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Tunnel to SIP provider

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jbrandt01

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I have a strange case that I'm not entirely sure how to approach.

I am in the process of moving our offices to a new location. I have decent DSL setup at the new location, but my SIP provider, Cbeyond is about a month out on moving. The problem comes from the fact Cbeyond's servers aren't accessible through the internet and only resolve in their 'internal' network, thus the PBX has to be connected to their endpoint device.

I currently have 4 extensions at the new site connecting to the old site through the SIP proxy, it works well enough but unfortunately I have the PBX installed on a server that needs to come with us to the new site.

I am looking for a way to keep the PBX at the new site but use some sort of tunnel to a proxy at the old site purely to route incoming and outgoing calls through the Cbeyond SIP trunk.

I think a bridge is the correct approach to this, I am unsure exactly how I need to setup the master/slave and what rules are needed to route calls. My current routing logic is an explicit route for 911, and beyond that greater than 3 digits is sent to the provider on 10000.
 
There may be a number of ways, but not knowing how their "endpoint device" works, make any solution simply a suggestion of something to try. It also depends on how much you are willing to spend on hardware that you may only need for a short term

It sounds as if a VPN connection, to the existing router at the old location would do the trick, but that may cost a bit.

If possible, you could leave the PBX in place on another PC, and simply leave the extensions, at the new location as remotes. That would be the most cost effective method for a short term solution.

Using the bridge, in any way, would still mean having a running 3CX PBX at the old site as well as the new).
 
If you can get a VPN between sites, you should be able to route the traffic to their endpoint device and back, and thus route your trunk to that end of the tunnel.
 
The endpoint device is a Cisco IAD2431 which I have basically no control over as its their device and they disabled the console. The same device is acting as a VPN server as well so I don't necessarily need to buy any additional hardware. I initially tried to connect remote extensions over this VPN but the audio stream got lost in routing. I guess I could try an experiment after hours from a remote location using VPN.

If I were to go with the bridge route, I have no qualms about running another PBX/piece of hardware for the short while it takes them to complete the move. Outbound routing seems pretty straightforward, but my current setup is to identify a DID and connect it to a particular extension. Does this same group of rules automatically traverse the bridge?
 
jbrandt01 said:
If I were to go with the bridge route, I have no qualms about running another PBX/piece of hardware for the short while it takes them to complete the move. Outbound routing seems pretty straightforward, but my current setup is to identify a DID and connect it to a particular extension. Does this same group of rules automatically traverse the bridge?

You would have to create new rules to allow calls to pass over the bridge, both directions. Were you planning on purchasing a licence for the second PBX?

If you are willing to install another 3CX, at the old end, along with one at the new end, why not just install one (at the old end) and restore the current 3CX backup. there may be an issue with the MAC of the new NIC card for licence purposes, but that is a small matter to overcome.

You could move the server yet continue operating as-is until such time that the providers equipment could be moved.
 
Why dont you just get some temporary sip trunks from another provider and then call forward your cebyond did's so that you can move the server.
 
@jbrandt01

You have three options:

- Backup and restore 3CX to another box you can leave at the old location as leejor suggests
- Setup CFWD via CbeyondOnline to some BYOB SIP trunks (Appia, Nexvortex, Vitelity) registered to 3CX at the new location as bardissi suggests. With this option you could pull the IAD and have it ready at the new location
- You could do a bridged VPN (not using Cbeyond's VPN service but your own routers) but it is the most trouble and the least reliable of the three options.
 
Regardless of what path I decided to take, I used this as an excuse to back up the PBX and restore it onto a new virtual machine so the portability is obviously a non-issue now.

Cbeyond's managed VPN through their IAD didn't work and per cobaltit's suggestion I tried a layer 2 bridge using openVPN running on pfSense boxes to some degree of success.

Unfortunately the connection at the new site is an ADSL2+ connection over 9000' of 40 year old copper and can barely do 768k on the upstream. In theory that should be enough pipe but I found call quality suffering regardless of codec and QoS settings after about 3 simultaneous calls and I suspect latency is the culprit. The remote extensions through the SIP proxy also had similar results which dissuaded me from calling it a solution.

I contemplated using a temp SIP provider and doing forwarding, but after limited success with the VPN and the remote extensions, I feel the available bandwidth just isn't there. My ultimate solution which was dictated by other influences as well was to implement a point-to-point wireless link. Strangely enough, this was the easiest, by far the fastest (110mbps over a 6 mile span) and believe it or not most cost effective solution ($120).
 
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