Fantastic video. Thank you for posting how you broke this down! I've got a client who was asking about phone systems and I'm going to forward this video to them. Super helpful!
Informative video! Thanks! As an MSP, we've tested various cloud PBX solutions such as 3CX and Nextiva, and ultimately chose Thirdlane Multi Tenant PBX for its reliability and deep customization. I hope this information is helpful. Thanks!
I installed freepbx on an old computer years ago and it worked perfectly. I got the POTS card with echo cancel and had 6 lines through freepbx. Installed Cisco SPA phones throughout the company. We got our phone lines via cable unlimited minutes nationwide per line. It was a very cost effective solution when making many calls.
THIS WAS GREAT. Seriously, this is great advice. We switched to voip.ms about 6 months ago and love it. The difference in price from what we moved from is staggering.
Voip.ms and vitelity have been great, so far...been using them for years for small offices... Voip.ms really offers a very full featured PBX with their service, unlimited sub-accounts, no charge for calling between sub-accounts (you can setup 10+ext numbers for each phone for "internal" dialing), as many voicemail boxes as you want to setup, conference bridges, etc... , so $3-4/month goes a long way there...as much as normally I push everything on-prem, Voip.ms makes a lot of sense for the less than 20-30 phones customer...and in those situations, I just assist the customer in creating and setting up their Voip.ms account directly. I manage a Asterisk system for a municipal government with 300 DIDs and 500 extensions spread out over 40 sites...definitely far ahead going on-prem there - down to 12 SIP trunks from a local CLEC for external connectivity, moved to there from a 23B+D PRI circuit about 3 years ago, and 15 years ago they were paying for 200+ POTS lines at $55/each/month (we though we were saving a lot going to the PRI with a common Asterisk PBX at that time)....So phone costs are now a very small fraction of what they were 15-20 years ago
Even though I'm a "one man shop" I still have chosen on-prem. Of course... I'm also a tech guy. One reason for that is for the flexibility of the phone system including integrations with automation systems & the ability to have multiple DIDs for different purposes come into the same system.
One benefit to a cloud based PBX is resiliency. We have an on-prem PBX solution, redundant ISPs (FIOS, Comcast, and 4G connections), Eaton UPS' with nearly an hour of runtime. All staff have been working remotely since mid March with our desk phones without an issue. Until today. None of the systems we had in place mattered when there was an electrical fire in the building and NStar killed power completely. Once everything shutdown, we no longer have phone service. All incoming calls are being routed to a single cell phone and we "hope" to have power back by morning... maybe... So depending on the company size and reliance on phones to generate revenue, an outage could easily cost a company more than the upcharge for a cloud solution.
I specified a cloud hosted solution (3CX) for my company and after months of strange problems (like phones not ringing together or not picking up calls properly) our provider have now suggested an in-house solution. Wish I had of gone for that in the first place !
after my 2 months of a rabbit hole of getting my company set up with VOIP, ill just always recommend on-prem PBX at this point. Aslong as they have an employee who can learn how to configure things, thats what I recommend.
Hi Tom, great video. Maybe a good idea to start bringing more content on VOIP Phone systems like FreePBX. Just like you have with pfSense and FreeNAS. Start with the basics.
Honestly appreciate the video. I am looking into doing a home voip just to learn more about pbx management and was wondering if it is even worth it. Your video helped me go with FreePBX so thanks
Thanks for the analysis and just confirmed our assumptions as CPAs in public practice. There’s also some tax savings in the year you purchase the on-site PBX system!
freepbx support's video calls you need a hard phone or soft phone or video doorbell that has that capability in the GUI go to settings/asterisk advanced settings scroll down to video support click enable and you can choose from multiple video codecs to use
We sell PBX Systems to clients as well. And are always amazed at how many of those clients get taken to the cleaners without even knowing there are other options out there. We happen to be a 3CX reseller but support other systems as well. Like you said you can't learn them all and become an expert at what you do sell.
I sell 3cx and I love it , we r authorized pratner and we use voip.ms too , its cheap too but m learning freepbx too, good video always love watching it 😊. 3cx prices are not too bad and thr stuff just works as long as u use the recommended phones , sip provider and firewall settings,
The MRC for on-prem seems way off. Are you saying that 13 users are equating $25 in monthly minute costs? Ignoring incoming minutes, that would mean each user is only doing 7 minutes a day in outgoing calls...what?
