Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX
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@bigbear said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
I will certainly look into this, but It has to be stupid simple if it is going to be something I recommend.
It sounds great for you because you want to run something MT and have the skill to back it up.
That is not how the majority of people buy into phone systems though. Also, I have zero desire to be a phone provider.
I recommend, assist, and implement. I do not run it, there is no market there for new companies IMO.
I mean new "VoIP Providers" come out every day it seems like.
Also I know you will figure out twice as much as me in half the time if you give FusionPBX a go @JaredBusch. lol
Just need the time to do so. Will probably get to it this week.
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@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@aaronstuder said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Do you mean if a Datacenter fails? Because that would affect FreePBX or FusionPBX the same.
My point is all your eggs are in one basket. Anything (Bad Update, Human Error, etc) could cause all 11 tenants to fail. At least with different VM's you only made one customer crash
You clearly do not understand the design here.
@bigbear is looking at selling a platform as a service (PaaS) with his design. This is nothing like you wanting to find the latest free thing that you can run for yourself and make money.
The margins in this business are tiny. I wish @bigbear all the luck in the world, but it is not a market I would ever try to get into. In fact @bigbear is only even in the market because of prior work and existing client base.
The market I am after are the single instance phone systems that I can implement for a client and then either walk away or maintain based on the client's desire.
It is a completely different thing.
All of that said, where the hell would you expect a solution to be hosted? Do you think RingCentral or 8x8 do not have a huge failure domain when a datacenter goes down? If you think not, then you need to go back and look at the huge AWS outage and Level3 outages in the last 12 months and compare that to the reports of services down from RingCentral and 8x8 customers.
I have no interest in running a hosting company and no intent to profit from this. My previous comments may have lead you to believe that. When I brought up "flowroute for pbx" up I was thinking about approaching someone like onsip to allow a bring-your-own-trunks account.
Just wanted to clarify that.
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@bigbear said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@bigbear said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@stuartjordan said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Is there many people using Fusion PBX in production? is that much of a comparison compared to Freepbx? GUI looks slightly nicer than Freepbx.
There are a lot of people using it. In telecom people don't share and recommend much because everyone, even your small no-name itsp guy, all perceive themselves to be in competition.
And again, my focus is on getting more options for single tenant every day phone system installs.
It's true. It's rare for PBX / VoIP people to talk to each other. ML is rare in that we have several "competitors" talking openly with each other.
Along that thinking I've been wandering if I could negotiate to get my calling rates available for ML members without them coming through my sub account.
I have 2 million minutes of usage per month but if all ML usage was pooled with a Telnyx I bet it could be twice that. Thereby giving everyone a .005 to .007 rate.
Sam model as my wholesale hardware pricing.
Then think about the fact that we could recommend a true FOSS pbx against FreePBX, a wholesale rate vs SIPStation and discounted Yealink phones.
Something along the spirit of Lets Encrypt.
But from that point still continue to encourage other companies to release their pbx as FOSS.
I have said many, many times that the margins are so tiny here. But if you feel you can live with them, I can completely get behind a model like this.
The primary reason that I object to the RingCentral & 8x8 model is because of the per seat cost just being stupid compared to a 1 off dedicated install with no limits (FreePBX or FusionPBX or whatever).
I mean the monthly cost for a system should come in extremely low. A FreePBX system on Vultr costs 1 hour per month in maintenance generally. It will be even less with FreePBX 14 and the new auto updater functionality.
So assuming a rate of $150/hour & $6 for the Vultr instance, the monthly recurring before services is $156. If you divide that out to someone with say 20 phones you get a cost of $7.80 per extension.
With the new auto updater, I think it will honestly remove all need for monthly maintenance. Moving service to a break/fix model only. So then you end up with a cost of only $6 per month and 20 phones costing basically nothing at $0.30 per extension.
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@stuartjordan said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Is there many people using Fusion PBX in production? is that much of a comparison compared to Freepbx? GUI looks slightly nicer than Freepbx.
That's the History of Asterisk. Pretty GUI's, with much less stable/scalable code on the back end
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@bigbear said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@aaronstuder said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Do you mean if a Datacenter fails? Because that would affect FreePBX or FusionPBX the same.
My point is all your eggs are in one basket. Anything (Bad Update, Human Error, etc) could cause all 11 tenants to fail. At least with different VM's you only made one customer crash
You clearly do not understand the design here.
@bigbear is looking at selling a platform as a service (PaaS) with his design. This is nothing like you wanting to find the latest free thing that you can run for yourself and make money.
