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   Give your Cisco phones a new life with 3CX Since we have been deploying the 3CX platform over the last six months we have had success repurposing Cisco phones to the 3CX platform. We have a school district in north Texas that is in a proof of concept phase and currently has a Cisco phone system. We have helped him over the last three years upgrade his phone system, even though we saved him money on the labor for the upgrades he is facing a huge Smartnet renewal. The issue with the current phone systems is that they are expensive, hard to upgrade and did I say expensive  100mg viagra . Why should you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a phone system? The 3CX platform performs as well and is sometimes less than a third of what a new Cisco phone system runs. The school was facing a forklift upgrade of hardware and software, that would have cost approximately $25,000.00. Repurposing the Cisco phones saved him $50,000.00 in new phones and allows him to retire the Cisco p...

   Setting up a Cisco 7942 as a custom template for the 3CX PBX Good morning from Minnesota! No, I live in Texas but I am in Minnesota working, anyway on to my post. Yesterday I talked about how to save money by repurposing Cisco phones to use with the 3CX PBX system. The customer I mentioned yesterday, the school district, has some 3CX supported phones – Cisco 7940, 7941 and 7960. However, he also has Cisco 7942’s and guess what, there is no template for those phones. Just as a disclaimer, 3CX did not test the Cisco 7942 as a supported phone, but the template I created works fine with the 7942 and he only has about 12 of these, to save money he said he is willing to take the chance. So let’s get to it. This guide is for your benefit, I am not responsible for your PBX. Also, if you’re running a 3CX virtual PBX creating a template and putting in the phones directory, I’ll show you the path, doesn’t mean you will see the template in the 3CX web console. There is a process to sav...

  3CX on Azure Maybe the Standalone Version As an entrepreneur in the IT Industry I am always looking for new opportunities in IT. Is 3CX on Azure one of those opportunities? Our company, Austen Consultants is always on the hunt for new streams of revenue. It became apparent that VOIP is finally becoming affordable for everyone; the competitors like Cisco and the days of a 50,000 dollar investment to obtain an Enterprise IP PBX are over. We first came across 3CX while doing research for a school district. A simple Google search for IP PBX and there it was…3CX. They were one of the first to come up in the search and within days we had a POC and shortly after, were signed up as a reseller and had our NFR Keys. I will go into more about this in another blog post. For now let’s talk about how and why we tested 3CX on Azure and vCloud Air. 3CX on Azure Our company is a Microsoft Partner as well and use Microsoft Action Pack so we get $200 a month credits on Azur...

   Welcome back for part two of 3CX in the cloud series. In part one I covered how 3CX functioned on Microsoft Azure. Today I will write about my experience installing the system on vCloud Air by vmWare. Again as a Hosted Voice company we were testing out 3CX on vCloud Air for our own selfishness. We wanted to see if we could host the 3CX Virtual PBX in the cloud so we could be up and running immediately and have little to no cost for our startup Hosted IP PBX system. If you read part one on Azure you saw that as of this writing 3CX Virtual PBX did not function correctly or as expected. The standalone version worked fine and I would recommend it on Azure. vCloud Air is similar to Azure and Amazon AWS, another cloud product where you can pay by the hour for your server. One thing that made me leary to start was the rumors that vmWare may not be developing vCloud Air anymore, scary! I wanted to have a robust platform to for our Hosted Voice using VOIP. To think I would put my eg...

  So when I first started working with 3CX back in version 12 I believe we had a single “Multi-Tenant” version of 3CX on a Windows Server 2008R2 box. Had to open up separate ports for every client it worked but management was tough! I am a Data Center Architect by trade and it was rough so I can’t imagine what a layman user did! We have since graduated those days, 3CX is now hosted in our Data Center in Dallas Texas on a VMware vSAN cluster, Cisco Nexus Network Infrastructure, Palo alto Firewalls and a healthy ISP with two Gigabit DIA connections. Since 3CX does very well on Debian we deploy a seperate server for each client. We have had very good success with the Linux Distro’s of 3CX, very stable and they are purpose built for 3CX. I have blogged about deploying 3CX on Azure a couple of times. I still have issues with going to Azure with 3CX, Azure is so cryptic about their pricing and for us as a 3CX Hosted Provider we have to get our costs down so we know exactly what we are pa...