So I studied MIS in school thinking it would give me alot of hands on experience with IT as well as business...turns out it gave me a good basic understanding of both, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert in either. I'd like to take a more focused route with anything IT just because I feel it's more valuable in my situation. I have a job so I'm not worried in a professional sense, but I want to be prepared in case anything ever happens. Where would you suggest I should start in order to get a really good IT learning environment? Could be books, websites, a specific programming language, or even a certification. I recently started doing research at Linux, and want to make the switch to something that will give me a good understanding of that environment too. Also you don't have to help me with this lol it could be anyone that just has the time, or willing to share some knowledge. Thank you!
Depends in what industry you are wanting to work in but the future / currently needed skills is for docker / kubernetes, in the next 5 years I expect most of the industry will be pushing that. We have the ability to run them everywhere from the cloud, to on-prem even on edge devices such as access switches.
I just got a NAS and I been working to get a docker setup so I can have a working copy of a PBX solution. Any chance on future videos of a setup tutorial?
For the on site voip equipment you still have to pay for analog voice services or sip trucks to provide dial tone to your equipment. That could has to be added to the on site voip service. You so have to contact or hire a phone person or I.T. person to maintain the network.
Thank you for putting this video together. Great content. On the example shown, how many hours did the client use for the 13 phones? I would assume somewhere around 30 hours correct? Also, I'm assuming that each line with Ring Central has unlimited hours per line. If that's the case, wouldn't it make more since to compare that to the unlimited plan ($4.25 per DID) from voip.ms which will be 4.25 X 13 = $55.25 a month? I'm also very interested to know if it's possible to setup Free PBX or 3CX on the cloud in a way where we can host more than one client. I saw few implementation for FreePBX hosted on AWS that connect to the client through VPN. However, i was wonder if we could host more than one client on the same system. Maybe it would be better to keep each system separate. Please advice thanks.
FreePBX is a great system for the price but I found it somewhat complicated to setup with some SIP Trucks (Amazon Chime for example) and old Cisco phones. Not a complaining just stating my issues with it
Also, doesnt Ring Central include unlimited minutes in their plan? Voip.ms charges $0.01 a minute US outgoing. Per line if you do 120 minutes a day, that's $36 a month in just Voip.ms charges for US outgoing only.
In the UK here and I've never come across incoming changes. Current deal is roughly 1 cent per min pretty much anywhere landline with ~$4/mo per channel rental. Incoming is free
off top of my head I could do that on-site for 4K australian, which sadly at present means about 2200-2500 USD. But Im using better spec'd mini partaker PC (exactly what sangoma use) for freepbx, one that can handle 100 + concurrent calls , and grandstream gxp2135 plus sidecar and the yealink and configuring and installation - which takes mere minutes, unless you need to do new drops which Tom hasnt mentioned was required.
I'm old enough to know what a real phone is and there is still a segment of the population that appreciates that when you pick up a receiver there is a dial tone. And when it goes down... it just comes back up. The internet, ISPs and VOIP are not that predictable or reliable. I am constantly getting emails from my ISP to reboot my router. Small businesses are a hard sell because every business owner has a high school kid that wants to hack the phone system or business computers. You'd be hard pressed to take one of those on. I deploy a "business in a box" and I have to keep th script kiddies out.
The only monthly fees we see in addition to the DID monthly fees and per minute usage charges are an e911 recovery fee and Caller-ID Name lookups (if you decide to enable either of the features). The fees are only applicable to the specific line you enable them on. The e911 fee is $1.50 per month, and CNAM queries are $0.008 per query. They don't charge the fake recovery fees that many other Telco and VoIP providers do. The is for service in the US.
I’m looking to get a cloud provider, can anyone give a suggestion? I have a couple old ringcentral phones sitting in a closet, but looking for a cheaper option.
I've moved away from the low MRC/break-fix arrangements. What would happen is I'd sell a customer some deployment for a high NRC, and then charge them a very small, or no MRC. Additional support is per hour. Either the customer ends up trying to save money and they avoid calling me for support/training/troubleshooting, and they have a very bad experience, or they call me all the time with a boatload of issues/questions. Charging somebody $100 to answer a question in 30 seconds doesn't feel right, so I end up providing a bunch of support calls for free. Unless the customer has their own IT to manage their system, I tend to charge at least a couple hours per month retainer. That way they can call without worrying about getting a massive bill in the mail, and I don't have to work for free.
