Solutions for Small Business VoIP?

MajorBlunder asks: "I'm part of the IT department of a small but prospering software company. We have recently filled the capacity of the POTS PBX phone system we currently have installed. We are currently looking into switching over to a VoIP phone system. We have a sizable IT staff in proportion to the rest of the company, so we'd like to be able to maintain the hardware/software in house as much as possible. I wanted to ask the Slashdot readership what experiences they have had with switching over to from POTS to VoIP. Any recomendations for full end to end solutions would be appreciated, and recomendations of things to avoid would be great."

VoIP is not cheaper

[Py to the Wiz]

... at least for us (a small business). Once you add in all of the per-line charges, the hardware, the setup fees, the broadband, and the fact that if you want to use DSL, you still have to buy at least one phone line from the phone company. Plus, of course, the reliability of broadband still isn't nearly at the level of hard telephone lines. After taking this into consideration, unfortunately, going through the local Ma Bell monopoly was still the cheapest and most reliable option for us (a business needing 3-5 phone lines).

We use the Cisco IP Phones & Service..

[PogiTalonX]

I work for a company that has about 12 people and we use the Cisco Systems [cisco.com] IP Phones. They work pretty well, have all the features of a normal PBX including intercom, call transferring, etc and they're relatively cheap.

The cool thing about these phones is each phone gets its own real phone number as well as internal extension. We are located in California and when we have trade shows in Florida we take one of these phones and plug it into any ethernet jack. The phone auto-configures itself and you get the same phone number and extension and you can call other people in the office on speaker as if you were in the next cubicle. Pretty rad. Hope this helps.

Re:Asterisk

[e4g4]

I set up a small voip system in our office in NJ (3 lines) using broadvoice paired with asterisk - and while the service (most notably broadvoice tech support) leaves some things to be desired - our phone system is much better in terms of its feature set than it was on our POTS pbx. That said, most of the reliability issues we've encountered were the fault of our service provider, and we're generally quite happy with the switch.

The website i found myself constantly referring to in terms of making phone, software, hardware and other choices - as well as finding out the quirks and perks of each and mountains of setup info is the voip wiki [voip-info.org].

Cheers, and good luck - you may need some in the process.

Re:VoIP is not cheaper

[Trejkaz]

The calls themselves are most certainly cheaper, though, so I suppose it really depends whether you make a lot of calls, or hardly any calls. If you consistently make interstate calls then there would be a big difference between paying STD rates for every call, vs. paying a tiny flat rate for every call.

Asterisk

[Denis Lemire]

I handle the IT for an Edmonton based WISP. When we moved offices almost a year ago we left our old Centrex system behind and built our own PBX using Asterisk. Overall we are happy with the setup, though it has a learning curve.

Once you resolve all the issues with echo cancellation, you'll end up with a very flexible setup. Best of all, because of its open standard nature you will not be marrried to any particular vendor of handsets.

It takes a little bit of work to get everything running to the spec you're looking for, but the results I would say are well worth it.

Re:Cisco

[ldspartan]

"Well we aren't talking about a bank, we're talking about a small software company, suggesting a 50k+ solution for even 1000 users is stupid"

As is dismissing a solution out of hand thinking hard about it.

"I know a hosted CCM provider that has 50 CCM servers and 15 Unity servers for 5000 users, yeah they have room to grow, but they are at about 75% capacity right now on those servers."

I can't imagine how they achieved such terrible density. That many CCMs should be supporting phones numbered in the tens of thousands, minimum. Unless they did something stupid, like buying 7815s. Then again, I'm on the development, not support side of things.

"Anyway, CME is still more expensive than asterisk solutions I've priced, and then you're stuck with very limited expandability."

Of course it is, since you can use $50 budgetone handsets with Asterisk, and need to be buying at least 7905s with CME. And you're getting the call-processing machine for cheap/free. And Cisco TAC is going to be at least a bit sad when you call up with voice quality problems and don't have QoS all over your network, or have no idea what you're doing. But I do believe you get something for your money.

Certainly, if you assume that you're in an environment where management is unlikely to approve a home-grown / not-supported-by-someone-big solution, Cisco is the best thing going.

LinksysOne is exciting to me. Its targeted exactly at this situation (well, maybe a bit more small law office than small software company...) and looks to offload as much administration as possible, and move those cost centers that bug you so much (as5400s, etc.) to the ISP side.

there's a reason why things are the way they are

[Anonymous Coward]

We were in excatly the same boat as you. We considered MANY different options, including what used to be called Centrex, and the IP version of the same thing from two vendors, a SIP client system including Asterisk and some (not all) IP phones, and different IP key type systems.