The margins in this business are tiny. I wish @bigbear all the luck in the world, but it is not a market I would ever try to get into. In fact @bigbear is only even in the market because of prior work and existing client base.
The market I am after are the single instance phone systems that I can implement for a client and then either walk away or maintain based on the client's desire.
It is a completely different thing.
All of that said, where the hell would you expect a solution to be hosted? Do you think RingCentral or 8x8 do not have a huge failure domain when a datacenter goes down? If you think not, then you need to go back and look at the huge AWS outage and Level3 outages in the last 12 months and compare that to the reports of services down from RingCentral and 8x8 customers.
I have no interest in running a hosting company and no intent to profit from this. My previous comments may have lead you to believe that. When I brought up "flowroute for pbx" up I was thinking about approaching someone like onsip to allow a bring-your-own-trunks account.
Just wanted to clarify that.
Thanks for the clarification.
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@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
With the new auto updater, I think it will honestly remove all need for monthly maintenance. Moving service to a break/fix model only. So then you end up with a cost of only $6 per month and 20 phones costing basically nothing at $0.30 per extension.
I'm kind of nervous about the auto-updater. Although it hasn't happened to me yet (knock on wood), I have read stories on the FreePBX forums where an update breaks something horribly. I normally at least read through the forums to see if any recent module update breaks anything.
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@fuznutz04 said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
With the new auto updater, I think it will honestly remove all need for monthly maintenance. Moving service to a break/fix model only. So then you end up with a cost of only $6 per month and 20 phones costing basically nothing at $0.30 per extension.
I'm kind of nervous about the auto-updater. Although it hasn't happened to me yet (knock on wood), I have read stories on the FreePBX forums where an update breaks something horribly. I normally at least read through the forums to see if any recent module update breaks anything.
Vultr snapshots has saved me countless times since I started messing around with FreePBX.
For that reason if you have s few clients (not sure if that is your situation) deploying MT really makes all the sense in the world. You can easily scale it to a redundant multi-server deployment if you are worried about uptime. But really that's more for hundreds of tenants and thousands of endpoints.
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@bigbear said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@dashrender This is my immediate thesis, I will be sure to share any pros/cons that come from real world use.
1.) Freeswitch is faster and IMHO better than Asterisk. Just park a call and pick it back up for a real world example.
I never have a problem wit this functionality in FreePBX. It used to be not fun (transfer to parking ext and wait to hear feedback), but that was fixed a long time ago.
2.) FusionPBX is multi-tenant, rebrandable, true open source. Can run a simple single server install and be expanded to multiple servers. No licenses or add on modules. True FOSS.
MT and rebrandable have nothing to do with FOSS. They are neat features, but hardly important to most people that want a PBX. The call framework for both FusionPBX (FreeSwitch) and FreePBX (Asterisk) is open source. It is quite true that FreePBX adds a lot of closed source pieces on top.
3.) I get mod_sofia instead of pjsip, and I ditch all my yealink ghost transfer and ghost call issues.
There are zero issues with this if you program the phone correctly. It is a single line in the config. It only took me a couple hours of email support with Yealink to find the cause. I cannot believe no one has ever done it. Instead the only public knowledge on this issue was to block it at the firewall. So fucking stupid.
4.) Better provisioning and its also free. Using Yealink RPS and FusionPBX provisioning you can drop ship a phone to your customer and it will automatically configure itself out of the box.
You can also have a Yealink customer default their existing phone and Yealink RPS will send it new provisioning info when it reboots. So even a customer switching to you with existing phones could default their phones and be up on their new system with you instantly.
Yealink RPS is not easily available and restricts you to only buying from certain suppliers that can offer RPS devices. For my clients, that is a no go. They don't individually buy enough devices to even waste the time setting up accounts. I don't sell hardware.
But if you do have Yealink RPS, you can easily point it to your FreePBX install. I code my Yelaink config files by hand, because it is faster for me to do it that way. But for the lone admin, the paid Endpoint manager works well. That is who it is designed for.
Also FusionPBX has templates for all major brands and models for easy provisioning.
These are there in the paid module see the above answer.
4.) No banner ads for SIP Station, Proprietary phone hardware or links that would otherwise send your customers around you to Sangoma.
I don't get how this is even an issue. It is annoying, sure, but pointing customers to Sangoma? No one sees this except the admin.
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Make changes int FreePBX and when you hit apply watch the CPU with HTOP or top.
