FOOD FOR THOUGHT Success Stories

[Speedy2k]

Link updated! sorry about that!

 

[blanchae]

That is cool way to update a legacy PBX. Nice work

 

[paulnye]

Successful '97 Phone' PIAF PBX! Thank you PIAF!

I downloaded my first PIAF iso back in March, clueless about what it even was.
Little did I know that 6 months later I would have several successful systems in production, with my largest being a non-profit with 97 phones online and counting! I never would have imagined this in a million years!
Not one day goes by where I am not thankful for all the care and effort which made all this possible to ones like me. Thank you mainly PIAF team, and of course Digium, freePBX, and to the PIAF forum!

It is truly a story of SUCCESS!!!

 

[darmock]

I downloaded my first PIAF iso back in March, clueless about what it even was.
Little did I know that 6 months later I would have several successful systems in production, with my largest being a non-profit with 97 phones online and counting! I never would have imagined this in a million years!
Not one day goes by where I am not thankful for all the care and effort which made all this possible to ones like me. Thank you mainly PIAF team, and of course Digium, freePBX, and to the PIAF forum!

It is truly a story of SUCCESS!!!

Glad it worked for you. Perhaps you can convince others to donate to the PIAF project? We have had a new XEN server donated (thanks rentpbx) along with a couple of phones (thanks lorne) but cash is always nice to keep the lights and internet flowing. Not to mention to replace some of our aging hardware in the lab. Drop me a note if anyone is interetested.

best regards

Tom

 

[mattseymour]

Nothing added here for a while so I thought I'd post my success.

I work for a church in York, UK. In our offices we had a Panasonic hybrid pbx with 6 analogue pots lines plus another line into the church building next door. The system was basic with no caller id or voicemail and we were pretty much out of extensions. It was working fine but we'd had a couple of card failures and some of the handsets had to be replaced. Concerned that it was reliant on second hand parts I was keen to have a replacement plan. We spoke to the company who maintained it and they recommended a replacement VoIP capable Panasonic pbx that would work with the same handsets, starting cost of £5k.

So I started experimenting with VoIP and quickly came across Piaf, which was the first distro I tried. I spent a bit of time getting to grips with it and starting to understand the VoIP basics. I then got hold of some Vodafone branded snom 370 phones second hand for £50 each, built a neat 1u rack server with an intel atom board and ssd, and we were ready to go.

I ended up using four VoIP providers: voipfone.co.uk do our incoming numbers and we have dedicated broadband from them which is privately peered to their network meaning we have a route that doesn't traverse public internet. However their outgoing calls are expensive so we use Aloha Telecom for landlines, Anveo Direct for mobiles and voipcheap.co.uk for many 'special' numbers. I love being able to easily tweak the routes and dial plans as appropriate to route calls effectively.

We now have 28 physical extensions plus some mobile clients, voicemail as appropriate, caller id, a decent out of hours ivr and various other enhancements for an outlay of £1700 and annual cost savings of over £650 before call cost savings so the system pays for itself pretty quickly.

A big boost for us is having three other buildings in the area that now have a phone on the system linked into our firewall over openvpn (snom has the openvpn client built in) which allows intercom calling as well as the convenience of being able to make internal calls. It's also great to know the system can grow. We might find ourselves expanding into a whole other building in the future and I know exactly how to handle that now.

 

[fang0654]

PiaF pretty much just allowed me to save a client from a Very Bad Situation.

Background: A client of mine (we mainly do IT support in the NYC area) was sold on an Earthlink T-1 for data with 9 voice trunks. They are paying about $550 / month for it, with abysmal data speeds, but good voice quality. They have an old NEC system, with phones that are at least 10 years old.

Problem: Last week, I found out that they were moving from their current space to a new space in a shared office. They found out at the last minute that they weren't allowed to bring in any external data connections (so no T-1).

Solution: I installed PiaF as a VM on their server (running Proxmox), ordered them a handful of the Grandstream GXV3240s, and got them up and running on the day they were moving. Got Earthlink to forward their incoming calls over, and now they are still in business, with almost no downtime. Their staff love the phones as well.

