Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Need a Phone At Your Desk?
First time accepted submitter its a trappist! writes "When I started my career back in the early 1990s, everyone had a 'business phone' phone on their desk. The phone was how your co-workers, customers, friends and family got in touch with you during the business day. It had a few features that everyone used — basic calling, transfer, hold, mute, three-way calling (if you could figure it out). This was before personal mobile phones or corporate IM, so the phone was basically the one and only means of real-time communication in the office. Flash forward 20 years. Today I have a smart phone, corporate IM, several flavors of personal IM, the Skype client and several flavors of collaboration software including Google Apps/Docs, GoToMeeting. My wife and daughter call me or text me on the cell phone. My co-workers who are too lazy or passive aggressive to wander into my office use IM. My brother in Iraq uses Skype. I use GoToMeeting and its built-in VoIP with customers. The big black phone sits there gathering dust. I use it for conference calls a few times each month. I'm sure that there are sales people out there who would rather give up a body part than their trusty office phone, but do any of the rest of us need them? Around here, the younger engineers frequently unplug them and stick them in a cabinet to free up desk space. Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Like the OP, we use Skype officially at the company. I have even given my phone to my desk neighbor...
Move sig!
Landlines are tied to a place.
Each will have pros and cons and which on is appropriate for the situation depends on this basic fact.
As is the rule with "Ask Slashdot", the answer to the question is "no".
I haven't had a dedicated desk phone in years. Lots of people don't even have their own desks anymore. Skype/IM or if really needed many companies (at least over here) will give you a smartphone just for work purposes.
I am the typewriter. :D and the writers tapped me until I became a conduit to their magical worlds.
I used to be cool. The cool tool that everyone loved.
The young nubile secretaries pushed my buttons
I was the greatest invention since the phone.
And then suddenly, rather gradually... it was over.
Now I sit in a closet collecting dust.
I feel your plight, office phone. I feel it.
Besides I try to avoid giving out my mobile number. Keep work calls at work, don't need to be called after I have already clocked off or am on holiday
Having a phone on your desk can be crucial if you have to pretend you're doing serious work when someone important walks by. Cell phones or IM aren't as convincing, even if you are working.
There's something about text that makes it inherently less efficient than a simple call, and once you start using IM, you tend not to use video or audio.
None of this means you need a phone system, just a phone that uses your cell phone for handling the calls.
I could never figure out how to do those...
Actually I have a fancy VOIP phone which I regularly use along with all the other communication tools listed. I regularly use Video conferencing and skype but the phone has been a very useful fallback when internet connectivity isn't where it should be.
In one breath you are labelling people who use IM "passive aggressive" (are they really?) and in the next you seem to be advocating getting rid of the phone for other methods of communication (including IM). That doesn't make much sense at all. Also, why does using IM mean or imply as person is passive aggressive. Do you actually know what passive aggressive is, or is it just a buzzword for you? I ask because if someone were truly passive aggressive they probably wouldn't include you in the IM at all.
Might be a rather specific use-case, but since there are so many telecommuters...I work from home, and I have a Cisco/Tandberg videophone (one of their "personal systems") on my desk. Although I'm practically never at the office, having the video there gives me that much more "presence" at the office than just being a voice (or writing off emails). The quality is much better than just having a webcam and a laptop + being a dedicated device, I never have to fight with whatever video conferencing software there might be. And of course, it has much better speakerphone capabilities than my cellphone.
I have been very happy with it for the last 2 years. Recently, there has been a bit of pressure to start using MS Lync - but the truth is, Lync is mostly still used as a corporate messenger and not for calls. Lync 2013 does provide for more standards-based approach - instead of MS's RTVideo codec, they are actually going to use H.264, so maybe that'll change things. Then again, you can get one of those Lync-aware phones from Polycom and keep using a dedicated phone.
How can you seriously conduct business on a Cell phone ? The quality is awful, h_lf t__ time you o_ly get half the sent__e and have to either guess what was said or ask people to repeat themselves. Having a clear line is much more comfortable when using the phone all day and gives a much better impression. If I get a call from a company using a poor quality mobile I think to myself are they so cheap that they can't afford a proper phone ?
I'm a software engineer - unlike the sales guys I don't have a work mobile phone, just a desk phone.
And it works for when I want to call other internal departments or outside.
Funny that.
I have to sometimes make long calls for my work and I *really* don't want to do it on a tinky winky little mobile phone, its bloody uncomfortable. And if I want to use a speakerphone then i'll need the mobile plugged into the wall anyway so the battery doesn't die halfway through and how is that any more convenient that having a landline with a cable? Also our Cisco deskphones have the entire company phonebook available on them which is very convenient. Their only downside is being IP phones , when the local LAN goes down so do all the phones.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works.
Businesses like things that just work. Your cell phone may be cutting edge state of the art, the thing all the cool kids are using and blah blah blah, but businesses care about those kinds of things... said no one. Ever. Businesses care about fixed costs and reliability and your cell phone won't ever have either. Configure one little thing wrong and you could be eating hundreds of dollars in overage fees... and god help you if your battery charge is running low and you're in the middle of an important call.
Land lines: Because they just work, bitches.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Where I work, nobody has a desk phone. Everyone has a smartphone and a laptop. You can switch offices easily, share them if people work at home on alternating days, form impromptu sessions in common areas, etc. My smartphone actually gets used so little that it generally gets left at my desk, as I also carry my personal one. It would be quite easy for many people to do without one completely.
I work with phones for a living at the largest private employer in Philadelphia.
While office phones are clearly on the decline, they ain't dead yet. We have approximately 20k phones, half of which are VoIP and half of which are either POTS or a digital offering from the local carrier. All of them are converting to VoIP, slowly, and in the process I'm watching the attrition that the OP probably expects. It makes sense to get rid of single lines where they're unused and unnecessary.
However, there remains the complex office setup where you have administrative assistants, or a suite front desk, and shared line appearances. Once someone wants to be able to put a call on hold on one phone and pick it up on a different physical phone, they want it to work like the same technology did in the 80s.
Of course it was easier in the 80s, when those phones shared a dedicated physical copper pair that carried nothing but the voice. With digital signaling it's significantly trickier; Broadsoft has a proprietary protocol to handle this, and the IETF specification (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-anil-sipping-bla-04) never left Internet Draft status (which, frankly, is a good thing as it's a very poor protocol).
I don't see that complex setup going away any time soon, as it's a common VIP pattern.
My phone rings so infrequently that when it does it literally scares me.
You've already done a fine job of convincing yourself to believe that you do not need a desk phone.
So unplug the phone and put it in a desk drawer. If anyone (including you) complains about it, then there must be a reason to keep it around. Plug it back in for a few months and try again.
But if nobody notices, just rotate it over to the circular file at the same rate as any other disused desktop annoyance. You still get to keep your extension, and you can (presumably) get to your corporate voicemail if you need to by other means.
(And if you just don't like to do conference calls on a cell phone for some reason or other, then the entire Ask Slashdot is for naught. You still need a desk phone anyway, like an addict needs [or does not need] drugs. So either keep using for conference calls, with pride, or stop using it cold turkey, or nobody will care.)
