Large installations

[gpetrom]

Hi everyone

Is anyone that has experience in large installations with 50 phones and above.
what is your opinion is 3cx stable enough to manage large installations?

Thanks in advance

 

[wisecomputers]

Not sure, but I am having an issue with calls being stuck in queue, and the queue's are not ringing in the right order. Example the last phone rights first, and that is the worst sales person in the company I am setting it up for. I also wish there was a way for the person to have the options to enter 1 to leave a message at any time. The other issue I am having is that the call reports are not 100% right for the call group reports.

But after sounding negative I would say I give it 7 out of 10

 

[archie]

He had call hungups all the time and memory leaks and every two hours he had to restart
3cx. He changed 3cx with trixbox and all problems gone

Probably he tried some beta of V5. Since RC V5 we do not have memory leaks. And since latest versions of V5.1 we do not have hungups.
Actually, we're using our system in our office. About 30 extensions and one bridge across branches works smoothly. Also, we're doing bulk tests in our test lab that involves about 20 simultaneous calls between 100+ extensions, zero memory leaks in a day. Nicky can give you more details on bulk tests.

 

[gpetrom]

Hi Archie

You are very right but when you say you recommend a device you have to solve the
problem and if that requires some programming yes you have to do it. You will reply
asterisk does not do that either, no it does not but you don t haveto pay for that program that is the difference.
A large company prefers to pay and be sure that they will not have
problems and for that reason you have to find a solution if they have a problem.
For example 3 or 4 months ago grandstream was in the recommended phones and gateways
and for that reason the client i was talking about before bought this hardware, we talking about 100 phones,
and one day 3cx decides that grandstream is not supported. What the company should do with
this hardware?
The argument here is not to promote asterisk but to name some specific problems 3cx has in order to solve them
and make it competitive combined to other solutions.

 

[archie]

Re Grandstream - it is surprise even for us. It's true, we've recommended it. They had reasonable quality and standards compliance. But their latest firmware updates completely changed everything. So, how can we recommend a phone which gets worse? Still, we're supporting it, and the fact that it is not recommended anymore doesn't mean we do not support it anymore.
In general, we're recommending devices which we had tested and found complying to standards.

 

[ITWorks]

We are using 3CX to replace our 100 extension Norstar Meridian PBX. 75 phones over the past 6 months have been converted to 3CX and the rest will be added this month. We use version 5.1 with Cisco 7941 and 7961 phones. We have an ISDN PRI connection via a Cisco 2811 router. We are a postsecondary school so our number of concurrent calls is much lower than say a call center. However it is critical to us our phone system is reliable and easy to support. 3CX has been that for us. We knew we would be using Cisco phones and gateways and wanted a system that would work with this hardware. We tested three versions of Asterisk before deciding on 3CX. Currently T.38 is not working for us but we have our fax machines and ATAs. All the important features have been working fine. As an aside: I have not seen a Message Waiting Indicator work with a Cisco phone and an Asterisk PBX but with 3CX MWI works.

Mark

 

[coelhopsi]

You will reply
asterisk does not do that either, no it does not but you don t haveto pay for that program that is the difference.
A large company prefers to pay and be sure that they will not have
problems and for that reason you have to find a solution if they have a problem.

Yes... asterisk is indeed free. Go to Digium's website, download it and then what?! How much time would you take to install it and set it up for your environment? If you have a problem with it, where will you find documentation for it? In one of those 5923875923752359 forums around the internet? And if after all you don't find the solution you need, then you have to hire an Asterisk specialist that will charge you $300 an hour...

That's the problem with open-source... everytime I took a look at AsteriskGUI's screen it gave me the creeps! Full of ortography errors (perfectionists like me can't stand things like these), no useful help... and what about the documentation? Even worse... if you can find it!

You say 3CX is good for large companies who prefer to pay. I say it's the opposite. I say open-source is good for large companies, who have money to hire lots of expensive specialists which will stay there for almost one year studying, analyzing and adapting the open-source software (be it whichever it be) to that large company's needs. Then they will have a smooth software. Otherwise, it will be full of bugs as with any other piece of software.

I'm just stating my point of view in a general way. There are exceptions of course. Not only exceptions, but also the fact that Asterisk (as well as many other open-source software) has its deeds and merits, like bringing VoIP to the masses' knowledge.

Me? I'd rather pay for a PBX system like 3CX than going with open-source software like Asterisk that will cost me a lot of time. Time is money! In the end, you'll see 3CX is cheaper.

 

[N_G]

Hi Coelhopsi,

Thanks for the heads up! I think you hit the nail on the head with your post ;-)

gpetrom,

We designed 3cx to make VOIP easy to install and manage, as well as interoperable. But dont forget that a good VOIP phone system is as strong as its components - Phones, Gateways and VOIP providers play an equally important role in the overall quality of the implementation.

 

[gpetrom]

Hi

Nick

We designed 3cx to make VOIP easy to install and manage, as well as interoperable. But don’t forget that a good VOIP phone system is as strong as its components - Phones, Gateways and VOIP providers play an equally important role in the overall quality of the implementation.

First off all Nick why mine and Haleas post was deleted? :roll:

Yes I know that, but steal when you recommend a device you have to mean it because your clients buys hardware based on your recommendations
If that means that you have to make a deal with the company that when it makes an upgrade to firmware they must test it with 3cx do it or don t recommended

coelhopsi

ou say 3CX is good for large companies who prefer to pay. I say it's the opposite. I say open-source is good for large companies, who have money to hire lots of expensive specialists which will stay there for almost one year studying, analyzing and adapting the open-source software (be it whichever it be) to that large company's needs. Then they will have a smooth software. Otherwise, it will be full of bugs as with any other piece of software.

Well I did not said exactly that here is the whole sentence

A large company prefers to pay and be sure that they will not have
problems and for that reason you have to find a solution if they have a problem.

I meant the opposite like you did, except if my English are so bad and let you understand another thing.
But with one objection when I pay something I want it to be stable and with no bugs.
In the post that was deleted I mentioned that a company had an installation with 100 grandstream gxp 2020 phones
that 3cx recommended 3-4 months ago and had major problems and replaced with another pbx.
And my question is, who fault is that the company bought the wrong hardware?

Sorry if my english are bad

 

[archie]

gpetrom,

Have you read my post re grandstream in this thread? Does it explain enough or I need to explain how it happened again? The compatibility issues with Grandstream is the smallest part in all this buzz. Their latest firmware causes phones to hang or reboot, even when working with another PBX, Asterisk, for example. And how could we predict it half year ago? Personally, I have Grandstream GXP2000 at my desktop with very old firmware - 1.1.0.14, and it works just perfect. Never hung, never rebooted. And, yes, I would recommend it, though it has some minor incompatibility issues for which we have workarounds in our PBX. But the problem is that you can not find such old firmware anymore, and you can not downgrade firmware of recent phones.

 

[ktikoft]

On the Grandstream 2020 issue we have 20 of them and have never had any rebooting or other issues with them I am running the lastest and previous latest firmware updates.

We have had 3cx in for almost a year now.

I am using them with three lines at a time on the 3cx system and have run 4 way conferences again with no issues at all.

I am running them with fixed IPs not sure if this may be an issue for others and I set the QOS to layer 2 level 6 to ensure my router gave them precendence but other than that they are out of the box. I also haev set them to use G711 not compressed codecs as i do not see any point in compressing a 64k cahnnel on a 100 mbit link.