Cheap and Reliable IP Telephony? 62
anomalie asks: "I am trying to sell IP telephony to my employer. The idea was shot down once already because of the cost (using a Cisco solution). I would like to find a cheap but reliable IP PBX because everyone liked the idea of IP telephony, just not the price associated with it. I need a system that could initially handle about 80 users at a single location, and eventually handle about 350 users at 7 locations. The two systems I have been looked at so far are Asterisk & Pingtel's SIPxchange IP PBX. I'm not looking here for a final solution, just some starting points for more research. Any feedback/tips/warnings from the Slashdot community?"
"I am looking to have at least the following capabilities:-Auto attendant
-Handle a PRI (hopefully allow forwarding of old PBX DIDs)
-Handle long distance T1 (we would initially segment off some channels from our current PBX)
-Handle WAN Traffic so we could utilize our unused channels for long distance from other locations
-Forwarding of voicemails to email
Nice optional features:
-Web based GUI for voicemail administration
-GUI call manager
Eventually, we would have relay units at the other locations to handle the local calls and call routing and have 1 central PBX at corporate headquarters."
Vonage (Score:2, Informative)
Astrisk (Score:4, Informative)
Astrisk really has a great set of features, a lot of which I am really going to miss. On the downside is that we were constantly having problems with it. Not major problems mind you, a couple lost calls here or there and sometimes the voicemail prompts would stutter. I'm not sure if the dropped calls were actually the fault of astrisk, or the PRI circuit we had coming in, because the astrisk console always was feeding warning messages about a particular PRI.
This could all be because we were running off of CVS versions of astrisk, with local patches but aparently, it is the way to go, because stable releases of astrisk are very few, and very far between.
So take this as a word of warning, astrisk is rad, but it'll take some work to get it to settle down.
Re:You should probably think things over. (Score:3, Informative)
You're getting screwed.
I do a lot of international calling to some strange places. The most expensive place I know of is Kiribati (while it lasts) for about $3/min. Afghanistan and Wallis & Futuna follow at $2. After that, it falls off quickly. Most places that people actually call are dirt cheap these days. The only calls that will cost $5 and up are to certain types of satellite phones, and VoIP's not going to help you there.
Using an ordinary service here in the USA with no fees or thresholds I can call dozens of countries for 5 cents a minute or less: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lesotho, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
At those rates, it's not worth the hassle of private VoIP arrangements unless I do huge volume.
Optiop (Score:3, Informative)
Internet-initiated calls: It may be interesting to compare this to Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk [bigzoo.com], which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand.
Free VOIP: An option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype [skype.com]. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get past any firewall. (This shows the alarming lack of security of firewalls, and the need for a software firewall like ZoneAlarm [zonelabs.com] that alert you when a program tries to connect.) Skype is brought to you by the designers of the original KaZaa program.
3.5 cents per minute, but free to the U.S. caller: If you want someone with only a normal telephone to call you in New Zealand without paying, you can put $10 into a BigZoo.com or OneSuite.com [onesuite.com] account, and give them the PIN number. OneSuite only costs 3.5 cents per minute from the U.S. to New Zealand, if the U.S. caller calls from a local number. With OneSuite.com or Bigzoo.com can have as many accounts as you have friends for whom you want to provide free calling.
Other ideas? Are there any options like this that aren't mentioned here?
Re:You should probably think things over. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:You should probably think things over. (Score:2, Informative)
Like where?
