Connecting two 3cx systems

[enes.avdic]

Hello everyone,

Hopefully someone can help me out with this issue that I am having. I work for a relatively small company which means the budget is not that great. We have employees overseas in Europe which connect to our 3CX server in the States. Latency is usually around 120-130ms but there are instances on a daily basis where of course latency is higher due to higher traffic and it causes issues. Now I am wondering what the best approach would be to solving this issue and the cheapest. I did some research and as far as I can tell the best thing would be to have one server here in the States for the State side employees and another server in Europe for the European employees. Furthermore to have those two servers interconnected so that it is all one system so that all calls are handled as if on one server. As far as I could tell based on my research this is possible with 3cx or am I wrong? If anyone has any better and cheaper ideas please enlighten me. I am open to any suggestions. In advance thanks to anyone who takes time out of their day to respond.

 

[markshehan]

Hello everyone,

Hopefully someone can help me out with this issue that I am having. I work for a relatively small company which means the budget is not that great. We have employees overseas in Europe which connect to our 3CX server in the States. Latency is usually around 120-130ms but there are instances on a daily basis where of course latency is higher due to higher traffic and it causes issues. Now I am wondering what the best approach would be to solving this issue and the cheapest. I did some research and as far as I can tell the best thing would be to have one server here in the States for the State side employees and another server in Europe for the European employees. Furthermore to have those two servers interconnected so that it is all one system so that all calls are handled as if on one server. As far as I could tell based on my research this is possible with 3cx or am I wrong? If anyone has any better and cheaper ideas please enlighten me. I am open to any suggestions. In advance thanks to anyone who takes time out of their day to respond.

You are 100% correct. This is the ideal solution.

To achieve this (you need paid versions of 3cx) you use a bridge. You set one to be the master (say the US office) and the other to be the slave. They work similarly to a voip provider (in that the slave registers with the master) and even has a port that shows up similar to your sip trunks.

But the real advantage is that your MyPhone will now have two tabs - one for the US PBX and one for the Euro one. Each can see the status of the other office.

Now you can set some outbound rules. If both PBXs have 3 digit extensions for example then you can say in each, if the number dialled is 4 digits and starts with (say) 9 (e.g. 9101) route it via the bridge (as it shows in your drop downs as a route provider) and strip the first digit. So your US 3cx will see the 9101, strip the 9 and send 101 to the Euro 3cx which will ring the Euro x101.

Then you get even more savings. Lets say you have a voip provider in the US for US calls on the US PBX and then a Euro provider on the other one.

So you set up an outbound rule on the Euro PBX that says if they dial 001 xxx yyy zzzz (ie an international call to the USA from Europe) strip the 00 and route it via the US PBX. The US PBX receives the 1 xxx yyy zzzz from the Euro one and it sends it via your US Voip provider. So now the Euro office is making international calls anywhere in the USA for local US rates. And then do the same in in US office for Euro.

It sounds complex but it is very simple and very very powerful for international offices.

I will be more than happy to show you how to set it up, or discuss it further outside of this forum if you want. Just PM me. If you have the two 3cx's it is a few minutes to set up bridging, but the outbound rules take a little more time to make sure you have everything covered (for example I didnt mention the failover outbound rule in case the first is busy).

 

[mixig]

But the real advantage is that your MyPhone will now have two tabs - one for the US PBX and one for the Euro one. Each can see the status of the other office.

just for note: PRO license is minimum for this feature

 

[enes.avdic]

Thanks a lot for your response guys. I will run this by my boss and go from there. You guys have been a big help thanks again.