Have you all done much of this voip stuff. I am assuming the systems plug into the internet and the phone lines. Can you call someone voip that has a conventional phone in cleveland on the other end. If there are hubs someone has to pay for them. Who administers and charges for the phone numbers. I'm old school t-1 guy having trouble keeping up.

I havent done any voip but I know macrovoice was selling voip hubs last year and you paid like .03 a minute and the quality was very bad.

the upper end of the voip market is fairly mature. be wary of mid and low end. One of my customers converted to cisco and they love it. sound quality and qos are good.
large organizations benifit most smaller
businesses should go slow.
m

As always, you get what you pay for. I have done lot's of Avaya/Cisco VOIP with many happy customers.

Bikechuck- you can recive calls on a conventional phone from a VOIP system. The way this works is to run a pipe (T1 or ISDN, whatever) from the VOIP gateway to the local telco network, which interfaces locally. The one who assigns telephone numbers to the VOIP sets is the customer who buys the VOIP system. Besides the gateway, they purchase and use adminstrative software (ala Cisco Call Manager) to assign the numbers and program the station features.

jjimm