 Okay, a lot of people have asked about the phone system situation, who follow this channel, but I'll just kind of give you a quick overview here of what's going on. I have a longer video I'm going to be uploading, which is the details of hiring Chris from Crosstalk to set up my new phone system. We've moved everything over to FreePBX, but I want to talk about Ring Central. And I did not have a horrible experience while using Ring Central. There was little bumps here and there where they made some changes that were minor, but they caused things like the app to change, whatever. They were really not anything that would, they did not disrupt service. That's probably the important thing. That being said, what was very disruptive, and I'm starting a video out here so people understand what happened with Ring Central. So if you follow me on Twitter at all, you got an idea and people were laughing. And this also got me a lot of messages as well. Some people didn't want to be known on Twitter for this, so they privately messed me, so I'll leave their names out of it, but I got a lot of messages from people saying of the same experience with them. So this kind of is a little bit of a warning of Ring Central. And I'm taking down my video where I suggest people use them. We had actually suggested them for a lot of our clients. And what's really turned me off to Ring Central is the exit from them. So what happened was we ported the number over. They didn't deny the port. And if you're not familiar with what number reporting is, that's when you move from one carrier to another. We went with a free PBX internally hosted, and we went with Vitality as the provider of the SIP service, and it connects to our free PBX, and I contracted Chris from Crosstalk to make all that happen. That being said, the port went fine. They had their usual retention, can we keep you as a customer? And I said, no, we're switching to this service. Thank you very much. We not had a bad time with you, blah, blah, blah. And it was cordial. I didn't really, they weren't too high pressure or anything like that. So that part went fine. They didn't deny the port order, and it went through fine. Went through an original amount of time, blah, blah, blah. Went and happened on the day it was us. But that day was like May 9th or May 8th. Then I realized a lot of our clients were complaining because we had suggested to them having Ring Central, and the complaint many of the small business clients were having is we can't call you anymore. It says your number's not working, and it would just ring. So I contacted Vitality who said those numbers are not hitting our service. It's a Ring Central problem. And then the nightmare started of from May 10th till May 30th, people from people using the Ring Central service couldn't call us. The only way I was able to get any response at a Ring Central was a series of tweets because if you email them, they just said, not my problem. You moved away from us. And I'm like, no, only people on Ring Central can't call us. It's clearly your problem. And this went round and round and round with them. And this has made me quite angry because it took several weeks. Now, the messages and private messages I got from people were the same thing. They can remain anonymous, but they shared that same thing with me. Like, yep, had the same problem. If you port from them, people on Ring Central can't call you. One guy told me, I think it took him two months of complaining with them to get it. He says, I should have just went to Twitter like you did. Even now, they've deleted this. And this is a screenshot from the video I started recording yesterday and got sidetracked on from this exact problem. Because they've now deleted this whole tweet stream, which is fine, whatever that's their prerogative to do. The only things that aren't there are some of the replies. So it's confusing to see. I don't know, whatever. So I will start with my exit from Ring Central, less than pleasant, which now has me really difficult in recommending them. And this was just such a pain, especially when you have a lot of your clients using Ring Central that all have to resort to using their cell phones now to give you a call. We could call them, they couldn't call us. And it was funny because even in this tweet stream, which unfortunately I can't scroll down, I sent screenshots, they're like, oh, email this person. And I did. And he replied within like seven minutes. So Kudo was on a response time because the response was easy for them, not my problem. You moved away from us. That was their answer. I'm like, really? I finally get someone apparently they called their executive response team. I guess these people are shaming us on Twitter. So I guess we have to solve the problem team. And I'm not just trying to badmouth them. Explaining my situation of what happened with them. I'm not at all someone who likes to do any type of bashing on any particular company. I very much take things we're going to assault and I realize there's trouble. But I mean, the level of not my problem it took and the three weeks it took to get my customers able to call me again means I can't really recommend Ring Central for people anymore. So I've taken that video down. And like I said, my experience having Ring Central was pleasant for three years. They're not the cheapest, but their service was good. Their customer support was good. I didn't have a