VOIP for small/medium sized businesses

[groovin]

not sure entirely how voip works, but im reading up on it fast. was wondering if anyone uses voip for their small/mid size biz.

has anyone heard of packet8??

thanks

 

[dphantom]

Cisco just came out with a SMB version of its IP phone with hardware and software. Don't have a lot of info on it but here is a link.

Cisco SMB

It'll probably be fairly pricey.

 

[spidey07]

Don't forget Avaya and Nortel as well.

 

[EatSpam]

Originally posted by: groovin
not sure entirely how voip works, but im reading up on it fast. was wondering if anyone uses voip for their small/mid size biz.

has anyone heard of packet8??

thanks

Check out the VOIP forum on DSLReports. Packet8 is not very popular.

I use a VoIP service called Nuvio purchased through Carolinanet in my home. Its been extremely reliable. They have a small business product, too. If its as good as my home service, then you'd be in good shape.

 

[cmetz]

groovin, I use Teliax. They are geared towards more experienced people but are quite good so far. I have also used Broadvoice and dumped them due to a lot of outages and customer service problems.

spidey07, the Avaya VoIP products I've worked with have been complete disasters every time. Bad products and Avaya's integrators/resellers really don't know anything about IP/Ethernet and thus can't get the VoIP to work reliably. I'd strongly suggest avoiding them. Don't know anything about VoIP.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: cmetz
groovin, I use Teliax. They are geared towards more experienced people but are quite good so far. I have also used Broadvoice and dumped them due to a lot of outages and customer service problems.

spidey07, the Avaya VoIP products I've worked with have been complete disasters every time. Bad products and Avaya's integrators/resellers really don't know anything about IP/Ethernet and thus can't get the VoIP to work reliably. I'd strongly suggest avoiding them. Don't know anything about VoIP.

Well if I wasn't in the middle of a layer8 problem I would agree with you. But when they buy me golf rounds all the time I'll give them an ear. 😉

Damn subsiderary companies.

 

[groovin]

what kind of bandwidth does voip require? for example, how much would a single phone call take up? also, what other things associated with moving to voip should i consider besides raw cost calculations (including time to implement)?

thanks again

 

[kt]

Originally posted by: groovin
what kind of bandwidth does voip require? for example, how much would a single phone call take up? also, what other things associated with moving to voip should i consider besides raw cost calculations (including time to implement)?

thanks again

VoIP bandwidth usage really depends on what kind of compression is being used and how you setup the IP phones. Our Mitel IP phones uses G.729 compression and we set the packet latency to 20ms. That works out to about 24kbps per voice call.

We just implemented IP phones at one of our location as a test case. Using Mitel 3300 and it's been working well although lately we have been running into problem with echo and cut off problems.

 

[cmetz]

groovin, you need good quality connectivity to any point you're planning on using VoIP with. In a LAN, this is no big deal. In a WAN, this can be a very big deal. Especially be wary of running VoIP over arbitrary Internet providers. It's a big marketing lie of VoIP that this works well. It can work, but there's a lot of gotchas. For example, if you have one high-quality ISP and all sites are connected to that high-quality ISP, you're in a lot better shape. If multiple sites connect to multiple random ISPs, you can run into peering quality issues.