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Solutions for Small Business VoIP?
MajorBlunder asks: "I'm part of the IT department of a small but prospering software company. We have recently filled the capacity of the POTS PBX phone system we currently have installed. We are currently looking into switching over to a VoIP phone system. We have a sizable IT staff in proportion to the rest of the company, so we'd like to be able to maintain the hardware/software in house as much as possible. I wanted to ask the Slashdot readership what experiences they have had with switching over to from POTS to VoIP. Any recomendations for full end to end solutions would be appreciated, and recomendations of things to avoid would be great."
I have a small printing shop that switched 6 months ago. Our first thing was to make sure your bandwidth settings were set to the highest value. This can be set on the Vonage website and I last I looked there were 3 choices. I have seen new lines default to the lowest setting which is total crap. I have 3 lines on a cable modem connection and have never had call quality issues. I have had just about every other issue with ringing and connect delays, voicemail, caller id, etc. Most of the time you pick up and say Hello and the other person doesnt hear anything cause the call has not properly connected yet. But it saves me hundreds/month and the minor issues I have learned to live with. --
Go to the digium web site, pay them a thousand dollars, and let them install asterisk for you. Either that look around for a local asterisk provider. If you live in a metropolitan area you should be able to find a few without any problems.
evil is as evil does
I work for a small firm, 100 people or so across 3 offices which are relatively close, about to add another 20-40 people. We are in a similiar position, because our old PBX system won't handle that many users without some upgrades, which we don't want to do because it is reaching the end of its lifecycle. We did a little looking around, and suprisingly the Cisco Call Manager Express was the best priced solution for us. The only way we could beat their price was going with an IP PBX system instead of a VOIP solution. They were running a promo, so there was a 39% discount from the list price on all hardware. Unfortunately, the owners decided to hold off on the upgrade and bandaid our system until late next year because we will be moving into a new building and merging two of the offices. We couldn't get a quote from Avaya, their rep never called us back, and both 3com dealers we spoke with had recently quit selling 3com. I can tell you not to go with Nortel, their solution was over 1.5x that of the Cisco solution.
The cool thing about these phones is each phone gets its own real phone number as well as internal extension. We are located in California and when we have trade shows in Florida we take one of these phones and plug it into any ethernet jack. The phone auto-configures itself and you get the same phone number and extension and you can call other people in the office on speaker as if you were in the next cubicle. Pretty rad. Hope this helps.
I've switched to using http://asterisk.org/ along with http://www.broadvoice.com/rates_compare.html. I think you'll find this Wiki to be a very useful resource: http://voip-info.org/
g ory&category=hardware or any other Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), or you could use Softphones installed on employee PCs such as X-Lite (free), or similar.
The plan I'm using is BYOD-Lite which costs me only $6 a month and there was no activation fee, since I had my own VOIP equipment in the form of an Asterisk PBX installed on Linux. From what I can tell, they are one of the few providers who allow the use of customer supplied VoIP hardware/software, in my case Asterisk.
Something you'll have to research is what technology you want to use for hooking up individual phones to Asterisk. One possibility would be to use hardware from Digium: http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=product_cate
Good Luck!
http://www.gloryhoundz.com/
last three years. We now have over 250 phones installed at 4 locations(including a call center). We started switching to Asterisk three years ago and grew the system to the point where everythign is Asterisk and we do all inter-office calls over VOIP(IAX trunks). The cost savings in licensing costs alone more than justifies 2 full-time IT staffers salaries.
/ Florell_astricon_2005.html
If you have some time to get comfortable with it, you will be very happy with the control you have over the system and the tremendous choice in phone hardware you can use with Asterisk. And if your company is anything like ours, they will love the cost savings.
Here's a link to a case study presentation I gave at Astricon 2005 last month:
http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/astricon_2005
Where it starts getting tricky is how to connect your LAN-phones to the outside world. You can use POTS lines, or a BRI or PRI, or a T1, but that all requires additional hardware from Digium. You can get VOIP service from many cable companies and CallVantage and Vonage and such but beware! If the VoIP service requires you to use their hardware adapters, you STILL need additional hardware. You might save a little money, but other than that there is no advantage for POTS if you have to use their adapters. Plus, what a kludge that is. Your incoming call goes digial(in)--> analog(adapter)--> digital(PBX)--> analog(phone)--> digital(PBX)--> analog(adapter)--> digital(out) JUST in your PBX! If you can get/can afford the bandwidth, a 100% digital solution requires minimal hardware investment (only the phones and the PBX server). There still don't seem to be that many providers, though. But I have had pretty good luck with a couple. Broadvoice has a BYOD (bring your own device) line of rate plans that are compatible with Asterisk, though you can only have 2 simultaneous lines per account. Teliax has a flat-rate plan with up to 4 simultaneous calls, and you can have an unlimited number of simultaneous calls (subject to bandwidth constraints) using the Pay-As-You-Go plan. The other nice thing about Teliax is that it supports audio codecs other than the standard 64kbps(per incoming and outgoing channel) that Broadvoice supports. Using more efficient codecs will allow you to pack more simultaneous calls in the same amount of bandwidth.
Oh, and use a high-quality router that supports QTos packet prioritization.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Think before you leap because the potential of VOIP is tantalizing, believe me I know, I got sucked in and, to be honest, in many ways I regret it.
