Provisioning phones with cloud SBC

[layton]

Background: we're a 3CX partner, the bulk of our installs are cloud hosted and using Raspberry Pi SBCs on-site. However, for smaller remote sites and work-from-home users with a desk phone, we are using ABP Tech's SBC-as-a-Service (Natpass under the hood) which works great. I don't recall which recent update changed the behavior of specifying an SBC when adding a phone to an extension - we used to have to enter the hostname or IP of the SBC, now we can select the SBC from a drop-down. Selecting an SBC from a drop-down is great for phones that are being deployed at a site with a local SBC, but for our random one-off remote phones using the cloud SBC, we've lost the ability to specify the cloud SBC so the phone provisions correctly. I'm just wondering if anyone else has ran into this issue, and if so how you're handling it? Manually specifying the SBC on the phone works, but obviously is less than ideal when we can provision everything else. I'm not against creating a different custom template, but that has its own drawbacks with making sure techs know when to select which template for the same model phone.

 

[CentrexJ]

For now if you want to do that you are best to go with custom template. Simply add to the phone name ‘cloud sbc’ to assist your techs.

Coming soon Yealink, snom and Fanvil will have phones with 3CX sbc build in. Then you can get rid of the cloud sbc. Some select existing models from Yealink and Fanvil are reported to just need a firmware upgrade for the feature.