Kid-proof tablet..
I work about 45 feet underground and the only cell service available is through a carrier that I won't use. Should my company ever provide me with a cell phone that may change, but I'm not expecting that upgrade any time soon.
I rarely if ever use skype, whether at work, or at home. At work it would not punch through the corporate firewall, and at home I don't have sufficient need to use it to communicate with family or friends as most can reach me via other platforms.
At work I actually have two phones at my desk, one for day to day calls, and another for bridge lines that I need to monitor. Some of the managers around here have 3 phones on their desks to give them that capability for multiple bridge lines, and also to have a line available to contact their managers for issues that need their attention.
The firewall pretty much blocks all forms of VPN, IM and SIP that can't run over http through a proxy. All such traffic is continuously monitored and content which violates corporate policy may subject the employee to disciplinary processes including (and not limited to) termination.
These limitations would be imposed on me if I were using a corporate Laptop or PC at home as well, as I would be required to establish a vpn to work and all my network traffic wold be required to go through that connection.
I suspect that this is not unusual for people who work in the financial and trading sectors. At the very least it is an effort being made by the corporations involved to prevent themselves from being subject to penalties related to insider trading. I also suspect that several companies have even harsher limits on what their employees can do across the internet simply because companies are looking to protect customer and owner assets that may be affected by a variety of black hat hacker attacks as well as reducing the potential for damage caused by disgruntled employees (or former employees.)
Before complaining that this is harsh, and hardly the usual treatment technology users should expect, I have to say that I happen to like where I work, the people I work with, and most of the people I work for. I like most of our customers and most of our stock holders. I can say that this is not unusual in the group I work with, as this is the first company I've worked with where I've had more people leave the group through retirement than through 'better' job offers elsewhere. No, things are not perfect, but on the whole, things are not bad.
You never know...
1) We don't (all) have company cellphones, only the higher-ups, people on stand-duty and people who travel a lot. Also I wouldn't want one as it would mean I am always reachable. 2) While it is mostly replaced with IM, it is still a nice tool to make someone aware that you need something _now_. 3) other people in the room can answer it, eventhough your computer is locked 4) you still hear it ring if you are at a colleagues desk in the same room or casually discussing stuff with teammates or people who walk in and want to know stuff (which happens quite often here) 5) you don't need a headset 6) as both ends hold a handset the conversation is usually shorter and more to the point as you cannot idly play around on your pc or stuff.
I can usually tell instantly if someone is calling from either Skype or a mobile, simply because of the compression and cut-outs.
Just that alone will annoy a potential client - and I really prefer not to give out my own mobile number (because then you get calls from the international helpdesk at 3am).
the OP reminds me of someone that just doesn't realise or accept that MP3's sound crap becuase that's all they've ever known.
I was forced to have a landline because it was the telco's requirement for having an ADSL. But since I moved to wireless internet, I have not had a fixed line. I use mobile phone for receiving calls and calling local numbers, a cheap VOIP service (half the price of Skype and Google) for calling my Mom in another country and skype for talking to may friends abroad.
Cost of mobile calls even on a big business plan is far too expensive to always use the mobile phone compared to the desk phone. As much as your idea about saving the desk space is fantastic (never even occured to me) - every now and then I make an extremely long phone call in the office and on a cell - that would really add up.
Smart phones and main desk phones without PCs are still the norm in my office! We have PCs but those are used by admin...
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Most of my job is application/system support work for securities traders in the bank I work at. 80% of the cases we deal with come to us by telephone (the vast majority of the rest are people shouting across the room or walking over to our desks), but the "phone" they call is actually an appliance that auto-forwards to a mobile phone, so no desk phone required.
The traders, however, are using specialist VoIP trading telephones from IPC or BT with lots of knobs, bells and whistles, external speaker boxes, dedicated voice broadcast/multicast speaker boxes, et cetera. Most of those guys would rather lose a leg or two than their desk telephone.
When my company (actually a government agency) moved six years ago I chose an all mobile solution for us, saved a lot of cabling and reduced the number of phones ringing at an empty desk. Nobody misses the old phones. The mobile solution is also a lot cheaper.
This looks like a very typical case of having found that you can live without something and then suddenly thinking it has no place in society.
Honestly you can have my desk phone when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. Actually no you can have it when you provide me with a SECOND company mobile... which incidentally won't leave my desk.
I am in the same boat as you in my company. We IM each other when we can't be stuffed walking, email each other to put things on the record, use a mixture of sharepoint and other "collaboration suites" if they can be called that, and everyone has my mobile number.
My mobile number however is issued to those who desperately need to talk to me. You won't find it on my business card. You will not get it if you're a customer, a vendor, or even a contractor working for me for all but the most urgent and important of jobs. This is a method of making space for myself. This is something very important if you work with people who think that every job is urgent and you should be called in at any time.
We do have someone who briefly tried to ditch the company phone. He simply forwarded his company phone to his mobile and unplugged it. Less than a week later he spat the dummy on his little exercise when someone called him at 6pm starting the conversation with: "Oh I was expecting to simply leave you a message, but since you're here..."
First of all, unless the cell phone is being provided by my company I feel no obligation to do any work from it (apart from being available to be reached when I'm on call or in an emergency). So unless they provide the phone or subsidize my wireless bill...they're putting a phone in my desk.
Secondly I work in a hospital. We configure the patient call system and the heart monitors to ring to the assigned nurse's handset phone (which is an extension of the PBX system). So going phone-free would be a hardship to our facility.
We may be trending that way but I don't think that the end of the PBX Office Phone network is nigh
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Do you still need a desk phone?
I suppose the answer would depend on the country, with the need basically vanished from much of Europe. We abandoned them years ago, except for the switchboard/receptionists and a handful of fixed lines for FAX machines (still needed for transactions with some countries). Everyone has a company-issued mobile phone; several hundred employees. They're not the top-end Android or iPhone models, but far above the dinky-toy model level. Everybody can be reached, almost anywhere, unless they switch off the phone. Of course, it's standard practice to switch them off when work is over for the day.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
As is the rule with "Ask Slashdot", the answer to the question is "no".
The only reliable rule with Slashdot is that people will take their own anecdotes and suddenly think that it will apply to everyone.
Not everyone needs to reach me everywhere. Hence very few people have my smartphone number, and none of those people are customers, vendors, contractors, auditors, or people around the office who have a history of self importance.
If I'm not at my desk it's because I'm either doing something important, I'm in a meeting, or there's some other reason why I would likely not want to talk to you if you rang my mobile right now. It's like having a PA to sort through the low priority shit. If you are important you'll have my number, if not you can leave me a message that I may hear when I get back to my desk.
And no I'm not going to stop and check the caller ID on a phone that rings every 5 minutes while I'm in a meeting. A desk phone gives me space to get my work done.
I don't know elsewhere, but here in France offices have phones ringing all the time.
