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V15 & Sangoma NBE/A101

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sjp_crs

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Anyone using the A101 and/or Netborder Express - I inherited a card for nothing, and if possible, would like to use it rather than dropping $1200+ on a Patton or similar gateway...at least for testing purposes.

The only guides I can find are for V12 or so, and all the links to configuration guides at 3CX now seem to be defunct.
 
You get what you pay for. Don't bother with the Sangoma.
 
Hard to justify $1200 for a small business on the strength of 'you get what you pay for'...especially when you have the alternate for free ;)

By that measure, I'd have gone with the $25k NEC PBX...and not 3CX in the first place ;)
 
sjp_crs said:
Hard to justify $1200 for a small business on the strength of 'you get what you pay for'...especially when you have the alternate for free ;)

As someone who has supported a bunch customers with 3CX and the Sangoma Product I can tell you it doesn't mesh well with 3CX. The issue is the Sangoma NetBoarder software isn't very good. If you can make it "work" it won't be very well and as such you get what you pay for as in you get a PRI connection that is unreliable.

How can a small business even afford a PRI anyway? In Canada they are $700/month + hardly the phone line of small businesses who can't afford a good adapter.
 
lifeline said:
sjp_crs said:
Hard to justify $1200 for a small business on the strength of 'you get what you pay for'...especially when you have the alternate for free ;)

As someone who has supported a bunch customers with 3CX and the Sangoma Product I can tell you it doesn't mesh well with 3CX. The issue is the Sangoma NetBoarder software isn't very good. If you can make it "work" it won't be very well and as such you get what you pay for as in you get a PRI connection that is unreliable.

How can a small business even afford a PRI anyway? In Canada they are $700/month + hardly the phone line of small businesses who can't afford a good adapter.

It's not really a case of 'can't afford', more of 'can this work, and if so how, because I have it and it didn't cost me anything'.

The NBE reasoning makes more sense, I haven't been overly impressed with it so far. The existing system uses a T1 PRI to an ancient NEC PBX with proprietary phones etc. Since they changed phone/internet providers, I suspect that T1 is now actually a SIP service being converted back anyway. They also have a number of dedicated lines for fax, fire and security alarms which don't use the PBX at all, and the plan is to leave those as they are (not broke, don't fix ;) )

I'm hoping that I can do away with the existing convertor and just go with SIP all the way, but their provider hasn't gotten back to us yet. In the meantime, it would be nice for testing to just pull the existing PRI connection from the existing PBX, plug it into the new one and if we have issues, simply plug back into the existing PBX. If I change over to SIP, then my fallback is much more problematic. I could run the SIP in parallel through another provider, but then they are paying for both services, and contract terms come into play.

I guess I need to push the telco and see what the options are there. If they can flip me to SIP fairly easily, and flip me back if things go horribly wrong, the issue becomes moot.
 
sjp_crs said:
Anyone using the A101 and/or Netborder Express - I inherited a card for nothing, and if possible, would like to use it rather than dropping $1200+ on a Patton or similar gateway...at least for testing purposes.

The only guides I can find are for V12 or so, and all the links to configuration guides at 3CX now seem to be defunct.

Hi SJP,

I thought you might like a non-negative post! I haven't used Netborder Express with A101 in V15, but I have in V14.

It's fairly straight forward. As far as I can remember (unfortunately don't have access to the V14 3CX anymore with the NBE setup), you can use the V12 config files.

It's just SIP communication so it should be all fine.

Sangoma support are generally helpful although they can take a few days to get back to you.

http://wiki.sangoma.com/nbe-3cx-configuration

Give it a go, you can use NBE for free too up to 12 calls: http://www.sangoma.com/resources/netbor ... r-windows/

You can always PM me if you want. :D I'll try and help where I can!
 
Thanks Simonjh88, I appreciate that !

I had a very pleasant chat with our phone service provider today - and as I suspected, the service is actually SIP, being delivered to a gateway at our site and converted into PRI in order to interface with our legacy PBX. She needed to check with her techs, but she's pretty sure she can set it up for us to do outbound via both SIP from 3CX, and from the existing PBX via their gateway. Inbound we should be able to flip any time we are comfortable, and flip back if we have issues etc, but we could only do one at a time due to routing rules etc. She is coming to see us next week and bringing a tech to take a more detailed look...all free of charge ;)

So, it may be that the A101/NBE solution is completely unnecessary. More concerning was when she indicated that had our PBX provider told them at the time that their existing PBX could have supported SIP, the service could have been configured that way, and we wouldn't have needed to buy the $1700 proprietary PRI board for the PBX from the PBX provider.

And the PBX provider wonders why we don't want to take them up on their $23k quote to replace the PBX, $9k to replace the phones, and an ongoing $9k/year for licenses/maintenance...
 
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