Of course, it got worse, not better. After a DISASTROUS trial with Cisco, we realized we should have gone with a telephony product vendor ... gee, the SAME one that supplied the OLD key system!

I couldn't wait to get that P.O.S. Cisco thing off my desk. It regularly lost calls put on hold, had display problems, did not work with the power inserter, and often simply DID NOT RING!!! It was worse than my old junk cell phone.

Finally, the Nortel integrator did a weekend overhaul and installed some kind of PBX replacement unit in the server room. I like the phone better, too, MUCH better quality speakerphone than I have ever had before. You can HEAR people!

From my perspective, we should never have considered these other wacky ideas. Having relaible phone service is just too much of a background necessity in business to be playing around with "baubles" and the Nortel people we spoke with seemed to just 'know' the phone lingo and had eveything working perfectly. That was almost a year ago, and it's amazing, NO service calls! Compare that to the 3 times a week calls before.

Proprietary vs Open

[wilymage]

This is a wee bitty redundant, but the figures might be interesting:

One of my clients recently looked into a PABX/VoIP solution for their two very small offices. They required only 10 IP phones and two gatekeepers.

Samsung's quotation was ~AU$14,000; Nortel's was ~AU$18,000. [AU$1 ~= US$0.70]

These were proprietary systems with weak licensing (Nortel: 32 license minimum for voicemail, etc.), limitations (Samsung: only four calls simultaneously!)

Another mob wanted $8000 for just the IP phones necessary, with ongoing (extortionate) costs for using their ISP, their VoIP provider, and their gatekeeper.

My quoted Asterisk solution will be less than AU$6000 for 2 servers, ISDN/PSTN cards, quality IP phones, no licensing, et cetera. Plus the features on offer are more numerous and 100 times more customisable.

Why would you bother with anything else?

My AU$0.02

Asterisk [asterisk.org] -- 'nuff said.

Re:My experience

[neilticktin]

We're getting ready to do a cover story in our magazine about our experiences with VoIP. To do this, we decided to "eat our own dog food" and move the entire company to VoIP.

In short, I'm glad we're on VoIP. We're using a smaller provider, which gives more personalized service ... and that's been a big win. The company is PhonePipe ... www.phonepipe.com ... and aside from the usual bumps in the road, we've been glad that we went with them.

A few things to consider. Some VoIP companies are not financially stable, and they many times don't fall under the FCC rules. So, you should check out the companies you are dealing with ... even some of the biggest ones are not financially sound.

For hardware, go with either ATAs or the Cisco phones. ATAs will allow you to preserve your prior investment.

Lastly, be aware that you may need to do some traffic shaping, QoS, etc... And, that many times, the cheap consumer routers handle VoIP much better than the higher end stuff (believe it or not).

Favorite features? Simultaneous ring, and the ability to filter which calls get through and which get routed right to voicemail.

Good luck with it!

Thanks,
Neil Ticktin
Publisher, MacTech Magazine

Re:comercially supported FOSS

[johnjaydk]

Jesus that's a big server for Asterisk. I've pinned up 600 calls / 60 cps with RTP (mind you, ulaw) against the echo app and sat at an average 70-80% idle on a modest old dual Xeon.

Codec and transcoding is everything when it comes to Asterisk and CPU. Try running the same setup with g.729. Hint: My box with dual 3.6 Xeons max out at around 120 calls when it needs to transcode g.729 for pstn termination. If Asterisk only needs to pass the packets along without transcoding then it can handle thousands of calls.

Re:VoIP is not cheaper

[Limecron]

Many small businesses don't have a T1. In many areas, DSL/Cable modems are not even close to reliable as a T1 from a prominent provider. Also, the cost differnce between a T1 and DSL/Cable line is usually quite significant, and most often the DSL/Cable connection will provide much better bandwidth.

    In my case, the (2mbps/768kbps) DSL we had was horribly unreliable. We switched to Cable and while it's been reliable enough to use it for VoIP, to buy the voice lines from the Cable company isn't any more expensive if you package the Internet and phone together. (And I wouldn't have to muck with fixing things (or hire someone to do it) if something went
wrong.) Additionally, the two times in the past year the Internet has hiccuped (for 15 minutes or so), surprisingly, our POTS lines did not go down with it. And I'm not using up any of my upstream bandwidth to boot.

    Our PBX is an Asterisk Box with the POTS lines plugged right into it. I did configure a SIP SoftPhone at home that rings if the business line rings at the office. The switch to VoIP would be easy if we ever decided it was worth it.

    All in all, I think we pay $110/mo for a 6mbps down/2mbps up connection (which numerous speed tests confirm that we are actually getting the full bandwidth), plus $15-20 per phone line.

Compare that to $500+/mo for a 1.5mbps T1 which you might need to do reliable VoIP.