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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."
-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."
It seems like replacing your current phone system is going to cost more in the short term than just sticking with what works. Will the IP telephone system cost less in the long run? What is the time frame to break-even? Will your company still be around by that time?
I have been pwned because my
The only corporations that would actually stand for a gain from the benefits of IP phones are the ones that would not balk at the price of the hardware.
The largest sum of money spent on phone systems is usually interoffice calls. Why would you set up IP phones in a single location as your goal, then add more offices as a secondary "good to have?"
This is not sound economics -- just because speaking over your cat5 network is cool does not make it a smart thing to do.
...
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.
Unless you're having problems with your current phones, I'd keep them. It's almost certain you'll have some downtime during the switchover, and a few things to iron out during the startup.
I've talked to a few people who've just moved to IP based phones. While they've ended up with a system that works, they had some problems setting up. And end users didn't like the new phones much - they didn't have as many speed dial buttons and certain features were awkward (well, probably just different).
If people are complaining all the time about the phones, then this cost is OK. But if people are happy with their phones, this is going to look like a big waste of time and money.
Wait a couple years, and you've got a good chance stuff will get cheaper, better, and your old phones will look worse.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
When you looked at the Cisco solution, did you just look at the bottom dollar or did you run the numbers on line savings, labor savings, etc? We're going from an all-Centrex phone system with about 420 lines spread across 21 sites to a Cisco VoIP system in the next few months. The initial cost is pretty high, but we're looking at a 2-2.5 year payoff. After the payoff, we're estimating a $7-$8,000 savings per month! Our network techs can do all the maintenance (no more $200+ service calls), all phones have advanced calling features and voicemail, we're leveraging the XML-based displays to add company directories and clock-in/out capability, etc.
Don't just look at the actual cost, run the numbers on everything else too. If it doesn't work out now, stick with current setup until either the numbers work out better or until the added features justify the cost.
Also, I personally wouldn't want to stake my company's phone system on a smaller vendor. We looked primarily at Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, and Avaya. All three have good reputations in the industry.
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
Ironically, we just switched off of using astrisk on Friday, to a non-IP phone solution.
Astrisk really has a great set of features, a lot of which I am really going to miss. On the downside is that we were constantly having problems with it. Not major problems mind you, a couple lost calls here or there and sometimes the voicemail prompts would stutter. I'm not sure if the dropped calls were actually the fault of astrisk, or the PRI circuit we had coming in, because the astrisk console always was feeding warning messages about a particular PRI.
This could all be because we were running off of CVS versions of astrisk, with local patches but aparently, it is the way to go, because stable releases of astrisk are very few, and very far between.
So take this as a word of warning, astrisk is rad, but it'll take some work to get it to settle down.
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.
-- $G
Wow there are so many armchair quarterbacks in here it is unbelievable!
I work at a mid-sized telco that heavily relies on IP telephony. To put it simply, this is where things are moving to on the carrier side and the PBX side. The technology is mature. Everyone is using it. 'Nuff Said.
It looks like the poster is looking for a basic IP PBX that does the stuff that pretty much EVERY modern office PBX does. AutoAttendents, lite web client, simple IVR's, voicemails, and being able to interconnect with a T1 are all very standard features.
Having researched the PBX and call center solution for my own company (about 300 users with 100 call center agents), these are my 2 recommendations:
Artisoft Televantage
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-VERY Inexpensive for small offices like 5-20 people. Pretty average priced when you get up there in the users. Low base cost, high per-seat license cost.
-Supports pretty much EVERY feature under the sun, along with some neat stuff like 'follow me' routing lists, announced hold times, and a free SDK for ODBC integration if you want to build your own IVR's and plugins.
-Televantage runs on standard Intel Dialogic boards, so you can use T1's, DS3's, POTS lines, whatever you want. It also supports something like 1000 SIP users per server if you want to use standard SIP IP phones.
-Biggest disadvantage to TeleVantage is that it runs on a lite version of MS SQL server. On average, we reboot our TeleVantage system about once a month just for stability's sake.
3com NBX SuperStack
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-The 3com is pretty lite on features though it does cover everything that the poster asked for. Certainly not a solution for a call center, but defenitely a great box for an office environment.
