(Last updated, June 14, 2022...)
Well, we've managed to survive the horrors of the world thus far and made it to April 2022, so as promised, here is an update on how the Aussie Broadband experience has been.
The positives - Front of house support including Level 2 are terrific, IPv4 and FTTN reliability is excellent, only outages I've experienced are a few pre planned NBN outages and a couple of ABB's quick middle of the night maintenance tasks.
Before I continue, let me reassure you the UCM's do work, the devices are just restrictive, hardware and configurability wise, one of the most common complaints I hear is with Music On Hold, in our markets, the most popular method is streaming, be it a plug-in radio, or remote stream, and the UCM's can't do it.
(Original post February 14 2021 updated)
By default, ChanSpy, a supervisor function that allows you to monitor
other peoples calls, is enabled and can be used by anyone, yes, anyone, who's phone is logged in to a FreePBX system that has this feature enabled.
Sangoma don't allow you to secure it out of the box, instead, they try sell you some commercial module (that in Australia is about $145) that allegedly sets a PIN.
We all (hopefully) backup our PBX's - our config files, databases, even system audio and logs, some of this can be backed up hourly, daily, or weekly, so in all likelihood, you will have at least two backup processes probably more, but where do you back them up to?
Local storage? It's fair to say nearly everyone uses this, but is that the only place you have them? What if your disks fail? A lot of good those backups are now you can't access them!
FreePBX, being a front end to Asterisk, allows setting multiple time periods under a single Time Group, usually for public Holidays and such, we call this Holidays - I know, so original
This article concentrates on Queensland, in particular Brisbane, Public Holidays, since only a few holidays vary between states, it will be easy for you to change to suite yours if you need to, likewise international readers, where many don't observe Show Days, ANZAC Day, or Easter.