Its been some years since I've been on FreePBX but last time I did that it had very high CPU usage enough to interrupt the call for a minute or two. The system only had 10 extensions.I would be curious about someone trying this test on current FreePBX systems. To see if this is still happening.
Try the same test on FusionPBX and you are not going to see a large CPU spike. Even if you had 5000 extensions or more.
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@markjcrane said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Make changes int FreePBX and when you hit apply watch the CPU with HTOP or top.
Its been some years since I've been on FreePBX but last time I did that it had very high CPU usage enough to interrupt the call for a minute or two. The system only had 10 extensions.I would be curious about someone trying this test on current FreePBX systems. To see if this is still happening.
Try the same test on FusionPBX and you are not going to see a large CPU spike. Even if you had 5000 extensions or more.
The single vCPU spikes up and down as I would expect. I have never had a call interrupted.
But the point here is to talk about systems without bias. Please do not turn this into a bashing conversation.
If you dig through threads around here, you will see that while I highly recommend FreePBX, I am far from a fanboy.
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@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@markjcrane said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Make changes int FreePBX and when you hit apply watch the CPU with HTOP or top.
Its been some years since I've been on FreePBX but last time I did that it had very high CPU usage enough to interrupt the call for a minute or two. The system only had 10 extensions.I would be curious about someone trying this test on current FreePBX systems. To see if this is still happening.
Try the same test on FusionPBX and you are not going to see a large CPU spike. Even if you had 5000 extensions or more.
The single vCPU spikes up and down as I would expect. I have never had a call interrupted.
But the point here is to talk about systems without bias. Please do not turn this into a bashing conversation.
If you dig through threads around here, you will see that while I highly recommend FreePBX, I am far from a fanboy.
I wouldn't mind seeing both sides list their perceived pros and cons and then putting them to the test. This kind of thing wasn't even possible before as the only option anyone considered was FreePBX. I thought maybe with a lot of support we could get someone to open source their PBX product, and FusionPBX was just waiting to be reconsidered.
I am sure there are issues and caveats on both sides. The fact that we can at least now compare 2 options is a big improvement IMO.
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@bigbear said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
@markjcrane said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Make changes int FreePBX and when you hit apply watch the CPU with HTOP or top.
Its been some years since I've been on FreePBX but last time I did that it had very high CPU usage enough to interrupt the call for a minute or two. The system only had 10 extensions.I would be curious about someone trying this test on current FreePBX systems. To see if this is still happening.
Try the same test on FusionPBX and you are not going to see a large CPU spike. Even if you had 5000 extensions or more.
The single vCPU spikes up and down as I would expect. I have never had a call interrupted.
But the point here is to talk about systems without bias. Please do not turn this into a bashing conversation.
If you dig through threads around here, you will see that while I highly recommend FreePBX, I am far from a fanboy.
I wouldn't mind seeing both sides list their perceived pros and cons and then putting them to the test. This kind of thing wasn't even possible before as the only option anyone considered was FreePBX. I thought maybe with a lot of support we could get someone to open source their PBX product, and FusionPBX was just waiting to be reconsidered.
This would be a good thing. Probably better to have a thread dedicated to each purpose.
I am sure there are issues and caveats on both sides. The fact that we can at least now compare 2 options is a big improvement IMO.
You will not get a single argument from me on that.
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@jaredbusch said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
But the point here is to talk about systems without bias. Please do not turn this into a bashing conversation.
The point was not to bash FreePBX or Asterisk it was fun for the year that I used them. I credit both for getting me started in open source telephony. Before that I was introduced to VoIP by Cisco Call Manager, and Microsoft Net Meeting.
There were points brought up about differences and this is one of them or at least used to be. Haven't installed FreePBX for several years so it may or may not be valid now. Which is why I asked someone to give it a try...
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@markjcrane said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Make changes int FreePBX and when you hit apply watch the CPU with HTOP or top.
Its been some years since I've been on FreePBX but last time I did that it had very high CPU usage enough to interrupt the call for a minute or two. The system only had 10 extensions.I would be curious about someone trying this test on current FreePBX systems. To see if this is still happening.
Try the same test on FusionPBX and you are not going to see a large CPU spike. Even if you had 5000 extensions or more.
It has load for sure. But definitely doesn't last a minute.
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As far as many comments about redundancy and not all eggs in one basket. Just need to have a backup system that runs a nightly backup and restore script to another server or two. Setting up a server cluster is also possible for both systems.
