sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems NEC Telephones & Systems Multiple location voip question...

I work for a small dental practice with two offices. We have 4 phone lines and two locations, both in San Francisco. Only one office is open at any given time.
Each office has an NEC Elektra Elite IPK system with 6 terminals.

Currently the systems are not linked in any way and we pay approximately $1000 per month to have all four lines ring in both locations (simultaneously), this is done by SBC. Instead of a voicemail card we have a panasonic $10 answering machine (please try and control your laughter). Both offices have an SBC DSL connection, and it appears that our growing practice is in need of proper voice mail. Additionally we would like to greatly decrease our monthly phone bill.

I am wondering if the two IPK control boxes be linked over IP, and then they can share the same voice mail system, additionally we can tell SBC to go… well we can get our phone bill down a huge amount.
That is to say the main office would have 4 phone lines, and the satellite would only have 1 (to support the DSL). The satellite phone terminals would basically be off-site extensions of the main system….

I know very little about PBX systems (obviously), I only set up computer networks. If anybody could tell me…

Am I going about this the wrong way? (should we use onesuite.com message center of something like that)

Will this be cost effective? (convincing the boss he needs to spend a lot is far easier than it sounds)

Does anybody know of a good SF Bay Area NEC tech who is not excessively expensive and can do good work?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

-Matthew Stryker
[email protected]

This is something your system is capable of doing for sure. You can go about it 1 of 2 ways. The first would to connect a t1 to both locations and use what NEC call "CCIS" and link both systems together, this would in effect allow you to have a "centralized" voicemail at one location which is shared to the other. The other way is to install a gateway in the main system and use 4 voip nec phones, each phone uses aproximately 90k up and down when in use, so you would need the bandwidth to support this. This option would be more cost effective but would not offer the same quality gaurantees. You can call us at 831-621-1775 if you need help with your system. We are NEC certified.