New PBX - on prem or off?
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For your fax need, e-Fax is not an option?
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@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@JaredBusch said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@JaredBusch said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
PBXs have extremely high uptime requirements.
I will say a lot of businesses claim that they need HA or near HA PBX funcitonality.
But once rational thought and actual math is done, it is rarely actually needed.
If his 911 went another path, I'd agree. But his 911 from three sites flows through this one PBX. PBX goes down, 911 goes down.
This is no different than any historical on site PBX. If the phones go down, so does 911.
Policy should be to use cell phone in that case. Much better option today than before cell phones.911 is not a special thing. Phones have always gone out. Phone systems have gone out. Providers have gone out.
Edit to add:
In fact, I know of no municipality that requires 911 be available even if the phone service is down.That doens't mean a business can ignore it. There are codes that require it to be normally available, and as long as it is, and a known plan for a service outage is in place, I know of no other requirements.
Correct - this is our plan today. If the phone system is down, grab the nearest cell phone and call 911.
yes, phone CAN go down. But there is "trying to keep them up" and "not bothering to keep them up" that are big factors. And it is a doctors' office, not a normal SMB.
So what is your proposal in this case?
Do something reasonable. That's all. Ask yourself, if you were a judge looking at what you had done or were a customer and found out why 911 could not be called in an emergency, is what you did reasonable?
If you have an HA system, that's more than reasonable, you looked at the risk and attempted to address it. Did you go to cloud and have backups and get near-HA that way? Then great, you looked into it and addressed it. Did you stick to a POTS line? Did you do some sort of failover? Did you get direct SIP to one phone for 911? All reasonable ways to give you super high 911 availability.
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@black3dynamite said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
For your fax need, e-Fax is not an option?
Medical office users (read: no education, doesn't understand computing basics)
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@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@JaredBusch said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@JaredBusch said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
PBXs have extremely high uptime requirements.
I will say a lot of businesses claim that they need HA or near HA PBX funcitonality.
But once rational thought and actual math is done, it is rarely actually needed.
If his 911 went another path, I'd agree. But his 911 from three sites flows through this one PBX. PBX goes down, 911 goes down.
This is no different than any historical on site PBX. If the phones go down, so does 911.
Policy should be to use cell phone in that case. Much better option today than before cell phones.911 is not a special thing. Phones have always gone out. Phone systems have gone out. Providers have gone out.
Edit to add:
In fact, I know of no municipality that requires 911 be available even if the phone service is down.That doens't mean a business can ignore it. There are codes that require it to be normally available, and as long as it is, and a known plan for a service outage is in place, I know of no other requirements.
Correct - this is our plan today. If the phone system is down, grab the nearest cell phone and call 911.
yes, phone CAN go down. But there is "trying to keep them up" and "not bothering to keep them up" that are big factors. And it is a doctors' office, not a normal SMB.
So what is your proposal in this case?
Do something reasonable. That's all. Ask yourself, if you were a judge looking at what you had done or were a customer and found out why 911 could not be called in an emergency, is what you did reasonable?
If you have an HA system, that's more than reasonable, you looked at the risk and attempted to address it. Did you go to cloud and have backups and get near-HA that way? Then great, you looked into it and addressed it. Did you stick to a POTS line? Did you do some sort of failover? Did you get direct SIP to one phone for 911? All reasonable ways to give you super high 911 availability.
None of that is required by law in any jurisdiction I have worked in.
The FCC guidance on 911 is that you have to inform people on any limitations of 911 services.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/voip-and-911-serviceAlso There was recently a law passed that requires all PBX system not require any codes to dial 911 (8+911 and such).
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@JaredBusch said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
Also There was recently a law passed that requires all PBX system not require any codes to dial 911 (8+911 and such).
Ah was 2017 with an effective date of 2018.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/582/text -
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@JaredBusch said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
The POTS line currently act as fax lines and 911.
There is no need to keep this for 911. You can, but there is no requirement to do so.
As for faxing...... Well you are medical and have abnormal faxing needs.
Assuming that you keep this for faxing and don't mix it with the PBX, there is nothing else to do. The line will go straight from the demarc to the fax machines.
If you want to add it in for 911, then you are adding complexity. You will now need an FXO device to convert it to SIP to connect to the PBX. Obviously if this is a hosted service, you are looping back and forth and it will still fail if the internet is down, PBX is down, etc.
My plan/desire (but can't have emotions here - right?) is to have everything on SIP. I'll need FXO? to convert the SIP lines to analog for the fax machines.
I would like to kill all POTS.If you want legacy fax devices, yes, you will need some sort of gateway device.
I have no choice on the legacy fax devices. While it's true that incoming faxes could all be potentially handled by the PBX (assuming it could handle our volume) outgoing still needs to be available via traditional tray drop.
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@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
And since you're talking about HA - Are you saying you have your PBXs in your hosted solutions all setup as HA? Are the fault tolerate as well? or just fast to get going on another node?
Are they HA as measured in uptime? Yes.
Are they HA in that we can get them back online insanely fast? Yes.
Do we generally run our 911 through them? No.
You do, so you are just using unrelated examples to try to ignore the real issue we are discussing.
Where are you running 911 then?