horrible time with Ring Central. And we switched to PPX for a couple reasons I'll get into. So I'm going to jump into that part of the video now. And that's enough about the Ring Central part, but this is what happened. This way I can make sure it's all in the clear. And anyone who tried to find the tweet stream of what was going on or people that were retweeting and things like that. Yeah, this is all deleted now. This page no longer works. So let's get into about me switching to free PPX. I have a longer video that I will be uploading soon of that I have to finish editing, because it's a few hour video of me contracting Chris from Cross Talk Solutions, who has some of the best videos on free PPX. Definitely he's really, really smart on all that stuff. That being said, an important aspect of having free PPX in any or any VoIP system is having proper QoS setup. And I'm going to bring this up real quick because sometimes I see people complaining about different phone providers. And we have this as clients that we've picked up because they've switched phone providers twice to try to solve their problem. They went from one VoIP provider to another VoIP provider and a problem comes down to you have to have your network setup right for any VoIP provider to work. So that I will throw in as a caveat here that we use PF Sense. Yes, it works with this. And if you literally use the traffic shaper next in yes and just turn on the VoIP shaping, that's enough to really make it work quite well. So I will throw that out there in, just as a caveat for anytime you're setting up things. So let's get into how we have it configured besides PF Sense. So here's this quick look. We're using the latest version of free PPX. Well, as of May of 2018, it does the critical errors found because there's a module that's disabled. It's one of the commercial modules, whatever. But this is something I want people to think about when you say, well, free PPX just saves you a bunch of money. Yes it does and that is a factor in the decision but one of those things that you have to consider about phone systems such as free PPX is you own the phone system, you own the critical error found or whatever or you're going to pay someone else for support. So before you think it's just a solution to save you a bunch of money, I also maintain this server, update this server and things like that. So those are factors you need to put in there. And if you want to run this either on your own physical hardware or in my case I ran it virtual, you have to maintain that piece of infrastructure in your building. That also means service failures to this building such as power internet will cause a service failure in my phone system as well. So these are a couple of considerations but one of the reasons we went to it, partly yeah, it saves us a few dollars but the other reason was I really liked the ability just to customize, move things around, create call cues and a very, very extensive system. And me and Chris did that video together that I'll be uploading. We barely scratched the surface in a two hour video of how many features you can do and how many fun things you can do with the FreePVac system. So I actually have some plans to do a lot of very custom tinkering around with it. I've got it set up so it's very functional for my business with a few features but we're going to be adding a lot more later and I really wanted to dig into and play with it. I love things like this, it's why I like open sources, why I like Linux because I can get behind the scenes into the years of it. Maybe you go, I just want a super simple managed phone system that I have to worry nothing about. Well, you know, you're probably boring of a candidate for a cloud system. You can just put in cloud, you pay a fee that what I don't pay in fees, I do pay with my time. So it's not like there's not an expense and it has to be taken in there. So besides using FreePVX and having it all set up and like I said, I have a video I'll get uploaded for that. It's been really smooth. I've been using it now, like I said, for about, we started using it from before we even poured it over because we had our lines forwarded to this. So it's been over 30, 45 days since we started using it. It's really been no problem. And of course, FreePVX has been around forever. And if you hire an expert like Chris to help get you going with it, that helps quite a bit. We're using primarily these Yealink W56P phones. We use these and we actually purchased these in April of 2017. We've been using them ever since. These are great phones. Chris has a good review of them. You know, I keep bringing up Chris, but he's kind of the YouTube expert that you'll find for a lot of these videos. But these phones are really good. The year of use of them, no problem. We used them on RingCentral, didn't have a problem with them. The only problem we ever had was back, I said the one hiccup we had with RingCentral was we have these phones set up so more than one line is on one phone and RingCentral broke that during an update but then fixed it. So that was my minor issue I had with them in three years. But it was, you know, their tech support was able to fix it. That being said, it was way easier to set these up with free PPX with a couple of the plugins like the Endpoint Manager plugin. These are actually pretty easy to configure and just an outstanding cordless phone. They, the range and everything on