We do have IM and voice conferencing via MS Office communicator or Webex but we mostly use those for calling our offshore teams or for conferencing with more than one person at the same time.
There's this culture that considers IMs as second priority. IMs are easily discarded, and people might claim that they didn't get them. If you want something to get done you have to make a call.
The only reason why my office phone ever rings inbound, is because some piece-of-shit recruiter has scammed his way past the switchboard in order to waste my time.
The phone is vaguely useful for teleconferencing, and when I don't want to spend my own money using my own mobe for business. Apart from that, it's an annoyance.
For everything else, there's Skype/Lync.
...I consider my VOIP soft-phone as something apart from a traditional base-and-handset phone. Setting aside that difference, I still need a "phone". First of all, my position requires that people (vendors, customers, etc.) be able to reach me via the PSTN, and I, them. Second, I need the features afforded by our PBX. Other people in my office need those features even more. Yes, Skype is superior for a certain subset of telephony tasks, and I use that too, but it is not a phone system, and it's too expensive as a PSTN gateway, compared to other VOIP-PSTN gateway services. Corporate IM? Same thing. It offloads a LOT of communication that used to require a phone call, but there are times when the nature of the conversation is impeded by the need to type.
Considering my work has yet to upgrade from winxp and the most restrictive IT policy ever, yes.
Getting new software requires serveral memos, even if the software is free and the computer network is too slow and has no quality of service.
Instead we invest in $80,000+ telecom suites for our advanced telecom needs. The upside is the telephone network is great.
We have roughly 350 employees. We use MS Lync with a softphone available on every client through a USB headset. We also have a handful of physical phones distributed throughout our office which can also be easily moved around. Users can simply dial out on the phones, forward their client to the phone, or even log into the phone and make it their own for a few minutes.
The biggest question is will your office culture embrace this solution or will it be a thorn in the side of productivity.
The less you talk, the more people hear you say.
Less and less people get desk phones. In my last three jobs I have not had a desk phone.* .
All I have been given is a mobile phone. However this does not mean PBXs (office phone systems) are not being used.
The mobile phone is still connected to a PBX so I can make free internal calls, call co-workers with shorter 4 digit numbers and have all the other PBX services mentioned in the summary
Of course people who make a lot of calls still need and use hard phones. But where I have worked this has been a minority
This is fairly typical for tech companies in Sweden, i think. It may not be representative for other companies in Sweden or tech companies in other countries though.
There are also two different questions in the summary.
Are office phones coming to an end? No, but usage is declining.
Are office phone systems coming to an end? No, but usage patterns have changed to include mobile phones and IM
* Except when I worked as a developer on a PBX. Then I had around 8 phones on my desk. I still didn't bother to configure any of them for usage as my office phone...
where I work we have real phones in the worst sense. Voice Mail is a distinct system, with limited storage, and not properly synchronized so the timing is always a little off. I've tried traditional headsets but they always seem to be cordless, and on 400$ devices they always seem to have issues with their batteries and charging (even though they sit for 16 hours a day on a charger.) I hate the old stuff.
I have a headset for the computer anyways. I want my voice mails in my email anyways. The headset is very comfortable, cabled to the computer for reliability, rather than having battery issues like a smartphone, it can follow me, when I VPN. I can re-direct to a smart phone if needed. Forget the phone, just let me use standard SIP applications to connect to a bridge. (I'm on Linux... but the employer is windows oriented, so I can see this turning into 'thou shalt use myfavorite windows app' through simple bloody-minded thoughtlessness.) for conference calling, I have speakers, just need a decent mic on the desk.
We have few hundred employees and 2 actual physical fixed-line phones (at reception)
:))
But we do have "fixed line numbers" for pretty much everyone
All is done over VOIP with intelligent back-end,
when someone calls me on my fixed number (or some call is redirected to me):
* If I'm behind my laptop, company IM rings in laptop with options to redirect/hold/answer via headset/answer via mobile/etc.
* If I'm away from my laptop (IM status auto changes after 5 min of inactivity), my phone and laptop ring at the same time (laptop silently), so i can answer it from my phone or do whatever from laptop
* If my Outlook/IM status is "DND" or my workday is over then i get a e-mail notification and the call is redirected to reception / help-desk (depending on caller)
Having and actual physical phone on my desk would mean that i miss 70% of calls (i have to move around the office quite a lot) and it would take up valuable desk space (where would i put my Chuck Norris motivational picture then
What I'm interested in is how the collection of communication you have ties together. Say a call comes in to the receptionist, how does she transfer it to you? How do you transfer a call to a coworker, or conference them in on an existing call?
Do you have separate work and personal mobile phones, so when on vacation (or after hours for those that don't have to pick up anyway) you can leave the work phone behind? And of course set your voicemail message to direct callers to the appropriate coworkers who are covering.
That's what I like about a wealth of communication devices, they each have their own strengths. My company desk phone is VOIP, connects using out intranet to all of the other branches (including internationally) and has robust transfer, conference and directory as well as a host of features my mobile does not. In the same way my mobile has features my desk phone doesn't, and we have a corporate IM and email as well, letting me use the best tool for the job.
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
There is so much legacy copper cabling running between the floors in the labs I work in that they're practically Faraday cages. Even my desk, which is outside of a lab proper but has a lab above it, I get no reception. "Desk phones" are still necessary in situations like that... Though I prefer asynchronous communication via email or IM, so people can deal with it on their own time.
A few of us who are lucky enough get to use Spectralink mobiles, at least. There are repeaters for them inside the labs.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
If my co-workers were in the same timezone that I am in then maybe I wouldn't need it. But I spend my entire morning and evening talking to people in China and Ireland. Skype and the other voip alternatives just don't have the quality needed to sustain an 8 way hour long call.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Not remotely. Sure mobile devices are going to take huge swaths of market share from land line phones but it's not hard to find use cases where a land line phone is required, useful or even preferable. Off the top of my head:
1) Managing multiple lines into a company. Could be done with wireless theoretically but much easier with landlines presently
2) Legal/statutory requirements. Particularly for certain industries like financial services there is a requirement to have a landline
3) Mobile phones get lost, land line phones don't.
4) Separation of work from personal life. With a mobile device it is harder to separate the two unless you carry two of them and who wants to do that?
5) Cost - land line phones can be a lot cheaper to own/operate and aren't obsolete after 4 years.
6) Office features including paging, multiple lines, better speaker phones, etc
7) Comfort - land line phones have handsets that are actually designed with the human head in mind
8) Sunken costs - Land line phones are already installed to most buildings in the US and other parts of the world.
9) Reliability - land line phones are FAR more reliable and have better voice quality than mobile devices almost without exception.
10) Users - lots of workers are not techie geeks and find a land line phone a preferable method of communication
11) Many users do not need to move from their desks. Why pay for the extra cost of mobile when it is not needed?
We are moving to a new building. Our ops manager was all gaga over his new IP phone system, and it was so cheap at only so much a month per phone. That made me think .. I don't really use the phone. At least not as much as he is going to be charged for it. I'm a developer, I hardly every get business calls from outside the company. Most of the tech support is done over the Internet. So I suggested that with phones in the conference rooms, I don't need a phone at my desk anymore.