-The 3com box runs Cisco Call Manager which is a plus since the poster specifically said he likes the Cisco stuff.
-The 3com box is very inexpensive for small-to-mid sized offices of like 30-50 people. The license cost and the base cost are both reasonable.
-The 3com box runs the same OS as artificial hearts, so it is VERY VERY VERY stable.
-Disadvantage is that you have to use proprietary 3com phones since insted of going with a standard protocol, 3com uses some Layer2 ultra-efficient monster of a codec that they developed internally.
-Another disadvantage is that if you want to add features that are not available in the 3com SuperStack, you basically have to put them on a seperate box next to the machine. For instance, if you desperately wanted ACD or announced hold times, you'd end up putting a 2nd box just as expensive as a PBX right next to your PBX to handle those calls on pass-through.
Here goes...
We deployed several offices with VoIP in a large enterprise environment. Some offices have more bandwidth then others. The one's with the least bandwidth have more issues with VoIP.
Most problems have to do with initial setup and configuration of the phones. i.e. programming of voice mail, features, etc. The next problem is setting up the routing and networking. Then out of the blue problems with dropped calls, voice mail issues and no incoming calls.
The hardware is only part of the problem. You have a lot of choices to make.
1. Quality phones and PBX gear that's stable and reliable.
2. Bandwidth, enough to handle the load of normal data and VoIP.
3. Quality tech's to set it up the right way. Network engineers to ensure the quality of the data circuits.
4. Quality provider with stable systems. This includes the Internet pipeline / leased line. You need to keep this circuit up and running during business hours. If the network is unstable and computers are disconnected frequently, then you can expect the phones to go with it.
There are advantages to having your data and phones on different systems. The big advantages to VoIP come when you already have circuits in place and you are connecting multiple offices from across the country (or world). This way you can save money on inter-office calls and long distance calls (depending on the provider). Workers can setup VoIP at home and connect it to their Cable modem along with a VPN connection. This makes a lot of sense both technically and financially.
The initial cost of VoIP hardware is justified when you need to service it.
The company I was in previously used the expensive, Cisco system (and it was cool to see our phones in the movies - Ocean's Eleven and others)... and we still had issues with it. Even once all the wrinkles were worked out and we no longer had echoes or constant rebooting of the phone server, it was still only as resilient as our network.
Like parent poster said, it sucks when your network goes down and you reach for the phone only to see that it's also rebooting, and you are stranded.
Granted this was a year and a half ago, but you're still taking the risk of much greater technical complexity, plus sharing a network that can be brought down by a lot of other factors (whereas POTS is independant).
Before you get on the boat, you'd better be able to point to a significant savings to justify it AND you have to either factor in downtime, or pay for a bank of backup standard phone lines. Here's a good tip for evaluating providers -- ask them for contact info for a few current customers that you can talk to. They should be able to find one who can share the experiences so far. You do NOT want to be the guinea pig on the cutting edge.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
The company I work for recently (~6 months ago) sold a system almost exactly as you describe, to great effect. My job was to make it all work together between them closing one PM, and reopening the next AM. So far, they're quite happy with it.
As configured, it has an LD T1, local DID PRI, auto attendant, VM retrieval by email, slick client-side GUI, about 120 analog (POTS) extensions, a handful of active h.323 IP extensions, and an operator console. Consumes only 4 rack spaces, instead of the couple dozen square feet of wall space occupied by their old switch. 17 PCI slots, hotswap Adaptec RAID, hotswap redundant power supplies, redundant quick-connect fans, audible alarms, gig-o-RAM, backplane, captive screws, yadda, yadda.
80 extensions in one spot, be they IP, analog, or 80 of each, is not a big deal.
Runs Win2k, has a network-operable Win32 GUI for administratia. It'll do all the fancy automatic least-cost call routing you can ask for between branches (via IP, or whatever other means you have). It will also do the remote PBX thing at least as well as anything else available today. Tenant-oriented resource allocation and detailed call reporting (and recording, if that's your gig) will keep the beancounters happy.
It's called Altigen. It mops the floor with Cisco's paltry offerings, across the board. And it's way, way cheaper.
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