Crosstalk PBX: a small business PBX, in your office or hosted

Technically, no. In practice, every system we install should have one. A phone system is a server connected to the internet, and FreePBX gets regular security patches. In August 2025, attackers began exploiting a flaw in FreePBX's commercial Endpoint Manager module and it was serious enough to be added to the U.S. government's list of actively exploited vulnerabilities. The systems at risk were the ones that hadn't been patched or had their admin page open to the internet. We can also take the admin page off the internet entirely.

The maintenance plan is how your system stays patched, backed up and monitored. Without one, any work we do is billed by the hour.

MACD stands for moves, adds, changes and deletes. It's a quick configuration change to how your system works, usually about 15 minutes or less. For example: adding or removing a user, changing who rings in a ring group, editing your auto attendant menu, setting holiday hours, resetting a voicemail PIN, or renaming a phone.

Bigger projects, like adding a new office or redesigning your whole call flow, are quoted separately.

A change is something you want done differently. Troubleshooting is fixing something that's broken: choppy call quality, a carrier outage, phones that won't register, failed hardware, or a firewall problem. The Standard and Premium plans include troubleshooting time every month, and any unused time rolls over for up to a year. Work beyond your plan is billed at our hourly rate.

Crosstalk PBX connects to a SIP trunk, which is internet phone service from a carrier. You pay the carrier directly, and we recommend ClearlyIP SIP trunking. VoIP.ms is another good option. With an on-premises system, we can also connect copper phone lines (POTS) or a PRI from your phone company. A hosted system can use them too through an analog gateway, but we don't usually recommend it.

It depends on where your phone system lives.

On-premises: your server and phones are on the same local network, so calls between extensions keep working. Outside calls need your internet connection, or copper lines if you have them.

Hosted: the server keeps answering your calls. The phones at the office that lost internet go offline until it comes back, and in the meantime calls can go to voicemail or be forwarded to another number, like a cell phone. With multiple locations, only the affected site's phones go offline, and calls to that site can be redirected to locations that still have internet.

For mission-critical phone systems, we recommend a multi-WAN setup: two internet connections, ideally from different providers, with automatic failover. We can set that up for you. If it grows into a bigger network design project, that part is quoted separately.

Crosstalk PBX works with any standard SIP phone. Contact us with the make and model and we'll let you know whether it's a good fit.

They go with you. You own your phones, and they're standard SIP phones, so they can be moved to a different phone system in the future.

Yes! See our conference phones, paging and intercoms guide for the adapters, paging gear and intercoms we use.

Yes. A hosted system works especially well for multiple locations, since every office connects to the same server. Maintenance plans for additional sites get a 25% discount per site.

Crosstalk PBX runs on FreePBX, a widely used open source phone system built on the Asterisk PBX engine. It does everything the big-name phone systems do, without per-user licensing, which is why we build on it. Commercial modules are available for anything extra, and every Crosstalk PBX server includes the System Admin Pro module.

Already running FreePBX? See FreePBX support.