.. why should the company spend money on a phone I'll use maybe once a month. He was concerned about the company forcing employees to use their cell phones, but I suggested that since it's my choice, no one is forcing me to do anything. And with thousands of hours of roll-over minutes, I doubt if I'll use them up anytime soon.
He was a bit reluctant, and I don't know if it will happen. But really
I think it was more like if there weren't as many phones needed, maybe his job wouldn't be as important either....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Is a smartphone not a phone ?
I just replaced the keypad by a smartphone and the handset by a headset.
Advantages:
1. Comfort. A big phone is just more comfortable.
2. Keeping everything separated. Work calls me at work, which means they don't bother me at home.
3. Speaker phone. As said before, speaker option on a mobile is (1) often still a little crappy and (2) drains the batteries, which means you need to plug it into your charger, which is inconvenient because the cable is just too damned short.
4. Name-based speed dial for the whole company. There's probably an app for that on smart phones too, but we have it on the desk phone, and it's very convenient.
5. Money. We already have this infrastructure. It's paid and depreciated. Especially internal calls cost practically nothing.
Disadvantages:
1. No smart phone to play with, i.e. no angry birds
2. My colleagues and business partners cannot reach me 24/7, but I don't call that a disadvantage.
Desk phones (in small businesses) and home phones are in serious need of a digital upgrade. The copper line is still a major asset in most places for use by DSL so why not upgrade the phone to a digital device which can offer many of the services offered by cheap cell phones such as text messages? Much could be done even without additional power. Options like a wireless hub could be added etc etc. Why do telcos not push this as standard? It would surely make better use of their resources. What am I missing here?
We are encouraged to use phones for major communication from one person to another - it leaves no paper trail. There have been WAY too many lawsuits where email chains were used as evidence.
No.
This. I work in a Faraday Cage so no cell phones for us :). We also have this thing called a "CD Player" where you take these circular disks, put them in the device, and it makes music.
Not true at all. You need a new provider.
In favor of Cisco IP: latency, coverage (barely any cell reception in my office), sound quality (especially in speakerphone mode), office directory, sturdiness, cost, cost, and cost
Here in Norway pretty much all medium-sized and larger businesses have agreements with a cell phone company that basically means that all company-internal calls are free, as well as all external calls made via cell towers located around their office locations.
I.e. all the calls that you would have used a land line phone for in the old days.
We have of course never had the horrible "cell phone receiver pays" system used in the US, partly because all cell phones have gotten numbers from a couple of separate ranges, never used for land-line phones, so that we always knew if we were calling a fixed or mobile phone.
The last time I bought a cell phone with a contract clause must have been 5+ years ago, it was for one of my kids.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
As a dispatcher I have a large one with several dozen direct lines connecting me to signals, crossings, other dispatchers, security etc.
And an external phone for internal calls in case the large one shuts down.
An additional alarm phone that rings everybody all over the circuits.
A special phone to alarm the switching station in case something on 25000Volt line happens.
Then I have a land-line phone in case of emergency the only one where conversations aren't recorded.
And a Sip-phone in case the land-line doesn't work.
And my cellphone in case all of the above don't work, which is usually during bigger works, when people stand around the hole and somebody says: 'You can cut those, that aren't our cables'.
I need one. and i do have a smartphone, corporate IM, email, etc. though Skype is officially forbidden for some reason.
For my previous job, i'm not sure i ever had a work related phone call in almost 14 years. at my new job, i'm on the phone a lot. what i found is that just using my cell would be more expensive than getting a voip kit like Ooma for my home office, and connect a desk phone to that. then i use a Google Voice phone number that rings both that and my cell, so i can still take calls if i'm travelling or something, but by far mostly use the desk phone as it's cheaper than upgrading my cell plan to work with this many minutes.
i do use IM as well as email, but phone is still a big part of it.
We use Lync as a phone system at my company. I have both a wireless headset for use at my desk and a USB for when I'm traveling. My phone number follows me wherever I go. Anybody can call the number and it rings wherever I'm signed in.
For all that matters i would be all in favor of dumping Fixed Phones if it means that i can talk to %person% not %persons_desk%
IF I WANT TO TALK TO FURNITURE I WILL TALK TO MY OWN
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
My company uses VOIP soft phones. They work pretty well
Absolutely I need a phone at my desk.
The geniuses who built our brand new "green" building put coatings on the windows to block UV rays and save of heating/cooling.
I have 4 bars of HSPA+ standing outside of the main door and a big X, no signal, once inside that main door.
I can forward my calls to my desk phone but I miss all my texts until I leave for the day.
I don't even know the number. I wish to be honest it was taken away because it's just a nuisance - it takes up space and rings occasionally, always a wrong number or asking someone at another extension. Pointless. Most companies could replace them with Skype, and a few phones in conference rooms, small meeting rooms and a few hotdesks.
The physical phone is not needed you can simply run a soft-phone on a PC/Laptop.
But a headset/handset/speaker(phone) is essential unless you hardly use it, it's just these are plugged into a computer instead of the handset
Note both Skype and mobile phones have very bad audio quality compare to copper or properly setup VOIP
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
One nice benefit of desk phones I haven't seen posted here:
When you go home at the end of the day, the phone stays on your desk. So, no one calls you. If your cell phone *is* your workphone, they can call you on the way out the door, on the bus, while you're feeding the kids dinner, and all night.
Sometimes it's nice to know work stays in the office, and home is home. You can do that with a cell by turning it off, but I don't know many people who ever do that anymore.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
The OP suggested it is lazy or passive aggressive to use office IM as a means of communication. Let me say as a developer that I love office IM and want most simple communication to be done over it.
It allows me to check it when I want without interrupting my concentration on whatever logic problem I'm working on.
I find that I am less social and less capable of communicating well when I am deep into a programming problem. IM lets me take my time at forming a response.
It usually leads to a faster social interaction with less fluff so I can get back to what I was doing.
To me, IM is a fantastic means of communicating a very small amount of information or coordinating over a rather tiny issue. Face to face communication still has its moments, and in some environments it may always be superior to IM, but I very much disagree with the idea that the only two motivations for IM are laziness and being passive aggressive.
Z
I can agree on the corporate IM, Skype, etc., anything that uses the hardwire LAN, but cell phones? Forget it. Until they figure out a way to make the reception consistently reliable inside steel-and-concrete buildings, they're useless. (And no, we didn't get budget approval for repeaters or femtocells in our building.) On top of that, I'm in a unique situation in my building that's even worse -- we recently moved into a newly renovated building that used to be a downtown bank. Guess where they placed some of our offices? In the vault! Yes, that's right. The architects in their noble wisdom decided somehow that they needed to spend a quarter million dollars just to cut apart one section of bank vault wall and convert it into office space by putting drywall and ceiling in it. Cell phones are DEAD in that whole area. Whatever you use in there, it's got to be wired, not wireless. And, because I work for a local government, I'm lucky we've caught up in technology in any way. We have dedicated phones, but they're at least Cisco VoIP phones, for what it's worth (model 7965). Overall, I'm pleased with the technology and facility that we have; it's a LOT nicer than what we recently came from (the old place was a 60-plus year old typical government dump of a building, you can imagine).