them is really good. Vitality is the provider we went with. They're really inexpensive. It's, it works well. I haven't really had any problems with it. The only thing we haven't gotten around setting up is any of the texting stuff that we had with RingCentral but we didn't use that a ton before. So it's, it's not been a priority to get that set up. It's not like to do this. I know it's something they actually have support for SMS. They also do all kinds of other features. We're using them just on the basic of, we buy sip from them. Now for my phone, I have this, my cell phone and I have Zuiper. I bought the paid version of Zuiper. Now this works really well. I'm really happy with this as a product. It's not that expensive if you buy it for, well the phone, I don't know how much it is for the desktop. One of my staff bought one for their desktop so they can use it. This has been really, because I don't want a desk phone. I don't like anything more in my office than I have now and I didn't want to use it on the computer. So this combined with my good old Bluetooth headset is just a great combination. So the few dollars I paid for this program is more than paid for itself because it allows me to easily answer transfer calls and things like that. And I do have the follow me turned on so I'm able to forward calls. If you call my extension, it bounces over to my cell phone when I'm not in the office. So that's worked really well. And then because we have PF Sense with OpenVPN, I'm able to, with OpenVPN on my phone, easily make phone calls from anywhere that I have internet access with my phone. So the overall experience has been pretty straightforward with all of this. And I just wanted to share with you the different tools that we're using that we went with on here. Maybe I'll do a specific video on Zuiper but really straightforward to use. Easy to set up, supports a lot of different protocols and really inexpensive. It also supports all the platforms. So as a soft phone, this is outstanding. As a desk phone, I really like these yay links. And around the office because, well, had them, they're laying around. We have a couple old Cisco phones and a couple of desks for, you may have seen them floating around. The Cisco phones are, eh, they're okay. They're fairly durable. I had them, I paid $20 for them years ago. We used to use them in Ring Central. So those ones worked perfectly fine with this as well. They're great for just being able to have a phone in a couple of different rooms in case we somehow managed to forget the yay links which does happen. But overall, it's been a great experience. And like I said, if you're thinking about switching to a phone system, I know there's a bunch of them out there and I always, someone's commenting, of try 3CX or try Grandstream or try this. I really wanted the larger flexibility of free PBX. I don't think those other ones are necessarily bad at all. They're 3CX is a pretty neat one. I gotta admit, comparatively, when I'm looking at the menus, there's so much in free PBX and it's not as pretty as they were when I tried out the 3CX system, but I just love the flexibility of this. And it was, you know, it's all Linuxy and that made me really happy with it all being Linux and open source with a couple of commercial modules that you can buy from Sangoma. So that's why I went with free PBX. I don't have anything bad to say about the other ones. It works well, but with any of the networks, make sure your network is set up properly. And I may do a video a little bit more in depth, but the short answer is if you're using PfSense, the cues that you create with the Next and Yes wizard will help your network work well enough to get this working. You can always fine tune it later and play with things, but we haven't had any issues and calls go through fine, but that is an important set up for any of the voice up. So hopefully this was helpful and answers the question about that. And then I'll finish editing the really long video I have with me and Chris because it's a really in depth from start to finish just talking about phone theory almost and firewalls and then moving into step by step, setting up a clean and solid free PBX. We created that video. I messed up the audio a little bit, so it's taking me longer to edit and it's really long from start to finish. So I'm trying to trim it down a bit to make it a little bit more reasonable, but still leave a lot of value in there. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details which you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just want to say thanks, leave a comment. If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out, go ahead and hit the subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications. Hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube. Anyways, if you want to contract us for consulting services, you go ahead and hit launch systems.com and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you. We work with a lot of small businesses, IT companies, even some large companies and you can farm different workout to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network. Also, if you want to help the channel in other ways, we have a Patreon. We have affiliate links. You'll find them in the description. You'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on launch systems.com. Once again, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.