Most places keep a local line for fax and 911. Not that I like that solution, but it is a simple fix that many places want. A single line for a single purpose is pretty cheap and solves a stupid legal issue really simply.
$35+/month (after taxes) i don't consider that cheap really.
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@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
And since you're talking about HA - Are you saying you have your PBXs in your hosted solutions all setup as HA? Are the fault tolerate as well? or just fast to get going on another node?
Are they HA as measured in uptime? Yes.
Are they HA in that we can get them back online insanely fast? Yes.
Do we generally run our 911 through them? No.
You do, so you are just using unrelated examples to try to ignore the real issue we are discussing.
Where are you running 911 then?
Most places keep a local line for fax and 911. Not that I like that solution, but it is a simple fix that many places want. A single line for a single purpose is pretty cheap and solves a stupid legal issue really simply.
$35+/month (after taxes) i don't consider that cheap really.
You can use a voip.ms or Skyetel line for like, $1/mo if you don't need faxing.
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@black3dynamite said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
For your fax need, e-Fax is not an option?
The machines do support this - though I've never looked it up. I'm not sure what it takes to make it work. I can tell you if it's a per page charge - nope, won't work. The last several services I looked at would be in excess of $700/month because of our volume. But two POTS lines only costs us $80/m so huge savings.
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@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@scottalanmiller said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
And since you're talking about HA - Are you saying you have your PBXs in your hosted solutions all setup as HA? Are the fault tolerate as well? or just fast to get going on another node?
Are they HA as measured in uptime? Yes.
Are they HA in that we can get them back online insanely fast? Yes.
Do we generally run our 911 through them? No.
You do, so you are just using unrelated examples to try to ignore the real issue we are discussing.
Where are you running 911 then?
Most places keep a local line for fax and 911. Not that I like that solution, but it is a simple fix that many places want. A single line for a single purpose is pretty cheap and solves a stupid legal issue really simply.
$35+/month (after taxes) i don't consider that cheap really.
You can use a voip.ms or Skyetel line for like, $1/mo if you don't need faxing.
Faxing is the whole point. though I'm happy to try using a SIP trunk and a convertor box.
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@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@black3dynamite said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
For your fax need, e-Fax is not an option?
The machines do support this - though I've never looked it up. I'm not sure what it takes to make it work. I can tell you if it's a per page charge - nope, won't work. The last several services I looked at would be in excess of $700/month because of our volume. But two POTS lines only costs us $80/m so huge savings.
How many faxes a month are sent/received?
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@DustinB3403 said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@black3dynamite said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
For your fax need, e-Fax is not an option?
The machines do support this - though I've never looked it up. I'm not sure what it takes to make it work. I can tell you if it's a per page charge - nope, won't work. The last several services I looked at would be in excess of $700/month because of our volume. But two POTS lines only costs us $80/m so huge savings.
How many faxes a month are sent/received?
Over 700 pages a day.
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@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@DustinB3403 said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@black3dynamite said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
For your fax need, e-Fax is not an option?
The machines do support this - though I've never looked it up. I'm not sure what it takes to make it work. I can tell you if it's a per page charge - nope, won't work. The last several services I looked at would be in excess of $700/month because of our volume. But two POTS lines only costs us $80/m so huge savings.
How many faxes a month are sent/received?
Over 700 pages a day.
That's insane!
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Your daily fax volume is probably the same as our yearly volume... that being said, we've never had any problems in the ~5 years since switching to VOIP with our fax machines connected to $65 Cisco SPA-112's
Something in my gut is telling me that this isn't going to be a robust enough solution, but I really don't know :man_shrugging:
Faxing a single page to faxtoy.net was $0.021 on Twilio
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@bnrstnr said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
Your daily fax volume is probably the same as our yearly volume... that being said, we've never had any problems in the ~5 years since switching to VOIP with our fax machines connected to $65 Cisco SPA-112's
Something in my gut is telling me that this isn't going to be a robust enough solution, but I really don't know :man_shrugging:
Faxing a single page to faxtoy.net was $0.021 on Twilio
Math people.. it is a basic thing..
$0.021 * 700 pages * 20 days = $294 per month. -
@JaredBusch that's assuming that dash only receives/sends faxes on weekdays but yeah. The cost would be the hard pill to swallow.
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On-prem must be the only option here.
Internal calls is a must-have thing in a lot of companies and I imagine a doctors office being one of them.
I don't know what is required to get HA on the PBX but PBX itself has a very low capacity requirement. All voice traffic goes between end-points directly and PBX is just involved in setting up the call. So I think two low power servers/appliances setup would work great - if the on-prem IT infrastructure and support is not up to the HA 24/7/365.
Redundant WAN with different operators will take care of the link to the provider. Providers themselves are already redundant.
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@DustinB3403 said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
@JaredBusch that's assuming that dash only receives/sends faxes on weekdays but yeah. The cost would be the hard pill to swallow.
Yep, this is why I have given up on the idea of using a fax service. They just can’t compete against a plain ol pots line.
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@Pete-S said in New PBX - on prem or off?:
All voice traffic goes between end-points directly and PBX is just involved in setting up the call.
This is false. It can be set up that way. but it is not that way by default.