I know this is going to cause a lot of people to revolt but I don't care, I think having a desk phone is a very useful work tool. The fact is most people can't send a useful email, people send emails so void of actual information that you need to start long threads to get to the point of the matter. When you can just call someone you can spend 3 minutes hashing out your point instead of a day of poor emailing, what makes more sense to you? Even if you get one great email in the course of a day, it wont make up for the 100 bad emails you need to deal with. I'm pro phone.
I need a very simple communication medium that can maximize the chances to work at any time, in any place.
Even when I'm in the data center in the basement.
I call it "plain old telephone".
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
There are plenty of businesses that run with no traditional phones on a desk, including some of the most phone-intensive ones. Many call centers for instance have dropped the desk phone for a 100% software solution. Lots of small companies with no physical office space use soft phones for mobility and work from home users.
The business must adapt to make it possible. Rather than dropping a grand to put a land line in an office (which is what it costs, time you do phone, PBX, wiring, people time), they have to be willing to spend $200 on headsets and such, and $200 on software and training. They have to be willing to have road warriors make it past the corporate firewall to the PBX for VoIP. They have to run and manage the internal network to a standard where it can deliver quality voice, and cats on youtube don't affect voice quality. It's all very much possible, but it is not quite as trival as the OP implies.
However, having seen a few places that dumped the land line, I can say it is the future. Wide band audio sounds a million times better, yes you can get it on a desk phone, but it's far cheaper to deploy soft clients. VoIP soft switches make least cost routing to dozens of providers much easier than traditional PBX's. Integrated video and white board features can increase collaboration for companies with people in multiple locations. Having everyone have the capabilities to participate in call center like functions during emergencies can be a huge win.
The only place I see the OP going wrong is with the cell phone included as a business device. They are simply not clear enough, or reliable enough for many business purposes. They are a much better tool than a pager to reach someone who is out of the office, but they are not a replacement for in-office communication at all.
I actually think there is a "killer app", well, feature, in this space which could turn the phone industry upside down. Imagine if Dell/HP/Lenovo integrated on most of their products a second mic/speaker jack, but presented it physically as a RJ11 unit on the side of the laptop/desktop/monitor. The ability to plug in everything from an old-school Ma-Bell handset to a modern GN-Netcom handset would make the transition from physical phones to soft clients MUCH easier. I'm really surprised someone hasn't tried it on a business laptop yet for road warriors who spend a lot of time on the phone on soft clients.
Every business is different but having one point of contact by voice is essential. My cell phone can fall in the toilet, be turned off, be out of range, etc. As to all the other collaboration tools, my land line is integrated into them. Why complicate the matter.
My windowless office in a computing facility is like a Faraday cage. No signal.
As a contractor, I spend most of my busy days on my desk phone in conference calls with people from all over the country. We also use various live-meeting tools to share documents and presentations, but for all the audio, there's few things as reliable and clear as a wired telephone system. Most times the bad connections come from people "on-the-go" calling in from their cell phone.
For inter-office communication it depends on the immediacy. If a coworker is working from home, I'll drop them an IM or an email if it's not urgent. Otherwise, I may give them a call. If they're in the office, I'll usually just walk over to their desk and ask. It also helps I sit in a 10 foot radius of my project team.
Our phones are also of the VOIP type which means I can forward my desk phone to my cell when I work from home and still utilize all its features.
Isaac
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no" Most newer IP PBX systems can be programmed to use more than one number, that is, someone calls your desk, you're not there, it tries your cell phone, you're not there, it sends you an IM, etc. I think the true answer is "it depends on the nature of your job".
I hate sigs.
Many companies here uses only mobile phones except for faxes and conference rooms.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I work at a hospital, in a research department. Surprisingly its more efficient to talk to people over the phone than it is through other means. You can only type so fast, and sometimes you need to use a lot words back and forth when you're talking with someone who's in a different field than you.
I'm not talking about help desk stuff... if a scientist needs clarification from an engineer about a technical problem.. the phone is the best method. If you are trying to recruit participants for medical experiments... the phone. If you are talking to someone from a different department about transferring data... the phone. If you are talking to a nurse or surgeon on a medical unit about a patient in a research study... the phone.
As always, just because the engineers think it will people time if they improve technology doesn't mean it actually will. Hospitals have tried replacing phones with other devices, and it just doesn't work. The phone is the simplest device for communication, and it will stay.
One of the biggest challenges engineers face is accepting that the current technology is adequate and that no radical changes are necessary.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I have no plans to remove my desk phone. That is the number on my business cards, and the number used for vendors. I also use it for conference calls. I would rather not do conference calls on my cell, nor do I want 4-5 vendors a day calling me on the cell phone. I find a desk phone makes for a nice answering service...it rings and gives voicemail...but I rarely actually answer a call on it.
You've clearly never tried to have a conversation using an actual half-duplex device.
giggity
IM works great, except when a tester wants to talk to you from the lab, where they don't have a personal machine. I don't travel, so there's no reason for the company to give me a phone. I'd rather there wasn't a compiled list of people's personal cell phone numbers for anything other than emergency on-call purposes.
Call quality of cellphones just is not sufficient for business teleconferences. People attending meetings with cellphones are frequently asked to drop rather than wasting many folks' time with "what? could you repeat that"
Cellphones are important too, but they're not quite a replacement for a landline in business.
Skype or other VOIP is fine, as long as you can access it from your location and your company does not forbid it. Many do, since it's trivial and legal to record audio from them unlike a land line telephone (in the US).
As for people not being able to figure out things like 3 way calling.... If I had someone that inept on my team they sure wouldn't be around long. Conference calling is something any elementary school child should be able to master in a few minutes.
If you have to resort to long conference calls on your cell by having it constantly plugged into the USB port on your computer to keep it from running out of power, you might as well use a landline.
I can also have my VOIP desk phone at my office relocated to my home office phone without having to physically move the phone or forward the number so phone calls from my home office phone look like they're coming from my office.
Also, it's crystal clear, loud and doesn't drop.
My lab is 10 m underground, and there is no alternate carrier coverage. We're not allowed to use most VOIP applications. My office has metal walls and a metallic window film, so my cell phone doesn't work there very well. And I'm not even a spook or defense contractor.
My land line is tied between my office and lab. Sounds like a good plan for it to stay that way.
I telecommute for work and I used a Logitech Skype phone with an incoming phone number for about a year. Several hours of my day were spent on conference calls. I ended up having to ditch the Skype phone because of numerous issues. Majority of the time the phone would work fine but there were issues will calls that lasted longer than 30 minutes. Calls would randomly drop, the voice wave would change frequency and become super slowed down, they'd stop hearing me, etc. Had to go back to using a regular land line. I also tried to survive just using my cellphone but the reception in my home office isn't great so my coworkers would have a hard time hearing me.
