FAO Business telephony geeks

[Gumby]

Right, the phone / internet system at my soon to be former place of work is costing a ridiculous amount of money.

Essentially there are 3 sites, one with 2 people, another with 1 person and another with up to 7 at any one time.

Lots of calls to mobiles and between offices. 2 of the offices (2 and 7 people) have internet provided by X (whose service is pretty s**t to be fair). The 7 person office has a 12 line ISDN at the moment with a kxtda box routing them to the phones (provided by Y). The internet and phone in the other (1 person) office is provided by Z. Z also provide the phone and fax line for the 2 person site.

Result = ludicrous bills.

VOIP time? Or any other suggestions? Only problem with VOIP as it stands is that everyone logs onto the (one) server through terminal services, which tends to near enough max out the network utilisation.

 

[AhmedRSi]

get eveyone to go on o2 contract, free calls to other o2 phones even with the £15/mo simplicity tariff

 

[Longy]

Get an Avaya Phone system IP Office 500 in, Put it on it's own subnet, get a dedicated broadband line in, Get the remote users to use the VPN phones to connect to the system (use a VPN/Router - recommended the Netgear VPN concentrators as I have problems witht he VPN phones working with Cisco). Use a premicell device for mobile phone traffic job done!

 

[MickM]

^^ What he said, IP Office 500 fairly easy to set-up and manage. Great system and very helpfull stuff on the avaya university site

 

[cava83]

Any ideas in regards to cost and installation? Say one office 500 and 10 basic phones?

 

[Gumby]

Cheers guys, had a look at these this morning. Rough calculations look like it could possibly save up to around £3.5-4,000/pa which isn't bad at all.

Easy to DIY or better to contract it out to someone else?

 

[iain187]

we had 2 sites, 2 people in one, about 15 in the other. the bosses wanted the 2 people to have extensions on the main phone system so we got recommended linksys gear (well we actually got recommended cisco but it was over budget) and it was absolute tosh. (dropping calls, quiet, interference etc)

the other site has gone now (hooray recession) and the linksys gear is being used for 1 site, which it can cope with ok haha.

 

[Longy]

Cheers guys, had a look at these this morning. Rough calculations look like it could possibly save up to around £3.5-4,000/pa which isn't bad at all.

Easy to DIY or better to contract it out to someone else?

Pretty easy m8 - It's just a router with phone bits added but then I work for a Telecoms company doing IT so easy for me if I get stuck

The box comes empty and you just add the cards you bought - probs just need the daughter boards adding.

Hardware wise just plug in your ISDN via RJ45 and your lan in the lan port away you go. Just use RJ11 or RJ45 phones and patch them in (To go digital or IP phones is something to think about- mixture of both? or PoE?)

Software is easy to navigate, just like windows MMC tbh. As long as your happy to play with it you'll get there in the end. If in doubt get a pro to do the inital setup if you can afford it and you tweak it later.

Most features are licensed based so double check you order correct keys!!!

oh and VPN phones are a b**ch to set up - you've been warned

 

[Gumby]

Cheers Longy!

Do you have to keep the ISDN lines? I think they are looking at the IP phones, possibly the Avaya 4620 / 5620 handsets. What add-ons / daughterboards would they be likely to use?

Yeah I've heard VPN phones being called 4 letter words before lol. Luckily it's probably not me that will be setting it up

 

[Longy]

Cheers Longy!

Do you have to keep the ISDN lines? I think they are looking at the IP phones, possibly the Avaya 4620 / 5620 handsets. What add-ons / daughterboards would they be likely to use?

Yeah I've heard VPN phones being called 4 letter words before lol. Luckily it's probably not me that will be setting it up

You don't have to keep your ISDN lines, you can use analog but then you'd lose your DDI's and 12 lines?

The 4620 are nices phones but I think you need a PoE injector/power pack to use them on PoE swtich - where the 5620 are PoE native I think - don't quote me though. The phones can easily be changed to VPN phones with a simple firmware upgrade.

The cards you need depend on the features you want, eg BRI card for ISDN, Analog card? SLT cards for anaglog phones, Digital cards for digital phones etc

 

[Gumby]

So 5620 probably easiest then!

Fair point about the ISDN lines tbh, the whole point is really to cut down on the inter-office calls and to try and get all the phones on a loop together (and to make them all dial out of the main office) and to cut down on very expensive leased products. Could you still have multiple calls in / out from analogue lines though? Or is it best to keen the ISDN?

 

[Longy]

I'm pretty sure on one analog line you can only have one in/out call at a time.

I have a 5621sw ip working over VPN connecting to FVS338 at home - tis very nice.

 

[Adam]

Yeah you can only have 1 in/out call at a time on a PSTN (analog) line.

 

[Gumby]

Keeping the ISDN lines it is then! What is the difference between 5620 and 5621sw?

 

[The Hoff]

For that amount of users, it seems like a big layout. I'd look into Skype (and the many alternatives) along with softphones.

http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/business/

Won't suit every business model (you haven't really made clear how your company operates), but certainly an easy/cost effective option.

 

[Gumby]

Tried skype, didn't really take off tbh.

Ended up that the leasing company offered to sell us the KXTDA and digi handsets for sweet FA so that is going ahead. Just need to get a 4 line VoIP module for it then all is hunky dory