I'm looking at the rate sheet for my LD service:
$0.15 American Samoa
$0.61 Antarctica (okay, below the Indian Ocean)
$1.25 Christmas Island
$0.50 Comoros
$0.81 Cook Islands
$1.24 Diego Garcia
$0.49 Fiji
$0.37 French Polynesia
$0.28 Guam
$2.99 Kiribati
$0.73 Maldives
$0.20 Marianas
$0.60 Marshall Islands
$0.42 Mauritius
$0.73 Mayotte
$0.78 Micronesia
$1.09 Nauru
$0.36 New Caledonia
$0.79 Niue
$1.25 Norfolk Islands
$1.08 Palau
$0.32 Reunion
$0.20 Saipan
$0.40 Seychelles
$0.85 St. Helena
$0.45 Tokelau
$0.43 Tonga
$0.78 Tuvalu
$0.70 Vanuatu
$2.14 Wallis & Futuna
$0.41 Western Samoa
The only places where you're paying that sort of money are those that have no local phone system so they have to use satellite phones.
Enough of the FUD! (Score:5, Informative)
I work at a mid-sized telco that heavily relies on IP telephony. To put it simply, this is where things are moving to on the carrier side and the PBX side. The technology is mature. Everyone is using it. 'Nuff Said.
It looks like the poster is looking for a basic IP PBX that does the stuff that pretty much EVERY modern office PBX does. AutoAttendents, lite web client, simple IVR's, voicemails, and being able to interconnect with a T1 are all very standard features.
Having researched the PBX and call center solution for my own company (about 300 users with 100 call center agents), these are my 2 recommendations:
Artisoft Televantage
--------------------
-VERY Inexpensive for small offices like 5-20 people. Pretty average priced when you get up there in the users. Low base cost, high per-seat license cost.
-Supports pretty much EVERY feature under the sun, along with some neat stuff like 'follow me' routing lists, announced hold times, and a free SDK for ODBC integration if you want to build your own IVR's and plugins.
-Televantage runs on standard Intel Dialogic boards, so you can use T1's, DS3's, POTS lines, whatever you want. It also supports something like 1000 SIP users per server if you want to use standard SIP IP phones.
-Biggest disadvantage to TeleVantage is that it runs on a lite version of MS SQL server. On average, we reboot our TeleVantage system about once a month just for stability's sake.
3com NBX SuperStack
--------------------
-The 3com is pretty lite on features though it does cover everything that the poster asked for. Certainly not a solution for a call center, but defenitely a great box for an office environment.
-The 3com box runs Cisco Call Manager which is a plus since the poster specifically said he likes the Cisco stuff.
-The 3com box is very inexpensive for small-to-mid sized offices of like 30-50 people. The license cost and the base cost are both reasonable.
-The 3com box runs the same OS as artificial hearts, so it is VERY VERY VERY stable.
-Disadvantage is that you have to use proprietary 3com phones since insted of going with a standard protocol, 3com uses some Layer2 ultra-efficient monster of a codec that they developed internally.
-Another disadvantage is that if you want to add features that are not available in the 3com SuperStack, you basically have to put them on a seperate box next to the machine. For instance, if you desperately wanted ACD or announced hold times, you'd end up putting a 2nd box just as expensive as a PBX right next to your PBX to handle those calls on pass-through.
VoIP in Reality (Score:4, Informative)
We deployed several offices with VoIP in a large enterprise environment. Some offices have more bandwidth then others. The one's with the least bandwidth have more issues with VoIP.
Most problems have to do with initial setup and configuration of the phones. i.e. programming of voice mail, features, etc. The next problem is setting up the routing and networking. Then out of the blue problems with dropped calls, voice mail issues and no incoming calls.
The hardware is only part of the problem. You have a lot of choices to make.
1. Quality phones and PBX gear that's stable and reliable.
2. Bandwidth, enough to handle the load of normal data and VoIP.
3. Quality tech's to set it up the right way. Network engineers to ensure the quality of the data circuits.
4. Quality provider with stable systems. This includes the Internet pipeline / leased line. You need to keep this circuit up and running during business hours. If the network is unstable and computers are disconnected frequently, then you can expect the phones to go with it.
There are advantages to having your data and phones on different systems. The big advantages to VoIP come when you already have circuits in place and you are connecting multiple offices from across the country (or world). This way you can save money on inter-office calls and long distance calls (depending on the provider). Workers can setup VoIP at home and connect it to their Cable modem along with a VPN connection. This makes a lot of sense both technically and financially.
