atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones VOIP for real.

Some of you may know me as the 1a2 enthusiast who wired his and his parent's homes with 1a2, and hooked up Asterisk boxes to tie it all together, as well as with another friend who collects phones, via Wi-Fi. It took some doing to rig up, but it's all worked well now for a year or so. But this is a private, peer-to-peer system used mostly for fun. As an added bonus I stuck another Asterisk box at work with three modems in it and created an Iax trunk with three fxo devices going into the Panasonic KX-TD816 and started working mostly from home. They can call me or even page me over my PA system at home, or in the 50's style office. Cute and functional! But change is comming.

We are moving to a bigger office in a month. Our IT guy wants to switch us to IP phones, and go with a HOSTED pbx where they charge you 40.00 a month for each extension. This is bad as we have 16 stations but only 12 employees. I can see the headaches this will cause. Have dealt with companies on a hosted PBX and it was a frustrating experience. At the moment we have 6 pstn lines comming in and have a 1-800 service as well as hosted voicemail. I would like to have an on-site pbx and voicemail unit like I do at home. Trouble is I know NOTHING about commercial quality systems. Are they like Asterisk? Is DSL sufficient or do they use T1 lines for the trunks? Who provides VOIP trunks with unlimited US calling and good international rates? I am looking for good info on providers or systems to help with the decisions because the people demonstrating the service don't seem to have much technical info. In my opinion the 6 CO lines we have are fine, and four of them carry our DSL anyway. Where can I find good info to go head to head with out IT guy, so we don't get stuck with a "fly by night" operation. I am very suspicious of anyone driving a luxury car trying to sell VOIP service.

Number One --- Odds are the salesman is leasing or renting that car --- and you are correct --- be very leery.

Number Two --- Don't do the hosted PBX. Your IT guy doesn't know telephony so this is his way of dodging his responsibility.

Number Three --- As far as your technical questions --- I'll let the tech pros do that.

Number Four --- Any good TDM system will do six lines and sixteen stations. With a flash Voice Mail. The cost of having a VoIP system doesn't compete. You are told one wire, one location, one phone and computer. Well, maybe. Look in the Avaya forum about the Office IP. If you want VoIP trunks for LD, there are several companies, the one locally that seems to do the best is NuVox. They can furnish your ported numbers and LD and data all on a dynamic IP circuit. Again, a good TDM system will support all this. Just make sure it has the capacity to expand and can be upgraded to IP for remote workers/telephones.

Ask NFC about their product line. He's in Northern Florida. Remember, your vendor is your friend. Find a GOOD friend.

Good luck, R500.

16 Hosted phones x $40/Month = $640
+ Internet T1 $500/Month
=$1140/month + taxes

KSU w. 16 phones, 60 month lease around $200/month
6 CO lines x $40 month $240
DSL for Internet $80/month
= $520/month + taxes

Sound about right?

Do you need remote VoIP phones?

I would be very leary about switching my business to all VoIP lines or a hosted service. Have you gotten a price from a local CLEC such as US Lec or NuVox as KLD suggested?

You could always get a hybrid key system that allows for VOIP remote workers. I would dump hosted unless you really have to have it for some reason. It's an expense you will never realise a ROI.

My company purchased a company that uses a hosted VOIP service. What a pain this is. If you need to add a station, it takes 24+ hours. Reset a voice mail password, 24 hours. The router needs to be rebooted monthly to "fix" audio problems. It just stinks and I have no control of it. I have already submitted a PO for a new Avaya S8300 to replace this hosted mess.

Centrex of the 21st Century for sure but managed by much less-competent people. Good luck, and fasten your seatbelt.

This confirms my suspicions, even worse they are pushing the service with us using DSL! Imagine 12 extensions trying to run concurrent conversations over a load balancing router with 4 dsl cnnections....can we say disaster? The loss of control bothers me the most. I said just keep the analog lines instead of going hosted voip. I am going to check out the company you mentioned. As for remote I am the only one who works remotely and manage my own personal Asterisk system, it's amazing! I had a long talk with the boss, explaining how bad this would be to rely on VOIP. I would think using PSTN for local calls and incomming tech calls, then go with voip for 1-800 and outgoing long distance calls. There seems to be a few vendors with cheap T1 service so my plan is to examine all options. I do not want to be stuck with hosted service or an overpriced proprietary system. Our current setup works fine, we own the KSU I have done the setup and repairs. Oh yes and our IT guy and I had a talk with the boss. He has no love for the hosted solution especially since the latest voip demo failed ( someone was dropping packets)....I wonder who..LOL?

Congratulations, R500.

One for the good guys. Check the dynamic IP T-1 out --- you'll like it.

:thumb:

as has been posted, be leery of hosted voip companies. I've heard a few horror stories of people hating the company and being unable to port their DIDs out...

You might consider Asterisk though, IF you are comfortable doing it. If you are, and it's installed correctly, Asterisk can be a very cost-effective and reliable system.

VoIP service can be reliable if you get a good carrier but if you need absolute reliability get a T1, Asterisk can deal with a T1 quite nicely.

Here are some of the limitations of hosted solutions
1 Most providers have zero redundancy, if you lose your WAN connection you are toast, no internal calls, no outbound/inbound traffic you would need to install a proxy server with analog gateways for redundancy and as far as I am aware none of the providers support this setup and it will add to the cost.
2 As already stated lack of control and delays in changes or addons
3 As already stated you never realize your ROI

As IronHelix mentioned if you should switch to VoIP trunks make sure you get it in writing that you will be able to port your numbers if you decide to move to another provider.

Well, I might as well muddy the water also. I like the Samsung OfficeServ 100 for this. It's a standard TDM system that has voicemail, VOIP, loop start CO lines and digital sets. If you add a MGI card then you can have IP phones in your home that is registered to the work phone system with very little issues. I will echo others...keep your business on TDM phones! This is not a high priced system and it's very stable.

Agree with many others. Stay away from hosted VOIP solutions and snazy luxary cars. We had a doctors office cut over with out contacting us in the telecom dept and I had to pipe analog off our PBX because the company they were using didnt explain indepth possible problems and the logic of "all your eggs in one basket". So now they are back to thier old Partner and on bell co's after a costly learning mistake on there behalf.

I am happy with our change. The Nuvox T1 service has been very reliable, and I configured Asterisk the fast way using Trixbox. There were just too many config changes at first, but now that things settle down I may make my own Asterisk install from scratch. You want to know what makes me even happier? I took my "shoe box" ksu and WE 564 and installed it on my desk along with the Grandstream phone and get that wonderful BRRRINGGG sound! Well I even found a 50's style desk in a trash pile with a broken top, some bowling lane section and paint and it's beautiful! Of course I ended up getting all the grief when someone here couldn't figure out how to use their voicemail. They wanted to go back to the panasonic system, but since they just tell others to pic up line X I suggested installing 1a2 and an intercom!

another disadvantage of the hosted is - it more than likely uses the SIP protocol which limits your features greatly as compared to any Hybrid switch which usually use H323

avaya, toshiba, nortel, mitel, the way to go

I would disagree. People that know use MGCP...not H323. SIP seems to be coming into its own and incredibly the backbones of the "SIP" trunking networks are MGCP for a reason.

Hosted PBX is a bad idea. Once you hit the general Internet you loose all ability to enforce an SLA. Plus to get any decent performance you need atleast a partial-T with a minimum SLA. Right there you loose the savings.

If you decide to use a hosted solution it should have it's own privatized network (that does not traverse the general internet) with a minimum SLA statement. Good luck finding one of those. And your 24-hour add/changes will still be there too.