Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX
-
I've been thinking about how these conversations go online and searching throughout SW posts where the typical OP is looking for a good pbx, hosted, but no one wants to pay the $20 to $30 per user anymore. Then they are shown FreePBX, where you end up seeing them on freepbx forums getting their ass owner for not being a life long asterisk guru. Exchange server was this way for a while then hosted exchange went from $16/mailbox down to $4/mail per month. FOSS didn't fix this, economy of scale did. And for some reason Hosted PBX hasn't reached this.
I wonder if the solutions is about FOSS, or if it's not more about why there isn't a "voip.ms or flowroute for Hosted PBX"
Something simple, per device or extension at a bare bones cost. Perhaps bring your trunk from major providers that are peered in (voip.ms, twilio, telnyx)
If you could get something cheap and reliable on Hosted PBX that didn't force you to give up your control over your trunks, and was a la cartel monthly service like the new trunk providers are, would they negate the need for FreePBX?
-
@bigbear said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
I've been thinking about how these conversations go online and searching throughout SW posts where the typical OP is looking for a good pbx, hosted, but no one wants to pay the $20 to $30 per user anymore. Then they are shown FreePBX, where you end up seeing them on freepbx forums getting their ass owner for not being a life long asterisk guru. Exchange server was this way for a while then hosted exchange went from $16/mailbox down to $4/mail per month. FOSS didn't fix this, economy of scale did. And for some reason Hosted PBX hasn't reached this.
I wonder if the solutions is about FOSS, or if it's not more about why there isn't a "voip.ms or flowroute for Hosted PBX"
Something simple, per device or extension at a bare bones cost. Perhaps bring your trunk from major providers that are peered in (voip.ms, twilio, telnyx)
If you could get something cheap and reliable on Hosted PBX that didn't force you to give up your control over your trunks, and was a la cartel monthly service like the new trunk providers are, would they negate the need for FreePBX?
You mean like @NTG and @Bundy-Associates do?
-
@scottalanmiller said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
@bigbear said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
I've been thinking about how these conversations go online and searching throughout SW posts where the typical OP is looking for a good pbx, hosted, but no one wants to pay the $20 to $30 per user anymore. Then they are shown FreePBX, where you end up seeing them on freepbx forums getting their ass owner for not being a life long asterisk guru. Exchange server was this way for a while then hosted exchange went from $16/mailbox down to $4/mail per month. FOSS didn't fix this, economy of scale did. And for some reason Hosted PBX hasn't reached this.
I wonder if the solutions is about FOSS, or if it's not more about why there isn't a "voip.ms or flowroute for Hosted PBX"
Something simple, per device or extension at a bare bones cost. Perhaps bring your trunk from major providers that are peered in (voip.ms, twilio, telnyx)
If you could get something cheap and reliable on Hosted PBX that didn't force you to give up your control over your trunks, and was a la cartel monthly service like the new trunk providers are, would they negate the need for FreePBX?
You mean like @NTG and @Bundy-Associates do?
Yeah, I've been in that same business. But say you just pay $2/device. I don't know if it could get to $1/device. Our cost was in between that with 15,000 devices at my old company.
But we had border controllers, better security, regional failover, a custom sip stack to support it. I would imagine Onsip is the closest thing in the market to this but they charge .03 per minute and require you to use their trunks.
You guys are Hosted FreePBX I believe and maintaining the individual customer installation separately, so the cost you charge make sense.
Pbxes does hosting but it's not a multi-server deployment, just an HA failover. In a real carrier setup you can reboot any server for maintenance and the live phone calls are moved to the other servers automatically. Or when capacity is reached a new sip server spins up to add capacity, then may be turned down an hour later.
-
And I guess my point being, perhaps a better strategy could be to convince someone to launch a service with this type of economy of scale.
I see the some cost per device in play on sites like PBXES. The probably is there multi-tenancy is likely based on multiple asterisk isntances. With freeswitch mult-tenancy can be done on any installation with domains.
If I guy comes along "Hey I got 18 phones at 3 locations." I would be like "Hey, $36 per month and use the available trunking service or bring your supported Twilio, Voip.MS, Flowroute trunks to this Hosted PBX service and be done with it"
Then hopefully we would see the features added that everyone wants.
Or maybe FOSS is the answer and I am off on a tangent. Was just thinking about how Email eventually got cheap enough that you didnt even want to run your own server.
-
I think that a major issue I see with PBX is that unlike email, phone calls are too complex for normal end users to even define what it is that they want. So if you do this, you have end users that can't figure out ring groups, hunt groups, security, IVRs and so forth. That's the majority of the cost in the existing hosted services - not the PBX, setup and hosting - but doing the stuff that the end users could do on their own only theoretically.
-
Paying $15-20 a month isn't dead.
My customer small dr office is doing just that with Dialpad for 3 users.They need to add another 4 phones, depending on the limitations, it might be cheaper to leave them there then the cost for hosted FreePBX and trunking costs and monthly support (normal support being $150/month for updates).
-
No I know that Scott is going to say just because this one office is using it doesn't mean that it's not dead.
I realize it doesn't mean that I need to know doctors offices have proven themselves to often make terrible decisions it doesn't mean that there's not a huge market out there of people doing crazy things. -
@dashrender honestly I love dialpad. The fact that FreePBX doesn't have a dialpad interface make me think we're not making progress. Those are the same guys who started grand central which is now google voice. They also sold the original dialpad to yahoo 15 years ago and came back to reclaim the brand (they were switch.co when they launched)
@scottalanmiller i don't think those are hard items to setup when we are talking about the target audience being other guys who are learning to deploy FreePBX.
