sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information IP Phone System

Hello everyone,

Any of you guys here had set up a cloud base IP phone system? I help support a small office of 8 users. Right now they have an inter tel system, but they want to move to the cloud. I only looked at Polycom and MiCloud system so far and no quote yet. Do you guys know how much would cost for 8 users? How much internet bandwidth would they need? How reliable cloud IP phone system are? How is the call quality?

Thanks,

Benito

All I know is That I have removed some.
Had a Carrier here that used Yealink phones, after a year they dropped and dont support any more.
Others bought out and changed operating system.
All I have seen down here cost more each month and you never stop paying the monthly bill.

Good deal for some, but not most.

What are they looking to accomplish by moving to the cloud? Will they be gaining features?

It is typically sold by the seat and when you add in the cost of beefed up internet it is dramatically more expensive each month ... every month ... forever. They could lease a premise based system for the same or less each month and once their lease is up they would save tons of money each month. As an example picture a 20 phone installation at $35 per seat or $700 per month plus an additional $100 per month to beef up their internet connection. I can install a system like that for $9,000+- and the lease will be roughly $200 per month for 5 years with a $1 buyout. Add in 7 phone lines at $35 per month and the monthly cost is less than $450. At the end of 5 years the cost drops to $250. So for the first five years they pay an extra $350 and after that they pay an extra $550 per month. And they still need to shell out $ for the actual phones.

On top of being more expensive it is quite possible the call quality will not be acceptable.

I am admittedly biased but i don't see the advantage.

Thank you guys very much for your response. The only feature that they would be gaining that they don't have right now is that if someone call their office, their cellphone will ring also. They don't have that feature right now because their inter tel system is outdated and end of life. I also think that they should keep what they have, but they want to get in the cloud train.

PM Sent

Good God! First it was the "digital train", then it was the "VoIP train" now it seems like The Cloud is the latest craze. Is there no end to this mindless drivel? The only people making money on any of this are the ones who convince everybody that they have to have it.


-Hal

Hal, I usually have the customer ask the sales guys if he even knows what the "cloud" is and how it got it's name.

The way I look at it is this.

Back in the day there was large rooms full of big computers and spread through was a bunch of dumb terminals connected to the large computers. This was version 1 of the cloud.

After a while small computers started showing up that didn't need the large computers in the large rooms. These small computer soon became as powerful and more than the large computers and the large computers started to disappear.

Then the day came that they started putting these small computers together and made new Large computers that were very powerful.

Finally all of the small computers were connected to these groups of small computers and became dependant on them. This is what we now call The Cloud (aka Version 2).

Basicly the circle has been completed it started off with large centrally located computers that everyone had to connect to to do anything. To small individual computers that could due what the large centrally located computers use to do and now back to large centrally located computers (server farms).

Problem is this new centrally located computer made up of many smaller computer didn't replace the smaller dispersed computers like the original smaller computers did to the original large computers (mainframes).

I predict that in time, the circle will make it's way around again and the Cloud will go the way of the Mainframes. This will happen over and over

Just my weird thought on the Cloud issue.

By the way, I refuse to buy into the Cloud and I'm sure it's death is not to far away once major outages start to happen to major corporations and all of their employees start to sit idle because they don't have access to the Cloud and all of their programs and data.

It's the Cloud Baby. Thank you very much!! Elvis Has LLEEFFTT the building!

You meant train wreck, I'm sure. I just went though this with two management teams - one corporate, the other municipal. They really wanted to be in "the cloud". In both cases, the cloud was almost double the price within 5 years of service.