The initial cost of VoIP hardware is justified when you need to service it.
Re:Astrisk (Score:5, Informative)
I second that.
I am using Asterisk right now to offload our high-volume long distance calls over to Nufone [nufone.net]. $0.0295/min anywhere in the continental US and Canada. Great service but not offically open for business yet. Talk to Jerjer in #asterisk on OPN.
Anyway -- Asterisk for the most part works great -- I currently have our Norstar system with four trunk lines going into an Adit600 channel bank to Asterisk. We also have 8 regular PSTN lines which go directly into the KSU. Speed dials are set to pick up a VOIP trunk line. When we move to the new building we will have a PRI going directly into the asterisk box, and a channelized T1 connection between the Norstar system and the Asterisk box. We're only going to have one "real" phone line in the building, with everything else going over VOIP to a colocation place downtown.
Biggest problems with Asterisk (for us) seem to be with VOIP phones, not VOIP calls. Since we're using our regular Norstar system we avoid most of these issues but we are slowly moving to VOIP phones to replace the KSU since we want (much) tighter integration of the phones and computers. You pretty much require end-to-end QoS though for guaranteed reliability and clarity of calls. We do pretty go with having QoS working on both ends of the data T1 such that it's not possible to fill the pipe and cause havoc.
Asterisk is really becoming VERY stable over the past few weeks -- I think there are under 8 bugs open in the bugtracker which are preventing 1.0 stable. (yes I realize how funny that sounds)
I've done this. (Score:5, Informative)
As configured, it has an LD T1, local DID PRI, auto attendant, VM retrieval by email, slick client-side GUI, about 120 analog (POTS) extensions, a handful of active h.323 IP extensions, and an operator console. Consumes only 4 rack spaces, instead of the couple dozen square feet of wall space occupied by their old switch. 17 PCI slots, hotswap Adaptec RAID, hotswap redundant power supplies, redundant quick-connect fans, audible alarms, gig-o-RAM, backplane, captive screws, yadda, yadda.
80 extensions in one spot, be they IP, analog, or 80 of each, is not a big deal.
Runs Win2k, has a network-operable Win32 GUI for administratia. It'll do all the fancy automatic least-cost call routing you can ask for between branches (via IP, or whatever other means you have). It will also do the remote PBX thing at least as well as anything else available today. Tenant-oriented resource allocation and detailed call reporting (and recording, if that's your gig) will keep the beancounters happy.
It's called Altigen [altigen.com]. It mops the floor with Cisco's paltry offerings, across the board. And it's way, way cheaper.
Questions?
Re:What problem are you trying to solve? (Score:3, Informative)
"I am looking to have at least the following capabilities:
-Auto attendant
-Handle a PRI (hopefully allow forwarding of old PBX DIDs)
-Handle long distance T1 (we would initially segment off some channels from our current PBX)
-Handle WAN Traffic so we could utilize our unused channels for long distance from other locations
-Forwarding of voicemails to email
Nice optional features:
-Web based GUI for voicemail administration
-GUI call manager
Of the list of options that you are looking for, the only two that I'm not sure of availability with a Softswitch solution is the auto attendant and the voice mail forwarding (I think the voice mail forwarding is available, not positive). Also, a softswitch could provide more flexibility than a limited PBX system. I'm not sure if this is a better option, or even if a softswitch would fit into your system, but I thought I'd throw it out there as a potential option.
When I started my initial research into switch vendors I found this site Sipcenter.com [sipcenter.com] was a useful resource for identifying potential vendors, although a few of the links are dead from the market fall. They have a section for IP PBX vendors, it may help you find a solution.
My recommendation, if you haven't already done this, is to put together a list of 10 - 12 potential vendors and send them a RFI/RFP. You may find a RFI/RFP process to be a valuable way to not only find a good solution, but provide you with the information to sway your boss(es).