Internet Phone Mission

[dprocket2]

Here's a question for the best and the brightest. What would you do if you had an office with 10-15 employees and your voice T1 went down? Let's say that it's going to take 3-4 days before the telecom companies can repair it. WHat would you do?

Currently, the phone company is forwarding all of your main-line calls to a cell phone. You also have a dedicated T1 for data that is functioning fine. What would you do?

Buy magic jacks for all your employees to install on their workstation? Buy Ooma devices? It has to be something that can be installed and set up quickly as your business can not be down for very long without phone service.

(fyi, this is a real situation).

 

[drebo]

What I've done in the past when our company's PRI has gone down is had them forward calls to a VoIP provider to which my PBX had a SIP trunk to...as such, I could receive and place calls through the normal PBX. Certain features would be lost (DIDs, for instance) and call quality WILL suffer over a single Internet T1, but you'll be up and running.

In the above case, we happen to be the VoIP provider and the only reason we still have a PRI is because we're under contract on it, but even so, it would work out just as well.

If your PBX cannot natively do trunking over SIP, you can use a media gateway instead. An Adtran TA900 can take a SIP trunk and convert it in to a PRI or RBS T1 to give to a PBX. They work extremely well. They're a bit tough to set up, but if you should be able to find someone local who is familiar with them.

Just out of curiousity, who is your provider and what region are you in?

 

[Binky]

If you're running the whole company from a single cell phone, I assume a low budget solution is optimal. You could have a full Asterisk system up and running pretty quickly with a host like rentpbx.com for $15 per month with no long-term commitment (coupon code: BACK10 from Nerdvittles). Run to Fry's or another local electronics store and buy as many Obi or Pap2T ATA devices (~$50 each, can ebay later for $30+) as you need for extensions. You could have a full hosted system up and running within hours with multiple extensions.

 

[Lifted]

I think it would be easier to pickup a single IP gateway such as drebo mentioned, and utilizing the existing infrastructure, than purchasing and deploying 15 new phones to use for 3 days, even if the phones are cheaper. The IP gateway would be much easier to get up and running in the future as well, and could even offer more services to their existing system if there is a second PRI on the PBX, or if they add one.

 

[Tsaico]

I have done what Brebo has posted and it has worked reasonably well. In our case, it was construction in the area where they hit the telcom while digging. Because electrical was in the area, the electric had to be corrected first before the telcom guys could get in there. Outage was 8 calendar days.