As a VoIP engineer, I need it. In fact I need multiple phones, so I have 5 different models.
Maybe I'm just in a weird place, but I regularly et voice mails with long rambling messages on technical topics that would be infinitely better served by a focused, well composed email with an attached diagram or two. Age does not seem to be a factor, oddly enough.
Seriously. How do we not need phones anymore? On average the engineer here at work spends half his day on the phone, he actually clocked it once. Try spending 4+ hours on various calls using a mobile.
Desk phones aren't going anywhere unless you spend a majority of time away from your desk. And for fucks sake, corporate IM? We have Office 365 here at work and the boss wanted to have people use Lync. Guess what? No one cared for it and I think only a few dozen IM's were ever sent. Its still running on everyone's PC but it sits idle while the phone is constantly used. My guess is since we have no speakers on our PC's (company policy) the alert sound never did its job and IM's went unanswered until the phone was called. You always hear a ringing phone, in fact its almost a reflex to pick it up. Even of the Lync window pops up or an alert bubble appears for some reason people tend to ignore them because its not a blaring phone ring.
Simple: My employer issues and requires the use of desk phones. I refuse to give out my personal cellphone number for work-related purposes. Just the same, the building where I work has terrible cellular coverage. So cellphones are out of the question.
/* No Comment */
My company uses IP phones and almost no one has a direct outside line since most of us have no reason for non-employees not to go through the main number-extension. However since we're spread out across geographic regions and have a lot of conference calls/meetings it makes perfect sense to use the company network to make the internal calls and keep them completely in-house.
It's also a heck of a lot easier to pick up the phone and dial extension 3456 than to call the main number, put in the extension and have the person on the other end have no idea who is calling them.
My personal cell phone has limited landline minutes and I'd much rather not use them on company business if I can avoid it.
We have corporate IM which is heavily used but sometimes it's quicker and easier to pick up the phone and make the call.
I do IT support and use my phone every day. Contacting customers, conference calls, calls from reception. Probably one the most useful pieces of kit I have. I don't want to use my mobile phone for work, the company doesn't pay for it and it's a personal number.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
I work in a manufacturing environment, we manufacture CNC machined parts.
Because of "National Security" regulations, we are not allowed to have Cell Phones in the Building. Photography and Video Cameras are not allowed without management authorization. Kind of a pain in the butt. If we want to video tape a process, to analyze it for improvement, we have to make sure that certain parts and documents are not on screen.
We also are not allowed to hire non-US Citizens. No Green Cards or H-1B visas allowed, so I guess my job is safe.
It was quite a shock the first time I tried to call in sick from home, and was informed that I couldn't, as my boss didn't have a phone. (Fun, since calling in sick was what HR told us to do - we were -actually- supposed to email in sick.) Other than that, no, I certainly wouldn't ever have any need for a work phone. If I need to talk to anyone at work, I do it in person or over IM, if I need to talk to anyone at work remotely, I do it in skype or over IM, and if I need to talk to anyone not work related while I'm at work, I wouldn't use a work phone anyway even if I had one, I'd use my cell. (And feel guilty - why am I not working?)
Obviously that only applies to dev. Sales people, or other managerial type roles that actually talk to customers, would presumably want customers to also be able to call them. Development doesn't really talk directly to customers.
If you do any business internationally, you certainly don't want to pay wireless international rates, which are often 10x that of wireline rates.
Cell phone quality is just that - cell phone quality. Do you want to conduct business calls on a connection where you and the other party may not be hearing everything that is said, or would you rather use a desk phone that has a good chance of having a 100% digital wired connection with crystal clear audio?
I don't know where you work, but where I work despite having several IM choices, there are those employees that refuse to use them because they don't like the intrusion when they're working. The only way to get those folks is on the desk phone. Sure I suppose you could use a cell, but it takes 10-15 seconds to find the cell, unlock it, navigate to the phone app, place the call and wait for the call to go through. The desk phone takes about 2 seconds from wanting to call someone to the other end ringing.
What about intercom, overhead paging, etc?
What about multi-party calls beyond three people? This is an area where Meet Me, etc really shines.
Perhaps the biggest driver for us would be the ability to use Jabber apps on mobile devices to place calls via WiFi that go out through the corporate trunks. This is a HUGE cost saver if you travel internationally where you're often paying $1.50 or more per minute while roaming on your cell. Data is much cheaper than voice is in this scenario.
I work in a secured location. No cell use on the floor for non-managers, no personal webmail or social network access, etc. Fine by me. I rarely ever use my desk phone, but it's handy for when I need it.
There is the option of a software phone & headset, which I may switch to next year if I end up using my desk phone more than a dozen times over the next 6 months.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I'd prefer to have someone who doesn't have cafe noise in the background during conference calls. I'm tired of folks batteries dying or people saying they are dying when we need to communicate. You can also keep your crappy "I saved $10/month" voip service with a narrow frequency band and horrible compression techniques. Note: Some VOIP services are great. I like mine.
You may think your efficient. I'm wondering if you are a drag on your project.
PS: We use the heck out of Lync and Skype on our distributed team. The company won't let those through the firewall so I have a separate machine on hotspot that lets me "talk" with the rest of the team. Neither are a replacement for an actual phone when we work in groups :-(
As a teacher, I often find the need to discuss details with other teachers about a student that I don't want to document in an e-mail (that can be subpoenaed.) In addition, I have students of low-socioeconomic status who don't have a computer at home, can't use work e-mail for personal matters, and rely on the POTS to communicate with the world. I use my desk phone everyday.
The general consensus seems to be that mobile phones are to expensive, have crappy sound quality, invade your privacy / personal time, run out of batteries just when you need them and frequently don't work inside office buildings. Done. I now officially hate that idea. What about soft phones? Not Skype, which apparently has its own list of issues, but things like Lync? Any thoughts on those?
You plainly said you don't use it, so why the question? Feel guilty to take the phone off your desk? Be a man (or woman) and just remove it. If you don't use it, then get rid of it.
Be seeing you...
And calling cell to cell is the worst. It's much worse for conference calls with 3 people (or more). What happens is when one person stops talking the other 2 start in simultaineously and you get 3 words in before you realize two of you are talking and then you both stop for a whole second and then both start up. Plus the sound quality isn't as good because cell phone calls are overly-compressed.
There's probably less delay calling Australia on a land line than downtown to downtown cell to cell.
Cell phones are great - don't get me wrong - for a 1 minutes conversation. But a 1 hour intense business discussion - forget it.
The last company I worked for used desk phones for answering the door buzzer and outside lines. No receptionist, so every phone in the office would ring -- about 25 in the room the software developers were in. It was expected that they stop what they're doing to answer, and try to contact the required person or take a message. This is just one of the stupidities inflicted by management.
It's a habit... and not necessarily a good one...
People who spend their lives at a desk MIGHT justify the expense of a phone switch, infrastructure, etc...
