When companies are working on projects together over multiple offices spanning over multiple states or countries, the phone bills really do start to add up.
We encourage our partners to inform their potential and current customers that calls between extensions on phone systems with a network bridge configuration are FREE. This is often a great selling point for potential customers, or a potential upgrade for current customers that may benefit from added functionality.
The phone system will need to be setup in bridge mode if you wish to connect two local phones systems located in different countries for latency reasons.
Setting up a bridge configuration isn’t difficult but we do offer a few recommendations:
Extension numbers shouldn’t overlap
If it can be helped, phone system extension numbers shouldn’t overlap. If there are multiple numbers across different offices with the same extension, a prefix will have to be added when dialling. This prefix will then need to be stripped by the PABX when it travels over the bridge.
Presence of remote offices
If it is required that one office can see presence information of another remote office, you will be required to use a Professional 3CX license.
Training material for setup
3CX offers training material for a number of processes related to a 3CX deployment, including the setup of a bridge.
Although SIP costs are low, calling either locally or nationally between your team can certainly add up.
In Australia there is not enough latency to warrant having multiple phone systems and bridging them together. We recommend using one phone system hosted in one of the supported cloud providers (Google, OVH, Amazon Web Services, 1&1 or Microsoft Azure), as this will provide the desired functionality and cost savings, and will work without any issues.