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Branch Offices (Best setup?)


Miguel Costa

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We currently run an internally hosted pbxnsip server locally (Toronto) , but are planning to open a new sales office in Phoenix later this year.

My concern is if I send all voice traffic to our Toronto office, I might need to eventually increase our bandwidth at this end. I would much rather have all outgoing calls routed directly to our SIP provider from Phoenix (about 90% of traffic is outgoing).

 

Questions:

1. Can I run another instance of pbxnsip from our branch office, and route all outbound calls via this server? I'm assuming this would mean I would use the outbound proxy settings (linksys phones) to point to the local server?

2. Do I have to duplicate all extension settings? Or just configure a domain & trunk.

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Well, there is a trade off. I think the important question is how many internal calls can be expected in the branch office and how many local calls they will do. Also it is a question if they should have a local DID number (may be important for sales).

 

You can relatively easily manage a remote installation using Remote Desktop or SSH. And hardware is cheap. I think that is not the show stopper in this case.

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We have a company with an office locally and two in remote sites. All are connected via permanent VPNs with local PBXnSIP installs, local PSTN access and calls routed directly to the SIP provider. Each office has a trunk setup to each other office, and extension numbering is done so that phones in other offices don't overlap, i.e. office 1 is 100-199, office 2 200-299 etc. Each office can then call between each other and it's still an "internal" call and each office routes it's other calls according to the local preferences.

 

Personally I'd do it this way, we did another branchwhere they had no local PBX, just phones, which registered back to the main office. We routed a local number to the branch over sip, but this install was less successful as the VPN had a habit of dropping, at which point all calls failed - not great! Obviously it was a network problem and nothing to do with PBX's, but the local PBX installs help mitigate the risk of loosing remote connectivity.

 

It depends on your setup and requirements really. If it's only for a couple of phones in a branch it might not be cost effective to put a whole new PBX in, but if you want belt and braces redundancy, it's probably worth doing.

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I recently posted a case in the best practices, where 1 main office and multiple remote offices...(will grow to 10 remote offices) not needing anything but hdqrts to remote and vis versa. It appears to me that several options exist. We'd be using Snom Phones with multiple identities. Since the revised CS410 comes preconfigured with ext 40 through 49 we'd just assume to use the default scheme. Might you read the post in best practices misc and comment on this? Thanks

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