OTOH, putting a mid-level cellphone in the hands of each employee, using group texting for announcements, having that phone in the conference room, server farm, and out on-site... can about the same annual costs
Evil Geniuses in Upper Management realize that if you give mobile tools like cellphones and laptops to employees they will contribute massive hours of overtime without compensation... The Pointy Haired types will worry about non-business use between bouts of productivity...
Tablets, BT headsets, VOIP apps, and an internal "social network" might, in the near future... beat anything we've seen yet for business communications...
Cell phones just don't work. I'm in Silicon Valley, which you would think would have 100% cell phone coverage. It doesn't. My Sprint PCS cell phone barely works at home, because there's a hill between me and the nearest cell tower, and the neighbors have a NIMBY problem with cell towers. This isn't a remote area; I'm just outside Redwood CIty.
So I have to have a Sprint "Airave" cell-to-VIOP box at home. This is a Sprint-provided small cell node in a box tied to my DSL line. This drops voice quality to cell quality plus VoIP quality - there's more lag than the echo suppressors can handle. Worse, if I lose the DSL line, I lose cell phone service. The Airave box, upon losing Internet connectivity, does not stop promoting itself as a cell node, and will capture local Sprint phones, even though it can't connect calls. If DSL is down, I have to unplug the Airave to free the cell phone, and go to a window on the side of the house facing a cell tower to make a cell call.
Sprint doesn't have service at TechShop Menlo Park, either. That's in an industrial park, on flat land, so there's no excuse for that.
Another big coverage hole in Silicon Valley was Stanford. Stanford cut a deal with AT&T to make AT&T their official cell phone provider, and didn't allow non-AT&T cell sites on their land. So non-AT&T phones worked badly at Stanford. This angered so many people that Stanford finally had to give in. Still, AT&T cell service is said to work better on campus.
Even when there's good coverage, delay and echo is a problem. I frequently talk to a friend in a rural area of Lake County, about 200 miles away. She has good cell reception on AT&T, but for some reason, there's more than a second of delay round trip, which breaks the echo suppressors and makes conversation painful. I mostly talk to her cell on my land line, even if I have to call back to do it.
On the other hand, when I get calls from Switzerland, where they have IDSN home phones and the call is digitized in the handset and sent over a synchronous channel with no jitter, it sounds great.
Sprint, 1988: "You can hear a pin drop"
Verizon, 2000s: "Can you hear me now?"
The desk phone provides higher quality voice and better ergonomics. That said, I never gave out my work number because I don't want people to call multiple places, or to chain me to the desk when I'd rather answer their call on my cell.
But I started using my desk phone just this week. I ported my cell phone number to Google Voice, associated both my new cell phone number and my work number with it. Now when anyone calls my cell phone, it rings both phones, and I choose how to answer. I can also make outgoing calls through my work phone, appearing to others that I am calling from my original cell phone number. It's a beautiful system.
I like the land line because of the call quality. I do not need it, but I absolutely prefer it. I like my Plantronics headset too. I could get one for my cellphone, but again it goes back to call quality. I do a lot of international calling, and the poor quality of a cell phone connection just compounds the communication challenges introduced by the international delay, and the often poor quality of overseas phone lines.
In my line of work, communication falls into a few different buckets. For discussions that need to be preserved, or when they need to be crystal clear, email is still the best tool. For quick, informal conversations with people in remote offices then IM works. The telephone is good for conference calls, bridges and discussions that require a lot of back and forth that would otherwise be slowed down by email.
In today's age nobody really "needs" the desk phone, but they're fairly convenient. Sure, I can IM a co-worker or walk to their desk, but when I don't want to get up but the only good way to explain what's going is with my mouth words, then the desk phone is perfect. And don't forget the ease of using inter-office extensions to call people - easy to remember and recall later when you're all crowded around one desk and need to call IT to restart a service or grant permissions. Conference calls are easier to take with a speaker instead of a mobile IMO...I took one from home the other day on my iPhone and had to eventually Bluetooth the sound through my TouchPad so that I could hear the damn call on the speaker (and no way I'm holding up my mobile for an hour+ to my ear).
Again - need? No. But am I glad I have one? Absolutely.
I can't be the only /. reader who works below ground. None of our WiFi, 3G, 4G devices work down here. Well, not entirely true-- I'm in the IT department, so yes, I have access to the company WiFi on my phone. But the general user population here doesn't.
As recently as 2 years ago, there wasn't a cell carrier in town that penetrate to the depths. Now those employees and visitors whose phones use one particular carrier can make a receive calls in certain parts of our suite. Those in other departments apart from the two not on the lower level don't have that problem.
It's not that we don't believe in advanced (beyond voice) communications. We completed a move to Asterisk open source PBX last year and are working on more and more integration. But not wireless. Many many people whose building has office space in the lower levels are a little RF starved.
Depends on the business. I work for a financial company, and there are regulations that require recording of many customer facing conversations. With the advent of Dodd Frank, it appears that the recording regulations are going to extend to mobile devices. Oddly enough, it is quite difficult to record cell phone conversations in a non-intrusive and reliable manner. Sure, there are spyware applications, but those are designed for consumer use, and aren't particularly workable in the enterprise (especially since most of them require rooted devices, which isn't easy to accommodate in an enterprise environment). We've also looked into recording Skype conversations, and there aren't a lot of reliable solutions for that either. Many of them have to run on the same machine as the client, which makes retrieving the conversations a nightmare.
Plus, things like abbreviated dialing between global offices, least cost routing, TEHO, etc, would cause telephone costs to skyrocket if desk phones were eliminated. Our International rates for our dedicated voice circuits is significantly cheaper than those of cell phones.
So, in our environment, at least, about the only conversation you could have would be replacing desk phones with soft phones. With as many people as we have who have more than 8 lines on their phones, I don't think there is a soft phone client that is reliable enough to replicate the experience.
Even for me personally, I have a much more pleasant experience using speaker phone on my desk phone than trying to use speakers and a mic on my computer. Headsets either way suck. I can't even imagine only using a soft phone or only using my cell phone. Heck, as it is, I generally call people back from my desk phone if they call me on my cell phone. Same thing if I accidentally pick up a call on my soft phone. For those of you who enjoy not having a desk phone, kudos to you! For me, I'm going to hold on to mine as long as I can!
I work remotely from home, so do a good number of the people in the company I work for. Even the ones who go into the office are often only there a few days a week. Right now, people have physical phones in their cubical but they are being phased out to use a USB headset with a software VOIP system. I don't really want to use my personal cell phone all the time for work, even though I have unlimited minutes and all that. I bought an Ooma, which a VOIP device refurbished from woot.com so it cost me around $105 for it. It only runs me $4 a month and I bought a nice speaker phone to hook up to it. I like to use that for long calls and such. I don't think that the traditional phone is necessary anymore, but we still need some way for voice communication which typically means some sort of VOIP system.
Simple answer is yes.
But since the typical enterprise ip phone deployment uses rfc1918 address space and the only place a public ip might be required is on the voice gateway your point about needing to buy more ip addresses is irrelevant anyhow.
