FreePBX support in Australia
If your FreePBX system needs attention, start below. If the office has lost calls entirely, go to that section first.
Who supports FreePBX when the software is free?
This is the question that brings most people here, and the answer is genuinely different from a commercial phone system.
FreePBX is free and open source. Nobody is obliged to support it, and there is no licence that entitles you to help. What exists is:
- The community forum, which is free, active, and often very good. Sangoma staff take part in it. What it cannot give you is a deadline.
- Paid support from Sangoma, who maintain FreePBX. That is bought as a package or as individual blocks of time, and it comes with an actual service level.
- Somebody local. Which is us, and it is the option most small businesses actually want, because the questions are usually about your setup rather than about the software.
None of that is a catch. FreePBX being free is genuinely why it is a good answer for a lot of businesses. It just means support is a separate decision rather than something that arrives in the box, and it is better to make that decision deliberately than to discover it during an outage.
We can also host it for you
Most FreePBX problems we get called about are not really FreePBX problems. They are server problems: the machine under the desk, the box in the comms cupboard, the virtual machine nobody has patched since it was built.
We host FreePBX for clients on their own secure cloud server. That takes the hardware, the operating system, the backups and the security updates off your plate, and leaves you with a phone system that behaves like a service rather than like a computer you are responsible for.
Worth considering if any of these are true:
- Your FreePBX runs on a physical machine somewhere in the office.
- Nobody is sure when it was last backed up, or whether the backup restores.
- The person who built it has left.
- It has not had a security update in a while, and it is reachable from the internet.
That last one matters more than the others. A phone system exposed to the internet and not kept updated is a real risk, and the usual first sign is a very large call bill.
What we help with
- Call routing, inbound routes, ring groups, queues, IVR menus and time conditions for after hours.
- Extensions, desk phones and softphones.
- Trunks and numbers, including getting a new number answering in the right place.
- Hosting and maintenance, including moving an existing system off ageing hardware.
- Systems nobody currently owns, where whoever built it has gone.
The help on this page is free and nothing is gated.
One extension will not register
- Restart the handset. Unplug the network cable, wait ten seconds, plug it back in, and give it a minute.
- Check whether anyone else has the same problem. If everybody does, skip to the outage section.
- Check the cable is in the socket marked LAN rather than PC.
- If it is a softphone, log out and back in.
If it still will not register, the extension's password or its settings on the system are the next place to look, and that needs whoever administers it.
Everybody has lost calls at once
Answer this first: do internal calls between desks still work?
- Desk to desk works, outside calls fail. The system is running and the trunk or the internet connection is the problem.
- Nothing works. The system itself is unreachable. If it runs on a machine in your building, check it has power and is actually running.
- Calls connect but the audio does not. One way or no audio is nearly always firewall or network routing rather than a phone fault.
Do not start changing settings during an outage.
A warning worth reading before you touch the firewall
FreePBX includes its own firewall module, and it is the single most common way people lock themselves out of their own phone system. Change the wrong setting from outside the office and you can lose access to the interface entirely, with the phones still running and no way in to fix them.
If you are about to change firewall or security settings on a live system, make sure you have another way in first, and ideally have somebody who can physically reach the machine. This is worth a phone call before rather than after.
Calls are going to the wrong place
Usually nothing is broken and the routing is doing what it was told. Have these ready:
- The number the caller dialled.
- The time and day.
- Where it landed, and where it should have gone.
Time conditions are the usual culprit, especially after a public holiday or when the clocks change.
Getting someone to look at it
If you administer it yourself and you are stuck, or you have inherited a system nobody has touched in years, we can look at it with you. Taking over somebody else's FreePBX build is ordinary work.
If you are not the person who manages it, here is something to forward:
Our FreePBX system is doing the following: [what is happening, when it started, whether internal calls still work]. VoIP System supports FreePBX independently here in Australia, and can host it as well, so it is not sitting on a server nobody is looking after: voip-system.com.au
Call 1300 865 879, or send us the details and we will come back to you.
Common questions
- Is this FreePBX or Sangoma?
- Neither. FreePBX is open source software maintained by Sangoma. VoIP System is an independent Australian company that installs, hosts and supports it. We are not a Sangoma partner, reseller or authorised agent.
- Is FreePBX actually free?
- The software is. Running it is not free in the sense that the server, the maintenance and the support all cost something, whether you pay for them or do them yourself. It is still very good value, and for a lot of businesses it is the right answer.
- Can you host it for us?
- Yes. We host FreePBX for clients on a secure cloud server, which takes the machine, the backups and the security updates off you.
- Can you take over a system somebody else built?
- Yes, and it is a lot of what we do. We will want the administrator access and a look at how the routing and trunks are built before changing anything.
- Should we move off FreePBX?
- Not necessarily, and we would say so even though we sell other systems. If it does what you need and somebody looks after it, it is doing its job. The reasons to move are usually that nobody can support it, or that it is running on hardware that is going to fail, rather than anything wrong with the software.
- Is it safe to have a phone system on the internet?
- It is, if it is kept updated and its firewall is configured properly. It is not, if it is not. An unpatched phone system reachable from the internet is a genuine target, and the usual way people find out is an unexpected call bill.