FLAWED... you should be doing apples for apples if RC phones are 100, then your on prem phones should be 100. how about updating this video with using EQUAL costs of phones for RC that equal your on prem. I hope your example on-prem 6900 is a"we're usin this fugure" else holly crap your over charging. DISCLAIMER: I only do on-prem with freepbx and grandstream, I wont suggest hosted pbx even for 2 phones, 1 phone, yes of course, 2 if they are stationed next to each other, but if in different rooms, its on -prem.
Why is the yearly 325? wouldn't it be 300 as it's 25 per month.
Good catch, there was a typo that had me multiplying by 13 instead of 12. So yes, you are correct!
Was going to ask the same question
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS so refreshing when people admit this kinda stuff and correct it.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS Excelent video all usual! Thanks for your hard work!
Fantastic video. Thank you for posting how you broke this down! I've got a client who was asking about phone systems and I'm going to forward this video to them. Super helpful!
Informative video! Thanks! As an MSP, we've tested various cloud PBX solutions such as 3CX and Nextiva, and ultimately chose Thirdlane Multi Tenant PBX for its reliability and deep customization. I hope this information is helpful. Thanks!
I installed freepbx on an old computer years ago and it worked perfectly. I got the POTS card with echo cancel and had 6 lines through freepbx. Installed Cisco SPA phones throughout the company. We got our phone lines via cable unlimited minutes nationwide per line. It was a very cost effective solution when making many calls.
THIS WAS GREAT. Seriously, this is great advice. We switched to voip.ms about 6 months ago and love it. The difference in price from what we moved from is staggering.
I appreciate how transparent Tom is white his services and business model. Integrity goes a long way with clients!!
Voip.ms and vitelity have been great, so far...been using them for years for small offices... Voip.ms really offers a very full featured PBX with their service, unlimited sub-accounts, no charge for calling between sub-accounts (you can setup 10+ext numbers for each phone for "internal" dialing), as many voicemail boxes as you want to setup, conference bridges, etc... , so $3-4/month goes a long way there...as much as normally I push everything on-prem, Voip.ms makes a lot of sense for the less than 20-30 phones customer...and in those situations, I just assist the customer in creating and setting up their Voip.ms account directly.
I manage a Asterisk system for a municipal government with 300 DIDs and 500 extensions spread out over 40 sites...definitely far ahead going on-prem there - down to 12 SIP trunks from a local CLEC for external connectivity, moved to there from a 23B+D PRI circuit about 3 years ago, and 15 years ago they were paying for 200+ POTS lines at $55/each/month (we though we were saving a lot going to the PRI with a common Asterisk PBX at that time)....So phone costs are now a very small fraction of what they were 15-20 years ago
Even though I'm a "one man shop" I still have chosen on-prem. Of course... I'm also a tech guy. One reason for that is for the flexibility of the phone system including integrations with automation systems & the ability to have multiple DIDs for different purposes come into the same system.
One benefit to a cloud based PBX is resiliency. We have an on-prem PBX solution, redundant ISPs (FIOS, Comcast, and 4G connections), Eaton UPS' with nearly an hour of runtime. All staff have been working remotely since mid March with our desk phones without an issue. Until today. None of the systems we had in place mattered when there was an electrical fire in the building and NStar killed power completely. Once everything shutdown, we no longer have phone service. All incoming calls are being routed to a single cell phone and we "hope" to have power back by morning... maybe...
So depending on the company size and reliance on phones to generate revenue, an outage could easily cost a company more than the upcharge for a cloud solution.
Sorry to hear.
We have tried Elastix, FreePBX, Issabel and others. We now use freeswitch and Fusion PBX and have been happy using it as a multi-tenant solution.
are you still happy with fusion? I'm looking into them.
I specified a cloud hosted solution (3CX) for my company and after months of strange problems (like phones not ringing together or not picking up calls properly) our provider have now suggested an in-house solution. Wish I had of gone for that in the first place !
Sounds like someone didn't configure 3CX properly. It's a superb system imho, and slightly superior to FreePBX, but not free!
after my 2 months of a rabbit hole of getting my company set up with VOIP, ill just always recommend on-prem PBX at this point. Aslong as they have an employee who can learn how to configure things, thats what I recommend.
