Cheap and Reliable IP Telephony?

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."

What problem are you trying to solve?

[ObviousGuy]

It seems like replacing your current phone system is going to cost more in the short term than just sticking with what works. Will the IP telephone system cost less in the long run? What is the time frame to break-even? Will your company still be around by that time?

You should probably think things over.

[sinergy]

The only corporations that would actually stand for a gain from the benefits of IP phones are the ones that would not balk at the price of the hardware.
The largest sum of money spent on phone systems is usually interoffice calls. Why would you set up IP phones in a single location as your goal, then add more offices as a secondary "good to have?"
This is not sound economics -- just because speaking over your cat5 network is cool does not make it a smart thing to do.

Re:You should probably think things over.

[Molina the Bofh]

Don't forget that the word of the day is globalization. More and more companies are needing to make international calls.

The largest economy of money VoIP can provide is in international calls. Some countries can have ridiculous fees, like $5/min.

VoIP leaves the company free to have some parts - like customer assistance - in another part of the world. That can mean lower costs.

Cost vs Savings?

[JLester]

When you looked at the Cisco solution, did you just look at the bottom dollar or did you run the numbers on line savings, labor savings, etc? We're going from an all-Centrex phone system with about 420 lines spread across 21 sites to a Cisco VoIP system in the next few months. The initial cost is pretty high, but we're looking at a 2-2.5 year payoff. After the payoff, we're estimating a $7-$8,000 savings per month! Our network techs can do all the maintenance (no more $200+ service calls), all phones have advanced calling features and voicemail, we're leveraging the XML-based displays to add company directories and clock-in/out capability, etc.

Don't just look at the actual cost, run the numbers on everything else too. If it doesn't work out now, stick with current setup until either the numbers work out better or until the added features justify the cost.

Also, I personally wouldn't want to stake my company's phone system on a smaller vendor. We looked primarily at Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, and Avaya. All three have good reputations in the industry.

Jason

Similar experience with Cisco

[jtheory]

The company I was in previously used the expensive, Cisco system (and it was cool to see our phones in the movies - Ocean's Eleven and others)... and we still had issues with it. Even once all the wrinkles were worked out and we no longer had echoes or constant rebooting of the phone server, it was still only as resilient as our network.

Like parent poster said, it sucks when your network goes down and you reach for the phone only to see that it's also rebooting, and you are stranded.

Granted this was a year and a half ago, but you're still taking the risk of much greater technical complexity, plus sharing a network that can be brought down by a lot of other factors (whereas POTS is independant).

Before you get on the boat, you'd better be able to point to a significant savings to justify it AND you have to either factor in downtime, or pay for a bank of backup standard phone lines. Here's a good tip for evaluating providers -- ask them for contact info for a few current customers that you can talk to. They should be able to find one who can share the experiences so far. You do NOT want to be the guinea pig on the cutting edge.