Cheap and Reliable IP Telephony?

anomalie asks: "I am trying to sell IP telephony to my employer. The idea was shot down once already because of the cost (using a Cisco solution). I would like to find a cheap but reliable IP PBX because everyone liked the idea of IP telephony, just not the price associated with it. I need a system that could initially handle about 80 users at a single location, and eventually handle about 350 users at 7 locations. The two systems I have been looked at so far are Asterisk & Pingtel's SIPxchange IP PBX. I'm not looking here for a final solution, just some starting points for more research. Any feedback/tips/warnings from the Slashdot community?" "I am looking to have at least the following capabilities:
-Auto attendant
-Handle a PRI (hopefully allow forwarding of old PBX DIDs)
-Handle long distance T1 (we would initially segment off some channels from our current PBX)
-Handle WAN Traffic so we could utilize our unused channels for long distance from other locations
-Forwarding of voicemails to email

Nice optional features:
-Web based GUI for voicemail administration
-GUI call manager

Eventually, we would have relay units at the other locations to handle the local calls and call routing and have 1 central PBX at corporate headquarters."

Comments

I'm just an IP phone user.

[johnnliu]

I work in a company with IP phone system. While it's good for long distance calls to branches in other cities (pay local call rates), the overall system has let us down many times.

I'm not sure whether it's that this particular service provider is no good, or whether the service itself is still unproven.

Anyway, just remember when the phone doesn't work, your internet also doesn't work.

No phone calls & no emails - might as well go to the bar.
Phones and emails are almost at the core of most businesses now, they are expected to be always working (like electricity in the building), and when they don't work, the managers get really upset.

Anyway, I don't know who (this person is probably no longer with us) got the company to use IP phones, but they have mentioned many times how much they hate the system.

Good luck. May be services in your area are much better.

IP for the sake of IP

[salesgeek]

Moving to IP based phones can have some great benefits to your company. If you do it right you will end up:

- With almost unlimited flexibility for managing call routing
- Easy integration with databases for tricks like skills based call routing
- Low cost for intra-office communications
- Near perfect support for work from home employees
- Flexibility to set up spot call centers and so on
- Really cool voice mail

Unfortunately, most companies don't use a fraction of the capability of IP phones - a lot of time they end up being used just like the crappy 80's AT&T Merlin they are replacing. Oh yeah - make sure you have a really good SLA on your T's... downtime is SUPER EXPENSIVE when sales and customer service are down.