Running an SBC in the cloud?

[fraser-t]

I'm looking at the possibility of reducing the hardware footprint of handset deployments by moving the SBC functionality to the cloud, and use the built in VPN capabilities of my router to allow the device to tunnel into my LAN. Has anyone attempted or investigated this? the main blocker I can think of is that the SBC is only meant to have a single IP address.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

 

[Marconi]

Your idea, while interesting, seems to defeat the purpose of having an SBC in the first place. If you're going to put the SBC in the cloud you may as well put the PBX there and do away with the SBC all together.

You could, theoretically, have a cloud-based PBX and (depending on your cloud provider) setup a site-to-site VPN from it to the site where the SBC would normally be. Then you would just need to route all of the VoIP traffic through the VPN link (probably easiest to do using VLANs). Running VoIP/SIP through a VPN link is possible but a lot of people have had trouble doing it.

A better option would be to run the SBC as a VM at the site if you don't want to run extra hardware.

 

[fraser-t]

Your idea, while interesting, seems to defeat the purpose of having an SBC in the first place. If you're going to put the SBC in the cloud you may as well put the PBX there and do away with the SBC all together.

You could, theoretically, have a cloud-based PBX and (depending on your cloud provider) setup a site-to-site VPN from it to the site where the SBC would normally be. Then you would just need to route all of the VoIP traffic through the VPN link (probably easiest to do using VLANs). Running VoIP/SIP through a VPN link is possible but a lot of people have had trouble doing it.

A better option would be to run the SBC as a VM at the site if you don't want to run extra hardware.

I probably should have clarified, the main purpose of the SBC in my deployments is for the management side of handsets (provisioning extensions, BLF, firmware etc). The sites don’t have server hardware that could run a vm as all their other apps are cloud based, but that would’ve been my alternative.

 

[Marconi]

The on-site SBC handles all of the traffic through a secured tunnel to the PBX and allows you to do the provisioning, BLFs, firmware etc.so putting the SBC in the cloud defeats the purpose. You can try using a site-to-site VPN and tunnel all of the non-local VoIP/SIP traffic through that to the PBX server but that will rely on the network equipment on site (and in the cloud) being able to handle the routing properly.

The SBC is designed to avoid all of the problems with having to handle VPNs and routing configuration. If the sites have a NAS capable of running a VM (some of them can) then you could use that to install the SBC from the 3CX Debian ISO. Alternatively, if you are able to get a Raspberry Pi, 3CX still support SBC on the Raspberry Pi.

 

[SteveITS]

FWIW 3CX has posted a few times in the past few months they are working on phone firmware that adds SBC functionality to the phone, so no external SBC is needed. Probably will depend on phone models, but that would help your situation.

 

[fraser-t]

FWIW 3CX has posted a few times in the past few months they are working on phone firmware that adds SBC functionality to the phone, so no external SBC is needed. Probably will depend on phone models, but that would help your situation.

That sounds promising, any word on which firmware version it might be in?

 

[SteveITS]

I don’t recall seeing any specifics in the posts.

 

[Marconi]

FWIW 3CX has posted a few times in the past few months they are working on phone firmware that adds SBC functionality to the phone, so no external SBC is needed. Probably will depend on phone models, but that would help your situation.

That would be a very useful feature, especially for small sites. I hope 3CX introduce it soon.

 

[layton]

There are 3rd party options you could explore - for example we use ABP Tech's SBC-as-a-Service (which is Natpass under the hood). The bulk of our clients have their 3CX installs in the cloud. We use on-prem SBCs in most environments, but for the small remote locations or the occasional WFH user, we've found the cloud SBC works great. You're not getting the direct audio between extensions at the same site like you would with a local SBC, but everything else works as expected - NAT traversal, provisioning, firmware upgrades, etc. My desk phone here sitting here in my home office utilizes the cloud SBC and has been rock solid.

 

[Evolute IT]

One thing to note, using Cloud SBC is complex now with the fact that it's a dropdown selector now instead of a text field.