other factors. Using loads of DIDs reduces your vendor options.
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@Dashrender said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@DustinB3403 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@Dashrender said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@DustinB3403 said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@Dashrender DID's.
Drop in a bucket... sure.. still insane overkill.
If management wants it, it's not worth your time even worrying about it. Assuming you make $50k/yr, you spending 30 mins on this just cost more than they pay in a month for it.
Go find a company phone someone doesn't need/shouldn't have, and you'll save more money.
eh... management just knows they want people to be able to receive and makes calls whenever they need. I refuse to believe that they want everyone to have a business call with a DID on it..
Really? Why? what difference does it make? The employees already have the cards, right? Assuming they do, if you take the DID away, they'll need new cards.
You use DIDs and extensions for that. You drop the DID whenever it is prudent. There is a simple transition plan so that extra money is not needed for new cards or whatever.
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@Dashrender said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
What? What's wrong with dedicated DIDs?
Technical Debt
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@scottalanmiller said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@Dashrender said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
What? What's wrong with dedicated DIDs?
Technical Debt
I'd upvote the others but I'm too grumpy atm.
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@scottalanmiller said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
DIDs are not really a convenience in the modern world, once you are dialing numbers by hand you've already left convenience behind.
Actually these two thing contradict each other in the stupid human world.
I never meet any normal people that actually know how to add a pause to a dial pattern on their mobile phone in order to dial a DID, pause, dial extension.
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@JaredBusch said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
I never meet any normal people that actually know how to add a pause to a dial pattern on their mobile phone in order to dial a DID, pause, dial extension.
iPhones add them automatically, for me at least. I do this all the time and didn't know that I needed to add a pause. Just adding the number from someone's email signature, for example, puts the pause in for you.
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DID's lead to lots of problems ESPECIALLY when changing providers. My current company we are trying to reduce DID's because we have over a thousand, based on a lot of legacy systems and ports that were done just blindly rather than surgically. Trying to port those 1000 current DID's to a new provider is a nightmare to say the least!
The trunk to employees rule, the term I've heard is "call path". Specifically you want 1 call path for each call. You need to calculate that based on employees as well as conference calls. I do not have an hard/fast rule but you need to check with your SIP trunk provider as to the number of call paths allowed. then check again, then check a third time! I've already been burned but that carrier everyone loves to hate because they sold us supposedly 100 call paths on the trunk and it turns out they never turned on the feature (default is 25, first big conference we had with outside users many could not connect).
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@scottalanmiller said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@JaredBusch said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
I never meet any normal people that actually know how to add a pause to a dial pattern on their mobile phone in order to dial a DID, pause, dial extension.
iPhones add them automatically, for me at least. I do this all the time and didn't know that I needed to add a pause. Just adding the number from someone's email signature, for example, puts the pause in for you.
No @scottalanmiller your iPhone does not add it automatically when you type in a number. It does attempt to parse it from things like email as you say, but no phone currently in existence simply adds a pause when you type in a new number for a contact.
Additionally, your iPhone does not add a pause automatically. It adds a wait. A wait means you have to push a button to continue dialing. A pause will automatically continue dialing. Every single time I have updated a contact form email data it has added the wait and not a pause.
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@JaredBusch said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@scottalanmiller said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@JaredBusch said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
I never meet any normal people that actually know how to add a pause to a dial pattern on their mobile phone in order to dial a DID, pause, dial extension.
iPhones add them automatically, for me at least. I do this all the time and didn't know that I needed to add a pause. Just adding the number from someone's email signature, for example, puts the pause in for you.
No @scottalanmiller your iPhone does not add it automatically when you type in a number. It does attempt to parse it from things like email as you say, but no phone currently in existence simply adds a pause when you type in a new number for a contact.
I didn't say type it in, I said add it from the email sig. You can't reasonably type in that way, but you just hit the number in the email and it adds it for you.
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@JaredBusch said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
Additionally, your iPhone does not add a pause automatically. It adds a wait. A wait means you have to push a button to continue dialing. A pause will automatically continue dialing. Every single time I have updated a contact form email data it has added the wait and not a pause.
Mine is a pause, it's fully automatic when I've used it. It's only so often that it has come up, as I basically never call people, but when I've used it, it is 100% automated. I didn't even know the situation that you are running into could come up. Mine takes the number automatically and dials it, including the extension, automatically. At least it did in the past.
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@scottalanmiller said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@JaredBusch said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
Additionally, your iPhone does not add a pause automatically. It adds a wait. A wait means you have to push a button to continue dialing. A pause will automatically continue dialing. Every single time I have updated a contact form email data it has added the wait and not a pause.
Mine is a pause, it's fully automatic when I've used it. It's only so often that it has come up, as I basically never call people, but when I've used it, it is 100% automated. I didn't even know the situation that you are running into could come up. Mine takes the number automatically and dials it, including the extension, automatically. At least it did in the past.
There is no 'mine'. It is iOS and it works the same for everyone.
Touch email in signature.
It translates it as a semicolon.
The semicolon is a wait character.
Always has been. It is a standard.
The phone will never dial the extension until you press Dial on the bottom of the screen.
Note: it says call ended because everytime I hit the button for the screenshot it terminated the call. but you can still see where it shows
Dial "103" -
@JaredBusch just tested mine, worked as I described. The ; is definite wait, but the , is pause. I just called Danielle from her contact entry on my phone and it dialed the extension automatically and went right to her (voicemail).
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@scottalanmiller said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
@JaredBusch just tested mine, worked as I described. The ; is definite wait, but the , is pause. I just called Danielle from her contact entry on my phone and it dialed the extension automatically and went right to her (voicemail).
Yes, and the point is that I have never, in the seven years I have had an iPhone, had the phone put in a comma by itself.
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@JaredBusch just tested a few things. All comes down to HOW the extension is written in email. I tried a couple and one notation does your way and one does mine.
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We are now going through our email signatures to make sure we are doing them in such a way that customers can touch to call us directly.
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Looks like Android should be the same notation.
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@scottalanmiller said in Setting up FreePBX 13 - Host Choice:
Looks like Android should be the same notation.
Yes, it is a standardized notation. I have no idea if any standards body ratified it, but it has worked for decades.
My old flip phone could do it back in the 90's. I think it was a w and p instead of ; and , on those phones.