Unfortunately, they are still under their 3 year (!) contract with Earthlink until next March, and their early disconnect penalty is pretty much the entire sum of the contract.

 

[w1ve]

Popup PBX for a non-profit event

I just did some volunteer work, setting up a cloud based pbx for a special event in Boston... This was PIAF Purple on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet. We had six IP phones at the HQ Hotel, three DIDs, 4 conferences, and about 300 people in the field on cell phones. For the six-day event, the total bill for the PBX, 1,080 calls during the event, and DIDs, was about $25.00! Call quality was excellent, and when it was not it was local network issues at the event. I used unmetered LocalPhone DIDs and Localphone and Voxbeam trunking. It worked very well. Only challenge was managing networking and NAT on several different networks in the Hotel. (We had dedicated lines + some of hotel bandwidth.) VoIP was flawless,

 

[Robert-BCC]

Hosted PiaF for a cancer non-profit.

I'm a self-employed technical writer and trainer. Most of my work is in networking and security; at the start of this project, I honestly knew very little about VoIP. In mid-August of this year, Bay Area Cancer Connections and their ten or so employees moved their Palo Alto office. Their legacy PBX was attached to a $630 per month T1 line. No one knew how to manage (or move) the PBX, so I volunteered to migrate them to a VoIP solution. After a lot of web searches, it seemed to me that PiaF had the right features, the most robust user community, and the best run forum. I used this site to research phones, find a PiaF host and SIP provider (Vitelity), make setup decisions, get cutover advice, and troubleshoot problems.

One employee gets over 200 pages of fax a month; she used to scan each page! You should have seen the look on her face when I told her that her faxes would now arrive in email as PDF files. I happily took the 20+ pound old yellow fax machine to electronics recycling yesterday. Everyone has their own personal conference bridge, and most of them love voice mail arriving as email.

We're still setting things up. I'm trying to get Polycom to donate a conference phone, I need to setup multicast for intercom service, enforce QoS, get the fancy donated Juniper SRX to pass incoming calls, establish backup procedures, do some more training, etc. But the bottom line is that BCC's monthly bill went down by over $500 / month and I have many of you to thank for this. So as I promised in this thread, I have now made a $500 donation to this forum.

 

[drdrew]

I have managed to set up roughly 60 call centers all running on PIAF in a hosted environment. We use a 3-server proxmox cluster in HA mode to ensure servers are always up. Most of the extra modules are removed in PIAF though to speed up things. We have also optimised part of PIAF a bit to go past 50 concurrent calls. Our current max that I have seen is about 130 concurrent calls. The PIAF security model works great. We have whitelisted all South African IP's and pin protected international routes on both the PBX and upstream providers. We have been hacked twice - both times for less than $1000. Both times was due to employee negligence - the technician working on the box did not re-enable IP tables.

Other than that PIAF is great. My entire business is built on it. We route approximately 100,000 calls per day through these 60 PIAF boxes and have zero issues. If there are quality issues, we simply switch the outbound route to a different provider or enable the jitter buffer. We know if there is an issue, it is not on PIAF, which is great peace of mind.

The only thing lacking in PIAF (and FreePBX) is proper reporting tools for call centres so we had to build our own, called the Teleforge Reporting System, which solved that.

Great work guys and thank you for an awesome product!

 

[voip_user]

Just deployed my first PIAF deployment. No phones on it yet, just a few DID's and conference bridges. I'm doing some work rebuilding a network right now and the IT was in shambles, No passwords, and not much access. I went onto rent PBX setup a PiAF server, got a few DID's from Flowroute, now the new management has there own bridges they can use, Quality for the bridge I was on was pretty good. We'll see what happens when this gets into more heavy use as people start to use there Bridges.

 

[globalweb01]

I created a PIAF system with 41 GV trunks (FreePBX 11). I also added YIAF. Asterisks answers calls, and does callbacks. Outbound calls are passed off to YIAF. This system has been running about 4 years with absolutely no problems.

 

[wardmundy]