Hi Tom, great video. Maybe a good idea to start bringing more content on VOIP Phone systems like FreePBX. Just like you have with pfSense and FreeNAS. Start with the basics.
Totally agree. I planning to learn FreePBX / Asterisk, and it would help me a lot
Crosstalk solutions is great for the Voip/FreePBX information.
Tom, We need Physical vs Virtual deployment as well !
Honestly appreciate the video. I am looking into doing a home voip just to learn more about pbx management and was wondering if it is even worth it. Your video helped me go with FreePBX so thanks
Great video, coincidentally I am getting to relaunch my business as a VoIP provider on a new system. the price comparison site is really useful
Thanks for the analysis and just confirmed our assumptions as CPAs in public practice. There’s also some tax savings in the year you purchase the on-site PBX system!
freepbx support's video calls you need a hard phone or soft phone or video doorbell that has that capability in the GUI go to settings/asterisk advanced settings scroll down to video support click enable and you can choose from multiple video codecs to use
We sell PBX Systems to clients as well. And are always amazed at how many of those clients get taken to the cleaners without even knowing there are other options out there. We happen to be a 3CX reseller but support other systems as well. Like you said you can't learn them all and become an expert at what you do sell.
It would be interesting to see how does the MS teams telephony options compares to this.
Sadly MS does not list those details. It says you have to call them for details. I dont want them having my details lol.
I appreciate the info very much ,,, thanks for the work :from Kenya
Oh, that’s a steal! Sounds like you guys need to raise your prices. Very nice presentation. 🙌
Good video. About 2 years ago I switched to an offsite hosted freepbx, mainly due to the fact I have many remote users.
I sell 3cx and I love it , we r authorized pratner and we use voip.ms too , its cheap too but m learning freepbx too, good video always love watching it 😊. 3cx prices are not too bad and thr stuff just works as long as u use the recommended phones , sip provider and firewall settings,
The MRC for on-prem seems way off. Are you saying that 13 users are equating $25 in monthly minute costs? Ignoring incoming minutes, that would mean each user is only doing 7 minutes a day in outgoing calls...what?
Callcentric is also a good alternative :)
So I studied MIS in school thinking it would give me alot of hands on experience with IT as well as business...turns out it gave me a good basic understanding of both, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert in either. I'd like to take a more focused route with anything IT just because I feel it's more valuable in my situation. I have a job so I'm not worried in a professional sense, but I want to be prepared in case anything ever happens. Where would you suggest I should start in order to get a really good IT learning environment? Could be books, websites, a specific programming language, or even a certification. I recently started doing research at Linux, and want to make the switch to something that will give me a good understanding of that environment too. Also you don't have to help me with this lol it could be anyone that just has the time, or willing to share some knowledge. Thank you!
Depends in what industry you are wanting to work in but the future / currently needed skills is for docker / kubernetes, in the next 5 years I expect most of the industry will be pushing that. We have the ability to run them everywhere from the cloud, to on-prem even on edge devices such as access switches.
I just got a NAS and I been working to get a docker setup so I can have a working copy of a PBX solution. Any chance on future videos of a setup tutorial?
Check out Crosstalk Solutions on here. He does full install from bare bone and VM.
We get cloud hosted FreePBX from Crosstalk Solutions for $75 a month. They've been great.
For the on site voip equipment you still have to pay for analog voice services or sip trucks to provide dial tone to your equipment. That could has to be added to the on site voip service. You so have to contact or hire a phone person or I.T. person to maintain the network.
Thank you for putting this video together. Great content. On the example shown, how many hours did the client use for the 13 phones? I would assume somewhere around 30 hours correct? Also, I'm assuming that each line with Ring Central has unlimited hours per line. If that's the case, wouldn't it make more since to compare that to the unlimited plan ($4.25 per DID) from voip.ms which will be 4.25 X 13 = $55.25 a month?
I'm also very interested to know if it's possible to setup Free PBX or 3CX on the cloud in a way where we can host more than one client. I saw few implementation for FreePBX hosted on AWS that connect to the client through VPN. However, i was wonder if we could host more than one client on the same system. Maybe it would be better to keep each system separate. Please advice thanks.
did you figure this out?
You can host 3CX in the cloud for customers. It's not multitenant so each client will have to have their own instance. I did this a few years ago.
