Remote Work from Home Office and SBC provisioning

[bryans]

Hello everyone,
I'm trying to setup a way to configure and provision a number of Yealink t46s phones at remote work from home offices. Currently I have a 3CX hosted system in my office and an SBC setup and working. Prior to having my SBC setup I was unable to provision a phone outside of my office. While yes, I could have done some port forwarding and DNS magic but that seems like a work around. My research led to setting up the SBC and I have it setup. However, I'm unsure how the phone offsite will be able to connect to the SBC without opening any ports for it. Would someone be able to break this down for me? Do I have to enable port forwarding to the SBC so it can provision my phone when requested. Does the provisioning link connect to the SBC through the firewall and setup a VPN tunnel? I'm having difficulty finding any clear documentation on this process and the SBC setup page from 3cx doesn't shed any light onto this.

What I'm trying to accomplish

yealink phone < (remote work from home office) < (https:/my.company3cx provision url) < SBC < Self-Hosted 3cx

 

[KeithA]

Hi Bryans,

What you can accomplish is :

yealink phone -> SBC -> https://my.company3cx.url -> Self-Hosted 3cx

you need the SBC to be at the remote location(s) which makes the outbound connection to your 3cx phone system, no need for port forwarding or dns magic.

When you configure the SBC it is done in two stages, add it on your 3cx system then when you install the SBC it will need the https://my.company3cx.url with its Authentication KEY ID that creates the connection from the remote site to the 3cx system.
See here for full details https://www.3cx.com/docs/3cx-tunnel-session-border-controller/

Then provision the T46 phones as per https://www.3cx.com/sip-phones/yealink-t4-series/

This all assumes https://my.company3cx.url can be accessed from anywhere.

Regards
Keith

 

[SteveITS]

unsure how the phone offsite will be able to connect to the SBC

Is the phone connected to the office through a VPN? If not then there's not a way for it to connect and just install the SBC software on the remote PC, or in a VM.

In addition to the above, note the 5 series has several models that can be its own SBC, making the phones portable: https://www.3cx.com/sip-phones/yealink-t5-series/

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hello everyone,
I'm trying to setup a way to configure and provision a number of Yealink t46s phones at remote work from home offices. Currently I have a 3CX hosted system in my office and an SBC setup and working. Prior to having my SBC setup I was unable to provision a phone outside of my office. While yes, I could have done some port forwarding and DNS magic but that seems like a work around. My research led to setting up the SBC and I have it setup. However, I'm unsure how the phone offsite will be able to connect to the SBC without opening any ports for it. Would someone be able to break this down for me? Do I have to enable port forwarding to the SBC so it can provision my phone when requested. Does the provisioning link connect to the SBC through the firewall and setup a VPN tunnel? I'm having difficulty finding any clear documentation on this process and the SBC setup page from 3cx doesn't shed any light onto this.

What I'm trying to accomplish

yealink phone < (remote work from home office) < (https:/my.company3cx provision url) < SBC < Self-Hosted 3cx

The point of the SBC is that it has to be local to the phones, not remote. You will need one SBC per site. ie if you have 10 remote workers each at their home, they will each need to have an SBC installed in their home.

Another solution that might interest you is the ability that some phone models have: a built in SBC.
We have a list of Yealink T5 models that support this, and some Fanvil and Snom models too.
https://www.3cx.com/sip-phones/ Check the ones that say "Can be Router phone"

You will need models other than the T46S, but this means the phone is entirely independent and will work pretty much anywhere you take it so long as you plug it into an ethernet port.