Getting up and running with ER-X?
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@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho a friend of one of our customers got hoodwinked by the Crosstalk guys! They sold him some piece of junk that was literally less than a free phone system and billed him $5,000 for the privilege of getting screwed.
From what I remember watching some of his videos he likes to use the PBXact appliances.
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@krzykat said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@scottalanmiller - OK have to know ... what exactly happened? I thought he only sold FreePBX setups and how could he set that up costing $5K unless its the cost of phones that ran it up.
Just a FreePBX setup on some non-business grade appliance hardware. No virtualization, no means of business support. The customer has an enterprise server, with enterprise virtualization, and enterprise backup all sitting right there and can mitigate downtime very, very well. Then they put their phones on some unserviceable hardware for some insane price tag.
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So this is SO weird, someone at Crosstalk slammed us with a "your account has been created" just hours after that thread! What the heck.
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@brianlittlejohn said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho a friend of one of our customers got hoodwinked by the Crosstalk guys! They sold him some piece of junk that was literally less than a free phone system and billed him $5,000 for the privilege of getting screwed.
From what I remember watching some of his videos he likes to use the PBXact appliances.
Which aren't production level, they are consumer style devices. They aren't garbage, per se, but they don't leverage a minimum business class approach either in pricing or in hardware/dr.
The doctor I was working with (and I just mentioned this thread to him) had asked us about the solution and we mentioned that it was free to do on his existing hardware, and he admitted his buddy had been duped to drop $5K to have the same thing but without the availability of support and without the enterprise hardware for $5K. Totally nuts.
Appliances and phones do not go together. Phones are a trivial workload and their uptime almost always matters. So treating them like low importance items with an appliance is crazy. They've become one of those scams, much like most SAN deployments. Thirty years ago you couldn't get general purpose hardware that could run phones well and general purpose hardware wasn't very reliable, so people got used to paying a premium for phone hardware. Today, lots of vendors prey on people not realizing how phones work and not updating their thinking for the computer age. Big money in that.
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@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
What is the issue with Crosstalk? (Peaked my interest)
Well, our experience is just from customers, but they basically sell free software, deployed poorly, for insane money.
We were pricing out something for a customer and it was like $200 and "this afternoon" from us, done correct. And they were like "WTF, we were going to be charge thousands by Crosstalk for less!"
Interesting to know. Will keep that in mind.
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@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
What is the issue with Crosstalk? (Peaked my interest)
Well, our experience is just from customers, but they basically sell free software, deployed poorly, for insane money.
We were pricing out something for a customer and it was like $200 and "this afternoon" from us, done correct. And they were like "WTF, we were going to be charge thousands by Crosstalk for less!"
Interesting to know. Will keep that in mind.
It's not that they are terrible or something. Basically they are just a reseller of boxes and they apparently don't give advice or use production deployment methods because the money is in selling a $5000 physical PBX because customers are be easily tricked into buying a "box of unknown functionality" for a ton of money, but selling them software or services in that price range is extremely hard.
All the VARs and resellers focus on physical "boxes" because people are conditioned to not do proper cost analysis when doing so. It's a "magic box" and so the price tag means nothing to them. So Crosstalk appears to just follow the reseller trend of taking advantage of customers who are acting emotionally. Which is bad, but it can only happen to a customer who is totally asking for it. I wouldn't do it, obviously, but any customer who asks a reseller to tell them what to do has gone out of their way to set themselves up for this - asking the salesman how to give him money.
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@scottalanmiller I've never really liked that business model. I need my clients to be successful and grow their business. That's why we charge them very little to get up and running, usually just the hard cost of the phones, because then we charge them for the phone service, such that we get to have them as clients for years with a nice small return monthly over many years that will equal that 5K number or more. I'd guess his 5k box doesn't come with a ton of support and maintenance either?
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@krzykat said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
I'd guess his 5k box doesn't come with a ton of support and maintenance either?
None, AFAIK. That's just for the box (and warranty on the hardware, I assume.) It's $5K just for the parts we (and pretty much every business) does for free. Nothing wrong with paying for parts when needed, but it's all expense for a part you don't need to buy at all.
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@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@krzykat said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
I'd guess his 5k box doesn't come with a ton of support and maintenance either?
None, AFAIK. That's just for the box (and warranty on the hardware, I assume.) It's $5K just for the parts we (and pretty much every business) does for free. Nothing wrong with paying for parts when needed, but it's all expense for a part you don't need to buy at all.
This mostly comes from people who are used to seeing what was done 20+ years ago. They have no idea what good systems are like today.
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- Download the current firmware to your laptop.
https://dl.ui.com/firmwares/edgemax/v2.0.8-hotfix.1/ER-e50.v2.0.8-hotfix.1.5278088.tar
Just got one for home last week and I had to downgrade to the v1 firmware to get VLAN tagging to work, just a heads up. It might work on the v2 firmware but I didn't have the time, patience or inclination to arse around with it more than necessary. No more ISP gear in the home network except for the SFP that I had to move from their CPE to the ERX-SFP.
- Download the current firmware to your laptop.
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@notverypunny VLANs work jsut fine on the ER-X. Any firmware.
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@JaredBusch Might take another look then... My FTTH comes in as a tagged VLAN and it wouldn't pick up a dhcp lease on v2, even after a few reboots but once I downgraded to v1 it picked up the lease from the ISP right away.