FreePBX is a great system for the price but I found it somewhat complicated to setup with some SIP Trucks (Amazon Chime for example) and old Cisco phones. Not a complaining just stating my issues with it
Also, doesnt Ring Central include unlimited minutes in their plan? Voip.ms charges $0.01 a minute US outgoing. Per line if you do 120 minutes a day, that's $36 a month in just Voip.ms charges for US outgoing only.
In the UK here and I've never come across incoming changes. Current deal is roughly 1 cent per min pretty much anywhere landline with ~$4/mo per channel rental. Incoming is free
wow, I need to re-evaluate my pricing model
off top of my head I could do that on-site for 4K australian, which sadly at present means about 2200-2500 USD. But Im using better spec'd mini partaker PC (exactly what sangoma use) for freepbx, one that can handle 100 + concurrent calls , and grandstream gxp2135 plus sidecar and the yealink and configuring and installation - which takes mere minutes, unless you need to do new drops which Tom hasnt mentioned was required.
@@Ressy66 Are those Partaker PCs decent?
Great Vid, thankyou. So many sharks out there ripping businesses off
Can’t justify it in the U.K. for small business when you can get unlimited broadband and landline with unlimited calls for just £28pm. I wish I could.
Yes I agree, there's alot of IT companies ripping small businesses off..... You should be ashamed of yourselves
Can you go into the pbx server a bit more? like what acutall PBXact UC25 is?
You could always have a look at the Sangoma website!!
I'm not a Sangoma guru, but your price to sell that PBX UC with phones has a good bit of markup on it........~40-50%?
I'm old enough to know what a real phone is and there is still a segment of the population that appreciates that when you pick up a receiver there is a dial tone. And when it goes down... it just comes back up. The internet, ISPs and VOIP are not that predictable or reliable. I am constantly getting emails from my ISP to reboot my router. Small businesses are a hard sell because every business owner has a high school kid that wants to hack the phone system or business computers. You'd be hard pressed to take one of those on. I deploy a "business in a box" and I have to keep th script kiddies out.
How does voip.ms handle all the FCC taxes etc that ring has to charge?
The only monthly fees we see in addition to the DID monthly fees and per minute usage charges are an e911 recovery fee and Caller-ID Name lookups (if you decide to enable either of the features). The fees are only applicable to the specific line you enable them on. The e911 fee is $1.50 per month, and CNAM queries are $0.008 per query. They don't charge the fake recovery fees that many other Telco and VoIP providers do. The is for service in the US.
I’m looking to get a cloud provider, can anyone give a suggestion? I have a couple old ringcentral phones sitting in a closet, but looking for a cheaper option.
We're using connex.net cloud phone service at our office and like it a lot. And we tried multiple different services in the past.
Unless you want a fully turnkey ootb system, then put 3CX in Lightsail, and just use VOIP.ms or some other SIP provider. It rocks!
I've moved away from the low MRC/break-fix arrangements. What would happen is I'd sell a customer some deployment for a high NRC, and then charge them a very small, or no MRC. Additional support is per hour. Either the customer ends up trying to save money and they avoid calling me for support/training/troubleshooting, and they have a very bad experience, or they call me all the time with a boatload of issues/questions. Charging somebody $100 to answer a question in 30 seconds doesn't feel right, so I end up providing a bunch of support calls for free. Unless the customer has their own IT to manage their system, I tend to charge at least a couple hours per month retainer. That way they can call without worrying about getting a massive bill in the mail, and I don't have to work for free.
3CX for me in Microsoft Azure!
and what VOIP or Dial tone you use with that ? are they reliable please advise--thanks!
also how much the average cost you pay for 3cx on Cloud ? and if I have multiple client do I need to have multiple instants ? thanks
Hello sir. How do we install zeek nsm on pfsense?
Funny.. I setup 20 phones for total cost of $800. You guys are making a killing from 1990's technology 🤣
In the title... It's spelled "on-premises"
FLAWED... you should be doing apples for apples
if RC phones are 100, then your on prem phones should be 100.
how about updating this video with using EQUAL costs of phones for RC that equal your on prem.
I hope your example on-prem 6900 is a"we're usin this fugure" else holly crap your over charging.
DISCLAIMER: I only do on-prem with freepbx and grandstream, I wont suggest hosted pbx even for 2 phones, 1 phone, yes of course, 2 if they are stationed next to each other, but if in different rooms, its on -prem.
I love your response. Are you still using freepbx?
@@marciamarcia7449 yep :)