Built-in Phone VPNs

[Mike Hammett]

Has there been any interest in supporting VPNs built-in to phones?

I'm finding more and more times that there's something the last mile provider is fiddling with that prevents everything from being seamless.

Sometimes the provisioning doesn't work. Sometimes it does, but the SIP won't register. Usually outbound calls work, though.

No amount of tweaking the Comcast router resolves the problem.

Slap up a Mikrotik router that VPNs (usually SSTP) back to our network and everything works fine.

It seems like using the VPN feature built into phones would make everyone's life easier and remove the need for an SBC.

I'd add this to the ideas section, but I can't.

 

[cobaltit]

VPN is networking and 3CX is not trying to get into that space. Since 3CX doesn't support having a VPN server or another interface on the same system as 3CX, this means you'd need a second cloud instance or something else to terminate the VPN.

I've never seen a provisioning issue with any provider. Provisioning is just HTTPS so if that's having an issue then pretty much anything else you do on that internet connection is going to have an issue.

Registration/one way audio is more common. But for home use, web client, soft client would be the way to go. Of if they really have to have a hard phone then SBC. If for some reason the labor involved in troubleshooting is cheaper than putting in a Pi, then just install the Windows SBC. I've done that on occasion, either with the computer there on a a static IP or DHCP reservation.

But since 3CX doesn't provision VPN settings, you can change them manually and they should stick.

But realistically, what I'd like to see (and I'll put this in the Ideas section now) is someone like Fanvil to bake the SBC into their firmware. That would really be the best option.