I'm a home user/home worker, none of my calls are that important but the quality definitely isn't there. We humans have a great capacity to blind ourselves to minor inconveniences, such as having to alter our conversational style to accommodate slightly unsychronised conversations or drops of several seconds in which the other person can't hear us but, ultimately, these things wear you down and change your relationship with your phone - you can no longer trust your phone but, like the flaws in a new lover, you excuse these things because you're so enamoured with the promise, the potential to route around the bastarding telephone monopolies that have held us all hostage for so long.
I should mention that I'm a UK user and, obviously, that places an extra burden on a US-based service. I signed up to Broadvoice because they had the best thought out plans and their support is, well, it exists which is more than can be said for many of the others. On the whole, though, I absolutely cannot recommend them to UK users because they let me down badly with regard to 0800 (UK tollfree) and 0870 (UK region-free numbers) which, although they claim otherwise on their rates pages, they simply cannot connect to, not for any amount to money. This alone renders their service redundant because, in the UK, an increasing number of businesses only provide and 0800 and 0870 number. The best example of this is Apple's UK branch who no longer accept emails - I wanted to buy about £3000 worth of computers and emailed them with a query, received an automated reply telling me that the only way to contact them was via their 0800, with no regular number to use as an alternative. This may sound like a fairly marginal problem but you wouldn't believe the number of times I've ended up using a mobile, at 20p per minute, to wait on a "freephone" service queue. Apple, BTW, lost that sale along with the chance that I'll ever again suggest their systems to a client.
So, for home users looking to save a few quid, don't buy into the dream while it's still a dream; certainly don't replace your main phoneline.
For home workers attracted to the idea of contacting clients all over the World, ask yourself if you, as a client, would be happy dealing with a service provider who you can't hear properly or with whom conversations are arduous.
For executives eager to boost their corporate careers by manfully slashing millions from their company's telecoms bill, ask yourself if adding an extra stress to the every single employee who uses the phone might not be, in the long-term, a serious blow to the company as a whole - somehow added employee stress and customer frustration never makes it onto Powerpoint presentations, but it's smart to know what's annoying the Hell out of your rank and file.
I wanted VOIP to live up to the dream, I really did - all I'm saying is that, in my case, it didn't, be aware of that amidst all the hype.
What is the deal? All you have to do is link asterisk.org and you get modded up 4 informative? geeze, is that sarcasm in the mods???
;-)
OK REAL Voip in a nutshell. You can run voip INTRAoffice then go out to copper (PRI) yourself or you can find someone to do voip trunking. (ie Your voice travels to an offsite virtual PBX and they send it to the pstn) [I say REAL voip because I'm talking business class, not running skype over a dsl line for kids to talk.]
While trunking is the coolest way to do it, sadly, voip trunking is about where cell phones were in the late 80's. Useable but you had to be sorta dedicated to the task. But I'll give you an example.
One of my clients decided to let speakeasy do the trunking. I (then) wholeheartedly recommended Speakeasy. It was a nightmare.
The problem was that we were like their third business VOIP customer. The bigger problem was that they lied to us and told us they knew what they were doing. I've been a full time geek almost 20 years. --I have NEVER had a customer support nightmare as bad as speakeasy VOIP.-- The problem was they had nobody trained on the system and they just made shit up. Then when you asked them to do what they said they could do, they would claim they never said it. I got to the point where I put EVERYTHING in writing.
If they had just come clean and said "Hey, we're learning this, give us a break" I would have helped them... But they didn't. I finally left my "dedicated" support person and went into the regular support queue. I got the support person to admit they were so new at it and they were clueless. I went back to my "dedicated" support person and told him the gig was up and he just stammered.
****But the service was good*****
The fact they were lying sacks of shit not withstanding, by the time they delivered the product, it worked well.
The topology goes like this.
You have a Edgemarc router (I think it is edgewaternetworks.com, google is your friend) and you put everyone behind it. (Voip phones, workstations and even servers)
The thing about the edgemark is that it does the traffic shaping to give priority to voice. (With speakeasy...) Every phone off hook costs you 90K. So a 1.544 T1 gives you 16 phones off hook simultainiously. (not 24) The balance is allocated dynamically to data. (Many systems use 64K per line) Speakeasy can bond 2 T's to give you 3MB if you need more lines.
Behind the Edgemark, you put a standard issue 100MB switch for your network. Spekaeasy uses (used) Cisco phones which have 2 enet ports. You can daisy chain as many phones as you like and the LAST one can be a phone or a PC. We often wire each branch phone-phone-phone-workstation.
With a SIP phone (google SIP if it is new to you) you can bring the phone anywhere in the world and plug it into a ethernet jack and you have your extension with you. No long distance etc. People just dial your local number and you can dial interoffice extensions just like usual. -coolness-
This is a big advantage of outsourcing the virtual PBX. (or setting yours up to support WAN connections.) Sadly, while this feature is possible with Speakeasy phones, (no exaggeration...) they didn't have anyone on staff smart enough to figure out how to do it. They lied to me on several occasions and said they knew how. (but no I'm not still bitter
With most trunking systems, each phone gets its own phone number (google "DID" it stands for 'Direct Inbound Dial' or some such) this is cool because they can bring their phones or use a softphone on a laptop.
Why Voip?
To me the biggest reasons to go VOIP today are to avoid the cost of a PBX or avoid the cost of long distance. Speakeasy charges about 26 bucks a month per line but since you use a virtual PBX running on their system, you have no out of pocket for the PBX. Good VOIP phones cost no more than good regular phones so that is a draw IF you are starting new or replacing equipment. But regular PBXs ain't cheap.
If you