On AstriCon 2019 and Sangoma's Stewardship of Asterisk and FreePBX | Hacker News Reader

On AstriCon 2019 and Sangoma's Stewardship of Asterisk and FreePBX

fredposner.com

27 pointskimi8 comments

This is good to hear. But what I'm really wondering about is what Sangoma plans to do on the commercial side, most notably with Switchvox.

I have been begging for a professional version of Switchvox for years. By that, I mean a version where more is left to the admin to configure, especially when it comes to SIP trunking. I mean a version that lets you use multiple NICs on the device to avoid NATing, ALGs, and other nasty scenarios. And a version with access to the Asterisk CLI so you can troubleshoot, debug, etc. All while maintaining commercial support, and general ease of use for day-to-day administrative activities that Switchvox is known for.

Their PBXact line might be more what you are looking for - a FreePBX system with commercial support, with the same insane flexibility of FreePBX. Switchvox always looked kind of "locked-down" to me.

How does this compare to 3cx?

I inherited a Shoretel system I have just had ‘upgraded’ to Mitel support, just so I can get a quote for additional licenses.

FREEPBX™ and 3CX generally do the same thing, but in very different ways. FREEPBX™ is truly free, unless you want to pay for premium support, Zulu, etc.

3CX has very straightforward pricing, and is quite simple to configure with the numerous SIP providers in the market.

Freepbx being more hacker-friendly, with pros and cons...

But Switchvox has a lot that FreeBPX lacks.

The inbound and outbound call rule system is vastly superior to FreePBX, enabling functionality typical of old school PBX systems, like: Match number according to this rule, strip the first x digits, append y digits, to generate a new number. In FreePBX (unless something has changed recently) you need a rule for every DID, which is a pain in the ass. With Switchvox, I can create a ranged rule that handles an entire block of DIDs. (My FreePBX experience is based on managing an Elastix system in our NYC office, which I peer to Switchvox via IAX2.)

Then there is the ability to join CallerID rules to inbound or outbound rules, with similar pattern matching. The Switchboard system is amazing. The IVR system is the most flexible I've seen in a GUI. It too is insanely flexible once you use it.

Yes of course we could migrate to FreePBX, but with a far higher administrative load, far fewer end-user features, etc.

The flipside to this is that robocalls are often being routed through misconfigured or hacked installations of FreePBX that have been sitting in a broom closet with a dying CPU fan for the last five years.

Nice to see some diverging (from mine, granted a narrower pov) and informative opinions on Astricon.

The content of the development tracks was a bit lacking in the first day, save a couple - the spooky stories were great and one of the subjects was something I faced weeks ago. the second day improved a bit, but we expected some more in-depth usage and... less Kafka.

but Jesus those donut sandwiches. And the salmon. I hope to get chosen to drop by next year if my boss feels like it'd aggregate to our knowledge base. this year, it kinda didn't - except making us realize we were on the right track in some design decisions.

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