First time deploying 3CX

[Tom Lee]

Good Morning Everyone,

I'm in the middle of planning to deploy 3CX to a customer with two offices. One office will need 3 faxes, 70 phones, and two conference phones . The second office will need 2 faxes, 4 phones, and one conference phone.

My testing the environment is 3CX version 16 on Microsoft Azure.

Current the customers phone lines are provided by three different Telco. Telco #1 provides main line using T1. Telco #2 provides 4 PSTN lines, and the Telco #3 provides SIP trunk lines. The current system, Cisco UC560, can handle all three in a single box.

I am trying to simply the whole Telco situation as we all know T1 is very expensive. So I am going to move all the T1 lines to SIP and keep the PSTN for faxes, alarm, and backup line.

Most likely I will need a gateway to test a fax line which on the SIP. Which gateway is good for this and with multiple FXO ports? Do I already need to using VPN between the offices and Azure to get the gateway to work?

After spoke to 3CX about the phones, 3CX is using Snom themselves and they recommend Snom. Is Snom D785 and Snom MP good phones? It is way cheaper than Yealink's T46S.

Thanks

Tom

 

[AWS2P]

Snom is serious German company phone (RTX is the real factory), they are not cheaper than Yealink's
They are easy to set and no bugs to stay stuck. D785 new model i use in my office, with large color display, sound is good.

for gateway beronet or patton are good with 4 ports

If 3CX is hosted on Azure you need SBC on customer side

 

[craigreilly]

Faxing over SIP is such a hassle. If you can afford it keep the PSTN's.
(And is FAX over SBC/STUN even supported?)

 

[eddv123]

Faxing over SIP is such a hassle. If you can afford it keep the PSTN's.
(And is FAX over SBC/STUN even supported?)

Completely agree, and no FAX over SBC/STUN is not supported.

It is the the switch from voice to T.38 that causes the most issues with FAX (a slow SIP response would invoke a T.38 Re-INVITE failure).

Conversions can slow down and even garble the messages being sent and adding STUN/SBC into the mix further adds complications.

The device must be local to 3CX, in the same subnet and/or locally routed subnet (including site to site VPN).

 

[eddv123]

NOTE: despite it being un-supported I have had success success with a Grandstream HT701 in direct STUN mode with 3CX however had to use G.711 pass-through for FAX as well as changing to TCP for the SIP traffic and toggling the speed settings of the FAX.

Real headache however and spent a lot of time on this.

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Hello @Tom Lee

Please note that we use phones from all our supported brands and we do not recommend one over the other. Each brand has its own strengths and weaknesses.
You can see all our supported devices in the link below as well as supported gateways.
https://www.3cx.com/support/
Gateways and FAX extension need to be local to register to the PBX so a VPN is a good solution for your installation.

 

[cobaltit]

Snom is serious German company phone (RTX is the real factory), they are not cheaper than Yealink's
They are easy to set and no bugs to stay stuck. D785 new model i use in my office, with large color display, sound is good.

for gateway beronet or patton are good with 4 ports

If 3CX is hosted on Azure you need SBC on customer side

Yes Snom is cheaper than Yealink if you go by how they target the models. D785/D735/D717 matched up to the T46S/T42S/T40G respectively. I've had demo units here for a few months and they definitely have a nice feel to them and the 3yr warranty is nice.