-
@bigbear said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
@scottalanmiller i don't think those are hard items to setup when we are talking about the target audience being other guys who are learning to deploy FreePBX.
That can't be the target audience if we are comparing to email, though.
-
@dashrender said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
Paying $15-20 a month isn't dead.
My customer small dr office is doing just that with Dialpad for 3 users.They need to add another 4 phones, depending on the limitations, it might be cheaper to leave them there then the cost for hosted FreePBX and trunking costs and monthly support (normal support being $150/month for updates).
I am curious, if you could move them somewhere what pricing would attract you. Bringing your own trunks and paying $2 per device. Or maybe paying $15 per trunk and getting everything else unlimited and free (devices features etc) this would be my thought on what a "flow route or voip.ms for pbx" should look like.
And dialpad a desktop GUI, just like thirdlane above, should be something that's included or available.
This is what businesses would expect I think when upgrading their legacy phone systems.
-
I have already built a free PBX system for them.
This is inside of a Vultr Account that they will loan and pay for directly. The same will go for their trunks.
The only thing that they will be paying monthly for outside of the hosting fees and the trunks is monthly support to me to maintain the PBX. they will also be paying me an hourly fee whenever I have to create new users or make other changes to the system per their directive.
Of course still have to pay for their own phones as well. -
@scottalanmiller said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
@bigbear said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
@scottalanmiller i don't think those are hard items to setup when we are talking about the target audience being other guys who are learning to deploy FreePBX.
That can't be the target audience if we are comparing to email, though.
Well, guys use to install exchange or some FOSS email server, because hosting it was $15 to $20 per mailbox (say with intermedia circus 2005) with archiving.
Now it's $4/user/month with a 50GB archive and 50GB mailbox.
Hosted PBx is $20+ per user now. So people are deploying FreePBX. If it was $4 or $5 per extension would everyone move to that service?
Again I may be on an tangent with the PaaS thing. I think dialpad is great and if there were a FOSS version of it I would be using just that.
You're talking about 300 employees at dialpad who have already made innovative products vs FreePBX's 30 people? So I am not criticizing FreePBX.
-
@dashrender said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
I have already built a free PBX system for them.
This is inside of a Vultr Account that they will loan and pay for directly. The same will go for their trunks.
The only thing that they will be paying monthly for outside of the hosting fees and the trunks is monthly support to me to maintain the PBX. they will also be paying me an hourly fee whenever I have to create new users or make other changes to the system per their directive.
Of course still have to pay for their own phones as well.How much does it cost vs gen upgrading dialpad? I mean their end cost?
I know to get the handsets you have to pay more than the original $15/month cost.
-
@bigbear said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
@bigbear said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
@scottalanmiller i don't think those are hard items to setup when we are talking about the target audience being other guys who are learning to deploy FreePBX.
That can't be the target audience if we are comparing to email, though.
Well, guys use to install exchange or some FOSS email server, because hosting it was $15 to $20 per mailbox (say with intermedia circus 2005) with archiving.
Now it's $4/user/month with a 50GB archive and 50GB mailbox.
Hosted PBx is $20+ per user now. So people are deploying FreePBX. If it was $4 or $5 per extension would everyone move to that service?
Again I may be on an tangent with the PaaS thing. I think dialpad is great and if there were a FOSS version of it I would be using just that.
You're talking about 300 employees at dialpad who have already made innovative products vs FreePBX's 30 people? So I am not criticizing FreePBX.
That's the difference. I don't think that they are the same. One is about price, one is about complexity. Email was never complex in that way, even when it was expensive.
-
So finding a FOSS pbx is the much better alternative, not getting a "flowroute for PBX"?
I've been playing with FusionPBX all day. I do wish Monster UI from a kazoo was built for a single server deployment...
-
Installed FusionPBX and am actually going to cut over a friend's business next week after another day of testing from a $5 FreePBX isntance. They have about 4 locations and 60 phones. Lots of issues here lately with phones losing registration and having to be defaulted and reconfigured. They run their own instance so I am not sure if it is a FreePBX issue or something they did.
At least on all the phones I am testing Freeswitch certainly is faster, but that has always been the case in my experience over asterisk. I am running it on Jessie and I believe I could host a dozen tenants and hundreds of phones off a $5 or $10 vultr instance.
Also, no banner ads and no questions around the FOSS and licensing. Has an easy way to add your own CSS, GUI and Branding as well.
It's come a LONG way.
-
Definitely interesting, will be following.
-
@scottalanmiller Just emailed the main developer tonight to talk about security with public deployments (i.e. vultr) so we can get a similar guide together like the ones @JaredBusch has provided for FreePBX
Wish I was at MangoCon right now...
-
@bigbear said in Let's Convince Someone to release a FOSS PBX:
Wish I was at MangoCon right now...
You should have been here! It's always so fun
-
An update on this. I am working on putting together some real simple instructions, as well as documentation to Twilio for setting up FusionPBX.
Have got a lot of help from @markjcrane and the other guys on freenode.
Moved over a couple tenants today and was actually able to simplify the customers setup to get things working more to their liking.
@EddieJennings you should consider doing a test run of Fusion before you do that FreePBX install. See also my comments in your thread about the NJ VULTR instance.