I am not a Frog. I am a Free Womble!
No one needs one, unless of course you have Sprint for your wireless carrier.
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
Yes, a "real" landline phone doesn't need to be plugged in, it gets its power from the landline and that is battery-backed which is why your landline phone works when the power is out.
Don't have one at my desk. Don't really miss it. Can take the phone from my co-worker if I need to call out. We have no shortage of phones at work.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Not for most people. Receptionists need phones are their desk only because it is tied to a place, but most office workers do not.
I forward my desk phone and blackberry to my iPhone. I still don't get enough calls to even approach my plan limit, since most calls are during the day and cell to cell. I'd really be happy if they could take the physical phone away and just keep the extension forwarded.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Unplugged my office telephone a few months ago, as a developer, getting calls from end users and investors was completely an obstruction to my day. Since voicemail automatically ends up as a .wav file in my inbox, I just unplugged it and everyone who feels the need to call can leave a message. It's a lot easier to forward a .wav file with a message to the right department, than it is for me to try and navigate the options on a phone system to send a voicemail, or transfer an actual caller to someone who's not at their desk.
And having a phone is a good way of having responsibilities that just need to be randomly memorized instead of written down and trackable in some way. In all effects, the phone is a much less efficient and effective way of interoffice communication than mail or chat.
because companies like to claim anything you do business on that can take, read, download, monitor 24 7.
Give me the contract that states you can't not and will not under any circumstance try to look at anything on my phone.
Pay me for a portion of my phone bill.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That means I have phone connectivity without needing the computer to be on.
And since I work from home, I have very little need for a cell phone. So my wife and I share one phone with a basic voice/text plan and no data.
Yes, but I wish people would just send me emails. Often, I just don't have the time to talk. If I get an email, I can respond at will or forward it off to someone else who it should have gone to in the first place.
If you don't need to actually call out and talk with external people no. Or if you do it so infrequently that it's a non-issue no. Probably whole floors of workers could have their phones removed and perhaps a couple of "phone rooms" added to the floor, so that on the odd chance they had to call a landline out, they could have a quiet place to make the call, and numbers associated with it if they needed to give someone a number to call.
I still need a desk which exists in my home-office. As for the desk phone? VPN access to the corporate VOIP network is all I need and a headset. I'm grateful to work for such a forward-thinking company which realizes many office norms are a thing of the past in the information age.
The company I work for does hot desking / activity based working, and only a small percentage of the desks and all the meeting rooms have fixed phones.
Every single employee is issued with a mobile (cell) phone. At the office there's some kind of technology that will route any inbound "landline" calls to both your mobile phone, as well as any desk phone you happen to be logged into. There's also the option of using VOIP via a headset connected to your laptop, which seems to be the option most "phone heavy" people choose.
In reality: most people hardly use their work issued mobile phones at all, or even keep them charged. Most real time colloboration is done over instant messenging and the occasional conference call for meetings with people who are working from home or offshore.
Many companies are switching to SIP based IP phones.
There are tons of SIP clients you can run on your PC, and plenty of high grade headsets that work with USB ports (Plantronics as one example that my company uses).
So no, no you do not.
But yes, yes you still need a regular phone #/extension that people can call you on from any regular phone line.
-- filgy
...has been one of the best things I've learned.
Highly used by companies since it is free so the companies jump on it, then they realize they need someone to maintain it, not just set it up initially (really small businesses can just contract with one of many many SIP providers to make it very easy and not have to worry with their own asterisk install).
-- filgy
The great thing about modern VoIP deskphones is that they offer much of the flexibility of a smartphone without the hassle of constantly needing to replace them.
For example there are now phones which have button extensions which can issue plain HTTP requests. So it's trivial to use them to turn the lights on and off.
The phones also allow you to use VPN tunnels, so you have at least some security mobile phones won't provide you.
Again you could do that with mobile phones, or even PCs, but putting it into a "desk phone" case ensures that nobody will mess with it and that it will last for some time. You'll never need to upgrade the hardware because you upgraded the operating system to run some piece of software since you don't run much of your own software on those. They are designed to be semi-dumb terminals. (Some modern VoIP offer you a simple sort of Web-browser, deliberately non compatible with html)
I find Google Voice very convenient, and it seems to fill most of the use cases listed on other comments. If you have a Google Apps for Business account, you can get a phone number associated with your work account, which is nice to separate personal and work numbers. My work number only rings my corporate Gmail, which is open if and only if I am at work. Combined with a decent headset, the call quality is much better than cellphones. And, if you want, you can forward it to your cellphone when you are away from your computer. A very sad missing feature is that you cannot forward two Google Voice accounts to the same cellphone number, so you can't forward both your personal and your work numbers to your cellphone.
People who spend their day on the telephone obviously still need a desk phone; if your job is in sales or marketing I don't expect your phone to go away. If you do a grubby job on a factory floor your rugged wall phone still makes sense. And if you work in a call center, duh!
Cell phones and/or VOIP make more sense for the rest of the workforce. For the typical knowledge worker the first question should be whether you even need to talk to them (a highly disruptive method of communication because of the need to drop everything to answer) at all, or whether you'd do better to use some form of text communication.
We bought a phone system some months ago when we were moving into a bigger space. its really just for inside the two office locations, a few of our remote sales people have remote phones, but most just want their calls forwarded to their cell phones. We use Skype for engineering conferences but my phone mostly just collects dust, Ill call other extensions for ease and to keep my battery up, but I wouldnt miss it. Since Im in charge of simple changes to the phone server I have to know a bit about it, but I really dont like the system. I think my boss likes having a system but I think we could have gone another route. Perhaps in a few years when the system is long in the tooth I can persuade another route.
Yes and no. Unfortunately my job requires a phone but we do all inter office comm with Lync/ Comm / Outlook and the businesses we work with use Cisco IP Comm and other programs like TouchStar (shudder). I guess if zombie apocalypse starts in the office, Aspect desk phones can kill a zombie. One.
SIP (VOIP) ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptors) can be purchased either tied to a carrier like a cell phone AKA Magic Jack or Vonage, or you can use an unlocked device and use a BYOD provider (Bring Your Own Device). In addition to a POTS phone line, I have two additional lines. One is tied to Google Voice for free calls to all of US and Canada, and the other is provisioned for under $10 US per Month also calling all of US and Canada as a "Local Call" with unlimited minutes. The Landline is published and used for the alarm, local calls, etc. The other lines are used to place and receive long distance calls and save cell phone minutes.
Details follow, SIP ATA is a Linksys PAP2-AT (un locked) One line subscribed to ViaTalk. One tied to free IPPI and free DID phone in Washington State. Google Voice rings that line. Included was a INUM number. All INUM numbers can call each other for free just like Skype, but unlike Skype, I'm not locked into a single provider. The INUM is used for international friends using INUM, Skype, or Google Voice. The free IPPI allows free calls to/from Skype and Google Voice. No need to be at the PC or even have it on for a call to ring my phone.
The truth shall set you free!