sundance-communications.com/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones VOIP....someones observations

Copious amounts of profuse verbiage.

VoIP? People are buying it so there must be a market for it.
My Amish neighbors sell manure by the wagon load, I don't want any, but people are buying it.
And so it goes.....
Mark

It seems that I am confronting a situation where VoIP seems to make sense. My company is opening a small office where we'll have 2-3 employees on-site most of the time. We want to be able to tie in that location to another in the area for overflow call handling and voicemail.

We'll have to tie in this location to our data network no matter what we do with voice.

Our plan is to setup a small Avaya system with analog trunks from the LEC. We'll use VoIP on the data line to route calls to the voicemail in our current office. In our current area office the GM there just had a new Avaya IP Office system installed.

I anticipate call volume will be so low as to not be able to justify a point-to-point between offices. I figure why not just bump bandwidth a little on the data side to handle the calls between sited. We're talking about 2 simultaneous calls between sites max.

I'm curious to see how this works out. Fortunately, in this scenario I don't think even a day or so of downtime for VM/interoffice calling would hurt us that much. Worst case is we have to install voicemail at the new site if the proposed setup doesn't work well for some reason.

What do you all think?

It should work fine. Tying offices together is one of the beauties of VOIP comes to light. We do setups like that all the time. I still don't see then sense in using it for much of anything else though.

Thanks Ed. From everything I've read it seems that there's not much sense to going IP within an office save perhaps a small office without its own phone system. Even then, I get really nervous about the idea of down time that affects both the network and telephones.

I think VoIP is a good solution in some situations but there's still a way to go in other situations/applications.

2.5 years ago in our old office location, I supported a Toshiba P4000 with 300 users. 12+ years of use and no major problems, no outages, no downtime. This was not a redundant system config. Oh I forgot to mention one hard drive failure. Also used the 300 model vm with 16 ports, no problems...Y2K, not a big problem, just a free file upgrade.

Moved to our new offices, upper mgt said VoIP. We live demo'ed Avaya S8700 and cisco. All but two wanted Avaya but those two were mgt and were scared about putting "non" cisco hardware on the cisco network. So we have 400 users under one roof, 100 more users split between two other locations.

I've been reading the threads and I have to agree, voip costs way more. Installation!!!...well, one prominent company installed but didn't understand telecom features, QoS, etc...so 8 months later paid 45K to have reinstalled. Still intermittent problems no one can troubleshoot.

Oh...other surprises too, talked a good game up front but walking the talk totally different. Oops, we made a mistake when we told you that unified messaging would take space in users email boxes...sorry. Oops, we forgot to tell you that the redundant backup power supply for your 3560 switches will only support one unit...and on and on...

DST patch...oops...sorry...have to upgrade your 3 call managers and oops...your IPCCe will not work with the new call manager upgrade so we have to upgrade it too...and on and on...simple three user conference calls disappear, the smdr software on the P4000 cost 2K and worked super on the 80 char serial output, new ip system smdr cost over 15K, requires it's own PC and still doesn't have the reporting capability...oh, no one can seem to get a DID trunk port to recognize both near and far end disconnect supervision using battery reversal...

Well, I'm on a rant...
I started with SCB in '79 and have seen lots of changes. VoIP is here, is it ready? Not completely IMO. I think it has a place connecting small branch offices together but from my view point, it's not ready for large office locations.

Forgot to mention, MACs and maint costs on the P4000 were less in 12 years than 2.5 years using current system...that's important to me. Getting off my soap box now...

DT98..trust me you are far from alone on this. One of the great things about being a big part of the internet is how to keep stories like yours from popping up on the first page of an internet search.

It seems to me that Paul is correct about many of the benefits of VoiP, especially the issues about running voice and data over the same infrastructure.

I have been using Voip sucessfully for several years.

Where I differ is in his view on the benefit of Open Standards and the cost savings this will bring.

When I buy a solution for my business, I want reliablility, accountabillity and stability.

For this reason I prefer to buy from a major vendor with a track record, and am reluctant to use an Open source product like Asterix, because I do not know who to shout at when it needs fixing, as it surely will sometime during its life.

Mobility and branch office IP trunking make VOIP a winner for me. Open standards are also a big positive in my opinion. The ability to design custom integration apps for instance gives us HUGE productivity gains. IP phones are every bit as realiable as other digital phones when they are placed on a properly designed network. Properly designing such a network does not cost a fortune, but it does require a little common sense and planning. Regardless of the technology, a phone system is only as good as the connection between the box and the station.

Our systems still rely on tried and true POTS and T1/PRI trunks for our PSTN connectivity at our offices. It works, so why change it, in my opinion (but thanks VOIP for bringing down Bell prices). We use VOIP for expanding our capabilities and saving money (IF it isn't at the expense of reliability/stability) rather than trying to be "bleeding edge" just for bragging rights. The "bleeding edge" pursuit can definately prove a costly one.

Atypical Midwesterner's common sense reply about reliability and stability FIRST. Good call. If more end users thought like that there would be less issues on the VoIP/TDM front.

Thanks, Weiss.

:thumb: