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

Well, I don't mean to cut everyones throat to suggest the mom and pop store, small offices, churches, etc should bypass the local phone system installer, but, who wants to pay $60 every time you make a simple move, add, change? Just seems like a small office should be able to easily install a voice server and maintain it themselves.

*richard hesitates... is this wise? Hey, run it up the pole and lets see who salutes...*

95% of small mom and pops, churches, offices have little to any MAC action. They call when a line is dead, they can't turn off a message lite, calls cutoff during voice mail, etc. Small TDM systems are complicated enough without having to ask about Kernel errors, partition errors, and PC questions that make their eyes glass over. Now every data shop charges more per hour than I do...so why would they subject themselves to a problematic solution they can't begin to understand and also pay more for it on a service basis? Bad economics.

$60 bucks is less than half of what most companies charge in this neck of the woods. A typical small shop isn't going to have someone on-staff who is technically capable of such an activity. Our systems offer a simple six-digit entry on keypad of the phone to swap extensions, yet they still can't get it right. Exactly how many times would this even be an issue anyway in a typical small shop?

I don't think that anyone's going to argue that people should be able to "do it themselves". Home improvement (key word HOME) stores have been preaching this for decades. As you know, there are entire TV networks and hundreds of web sites that encourage people to avoid that "horrible" service technician. Somehow, they seem to treat gas and electricity a little more responsibly. "Phones are simple, it's just four 'wores'" Yeah, OK.

When you have someone who barely understands how to load paper into the copier in charge of the phones "because it is so easy" is where the fault lies. All of this is easy to those who are somewhat educated, but therein lies the problem. Most companies place their least-intelligent persons in charge of their phones and other office equipment. The $8.00 per hour receptionist who is too busy fighting with her boyfriend via text messaging on her prepaid cell phone during training is the first person to proclaim "this system doesn't work".

It can be TDM, 1A2, VOIP or anything else. Until companies start taking their phone systems seriously, there's not much that we the professionals can do. I love my customers, I really do and I make sure that we bend over backward to support them. We try, try and then try again, but it doesn't make much sense for us to sell systems that are easily self-managed if nobody wants to, well for lack of a better term "self-manage" them. It seems as if all they are looking at is the thousands of dollars saved on cabling or long distance charges. There is just so much more to this equation than that.....

To be continued.

Thats right Ed, anyway in my experience if there is a point there in the first place they will just use it until they want a move to somewhere there is no cable and then ask " O while you are there can you change the name on that phone as she moved last month".

I had a customer ring me and asked me to dial in and change the name on ext 220 because that person hads left and when the new person rings reception from that extensions she gets confused because the name is wrong. :shrug:

Good points RATHER BE FISHING, Ed, and OBT.

microsoft is getting into the voip business ...

have a look

https://www.microsoft.com/responsepoint/default.mspx

Yes, the dreaded 800 pound gorilla is now going to reach out and touch someone... Joy!

$60/hr is pretty cheap rate around here as well.

About half the customers I have are "Break-Fix" meaning they never call until the phones are acting up like RBF said. If they want me to give them the keys to the castle on Asterisk I will more then happily hand them over, but as Ed mentioned before, these are the people who ask "How do I answer the phone" right after the system is installed. Most of the calls I get aren't about the phones acting up but people wanting to change things that wouldn't be covered as part of the user's job anyways. Things like adding a queue, changing the AA, moving the hunt group/queue order, putting different on-hold music on it, etc. About the only real call I get about the phones acting up is sometimes the MWI will stay blinking even tho they have no voicemail. This usually corrects itself in 5 hours so I tell them to just ignore it and call me tomorrow if it's still doing it.

I do know what you mean about calling the vendor everytime you wanted to do something, that's how I originally got into Asterisk, from the fall-out of a Toshiba Strata DK40i and a vendor that refused to supply me with user manual's (and no, I didn't ask for programming guides). All I really wanted to do was be able to change the name on the display and make all the buttons map the same on all the phones. The combination of a bad vendor and a phone system that was sold to do X things but could only do Y is when I decided I would just program my own.

If a phone system is robust enough, has enough forethought put into the programming, and sold with the correct features they really need, then they shouldn't need to call you every week to look at it.

This also means that if you sold them a VoIP system that will be traversing the public internet that you did your own due diligence at time of sale and thoroughly advised them of the shortcomings of the internet, and that service outages are possible.

Bad Vendor's is why people want to avoid the dreaded service tech, not because a skilled professional isn't worth his going rate.

Can you guys point me to some of the software used for Using VOIP on a Computer. I have found one it is called Axon. I don't know if this is the right kind of software though. Also what is your Guys preference for IP phones. Quality but still at a decent price.

Why do Ed and Kumba now look like the same person?

Aww, man, poor Ed. He just got told he looks like an IT guy.