sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Comdial Telephones & Systems PBX and Voip

Hi guys, I would like a unbiased answer to the PBX, VOIP question.PBX guys say Voip has too many problems and you'd better have a very good network.Voip guys say PBX is a waste of time. HELP!

Unbiased??? Here???

:rofl:

Yeah unbiased, what am I thinking! Ha Ha!

VIOP does all kinds of fancy stuff except the most important, perfect calls every time. Isn't that what phones systems are for?

Thanks guys! Found a lot of info on the other Forums.

So, whadya tink? What are your conclusions, in all seriousness. Maybe you've found something that some of us need to think about!

My first impression is that VOIP has come a long way as far as features, but the stability compared to a PBX still worries me, this comes from people I've talked to with full VOIP systems. The Admin people usually say it's Ok or good,but almost all the users I've talked to say it's not good or they'll just live with it. The last one was when I was paying my AAA bill at a huge center, They were Voip and the system was down, and I asked about how their phones performed, and the 4 people I talked to all said it's good when it works but there are a lot of problems they didn't have with the last system.The companies that said they liked it always had a very good infrastructure and good IT people on site.One even had a Nortel MICS on site as a backup, I don't get that!I guess it depends on your support, but that's how it has always been!Voip seems to be the future, so we have to be able to do a good install and support.

When it comes to VoIP, the VoIP PBX platform and the network infrastructure is everything. Traditional PBXs were primarily hardware-based and ran very lean versions of firmware - like Comdial stuff, for instance, which runs VxWorks on ASICs or FPGAs. Most VoIP implementations are done as "Soft PBXs" - that is, you're running a traditional machine, an operating system, and then the PBX software on top. This leads to several unfair comparisons. Folks go out and purchase a cheap PC or low-end server, install Windows and a PBX, and then wonder why it crashes, has trouble dealing with large call volumes, etc. If you're going to run VoIP, you either have to spend the money to get a hardware-based VoIP PBX, or spend the money to build a soft PBX correctly.

The second challenge is network infrastructure. One of VoIP's biggest advantages is its ability to run on existing Ethernet and IP networks. However, if your network infrastructure cannot handle the additional load, then you're going to run into problems. Bandwidth is one aspect, but people fail to consider things like latency, packet forwarding rates, congestion, etc. An IP network is a far cry more complex than digital phones hooked to a digital PBX, and it has to be treated as such. There's a reason that switches produced in the past 5-10 years have settings for QoS and some even optimized for VoIP - because, when it comes down to it, the computer can wait, but the phone needs the traffic, low latency, and packet forwarding now, or your call gets dropped, garbled, etc.

Bottom line: VoIP has taken a bad rap for a few years because people do not take the time to implement it properly. Properly-implemented VoIP can and does work just as well as a traditional, digital or analog PBX.

The problem with VOIP is that it is running on a packetized DATA network. This type of network was never intended to carry REALTIME two-way voice or video traffic. It is well designed to prevent data loss or corruption, but not to deliver data in a steady stream without delay. That is what the public switched telephone network was designed to do.

A large supermarket chain in my area just upgraded from thier rock solid Nortel system to a Cisco system.

I was ice fishing with one of their IT guys and when he asked what i did and i said phones he told me "we just spent millions on a new phone system" ..... it linked all of their sites in 6 states.

Then he said "but we keep dropping calls and cisco can't figure it out"

Enough said?? .... millions of dollars but they can't make and take calls from their customers!