Jacksboro Independent School District  (ISD) is a public school district based in Jacksboro, Texas. Jacksboro ISD receives funding under a U.S. federal program called E-rate, which provides schools with discounts on telecommunications services to support connectivity and Internet use. E-rate began to phase out funding for voice service in the last year, shifting its contributions to support advanced communications systems instead.   The school district wanted to preserve the considerable funding it received from the E-Rate program, but that meant a major overhaul of its legacy Cisco phone system, one that would have cost more than $50,000. Maintenance on its current phone system was complex and costly, and Jacksboro ISD wanted to spend less and cut down on administration time. The school district also wanted to cut communications costs which were up to $2,500 per month, with extra costs for 200 DIDs. To find an alternative, Jacksboro ISD Director of Technology/Support Services...

  AustenTel has developed a Cloud SBC for 3CX and works well on other platforms like Cisco. Our team has spent three years developing this solution for 3CX. We are a 3CX Platinum Partner and host around 3500 extensions for multiple schools, cities and business in Texas. We built the platform for our own use, but have since decided to release it to other 3CX partners that want a solution that requires no on premise solution, like 3CX SBC on a Raspberry PII. This Cloud SBC allows you to provision your endpoints to your 3CX on any Cloud platform, including 3CX’s hosted platform. We are currently developing a WebUI so that there will be some statistics and feedback from you endpoints. This should be on our site in the second quarter of 2022. In the meantime we can still provision your extensions and you will be amazed at the quality of the calls and easy provisioning. We also offer 3CX support and hosting for your 3CX server that includes our Cloud SBC in the hosting packag...

   3CX SBC v16 3CX SBC works great for small and medium sized businesses. The biggest issue I have seen is that it is deployed on Windows which is susceptible to Windows updates and just generally Windows desktop should not be used as a server. Let’s be honest the Raspberry Pi is a cool little box and we have run Citrix zero clients on it as a dummy terminal, but do you really want your phone system to depend on a plastic box the size of a pack of cigarettes? If you are going to install 3CX’s SBC there are limitations on amount of concurrent calls, phones and BLF’s. If you install it in an environment that needs to be up, put it on a server not a Windows desktop. I know a school district in North Texas that hired a company out of Wichita Falls to implement their 3CX uhmmmm…. At the High School they put the 3CX on the Librarian’s desktop, she went home early and shut her computer down and 3CX for the High School! So now I will tell you that we have a Linux based SBC...

   3CX Hosted PBX Done Right In my last post I discussed that 3CX is Cloud Ready on Azure. That is a somewhat bold statement considering what it takes to actually architect a correct solution in the real world. There is a lot to consider when designing an IP PBX that is functional and operational, one that you would be proud of. When I say proud, the primary criteria would be that the end users or consumers of the voice service are happy customers, the voice quality is clear, the Apps work, and the phones operate flawlessly. If you really consider all of these factors, on it’s face it seems so easy! IP PBX vendors make money off of sales of their products. At the end of the day the IT professional (now also considered the telephone guy) has to be able to support the solution and make the end users happy. We IT guys and gals out there know it takes a lot more to make that happen than simply spinning up a box on Azure or AWS. There are many components that...

  3CX V15 is Gaining Ground on Azure Good morning! Well since I last blogged about 3CX on Azure a lot has changed in the world of 3CX. Namely, 3CX V15 was released in the last quarter of 2016 for GA. As a 3CX partner we had access to the beta release and we were able to test it again on Azure. 3CX V15 works great on Azure, there is no multi-tenant version moving forward from V14, so the port requirements that I had blogged about earlier are now gone. 3CX V15 uses HTTPS and regular SIP ports, so there is no need for 1:1 NAT mappings to multiple ports like there was on V14. 3CX has also released the Linux version of the PBX and it is not for Linux novices in my opinion. For a hosted PBX voice solution the 3CX V15 Linux boxes have a very small footprint and is designed with hosting providers in mind. 3CX is moving their model to be more cloud friendly on Azure and AWS. There are some concerns I think that need to be addressed though. Setting up 3CX right out of the box is ...