VOIP - small businesss

[brxndxn]

If you were tasked with moving to VOIP for an office of about 20 employees, how would you do it? I'm trying to make sure I don't overlook anything.

The office has a 20mb up/down dedicated fiber internet connection with service agreement..

What hosting service would you use?

What phones would you use?

Would you use something like trixbox?

 

[imagoon]

I personally stick to PBX's with support agreements (hardware or otherwise) in business environments. The few dollars you save are typically lost quickly when the box goes down.

So Mitel, Avaya would be what I would be looking at. With 20 people, prob something with integrated voicemail.

 

[drebo]

I would never, ever consider trixbox. That said, Asterisk itself can work very well in a small-to-medium office environment.

If you have a decent enough router and you were fairly confident in your internet connection (and you were my customer), I would provide you with a hosted PBX that was asterisk-based.

There are a lot of options, and my best advice to you would be to find someone else to set it up for you. Preferably someone with several positive references. Joe Blow out of his house doesn't really help you when it goes down. However, a company with many, many phonesystem installs gives you a finger to point at someone.

Imagoon's mostly right. You want someone to point the finger at when there's a problem. Don't set it up yourself unless you're very technically savvy. Also, the PBX hardware itself is generally the lowest-cost item. The phones (particularly in a VOIP environment) are the most expensive part.

If you absolutely must set it up yourself and you don't want to take the time to learn Asterisk the right way, Elastix is a fairly decent packaged install of Asterisk. That said, I'd still recommend that you read "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony" (Free downloadable PDF at http://www.asteriskdocs.org) at least twice and spend two or more months familiarizing yourself with Asterisk at the config-file level before you install any GUI. That way, when shit doesn't work right, you'll know where to go, what to look for, and how to go about finding info to fix it.

I have asterisk PBXes set up for 80 phone offices, multi-location businesses (4 locations off one PBX), hosted pbxes for offices with 30+ phones, and my voice switch for my ITSP is Asterisk-based (with a Cisco AS5400 for a media gateway). Asterisk works great when set up properly. It can also work not-so-great when not set up properly. If you don't want your coworkers or customers jumping down your throat at the slightest problem, find a company else who specializes in this kind of work to do it for you.

 

[mxnerd]

I tried Elasitx (trixbox/asterisk variant) and like it very much. But since I'm not VOIP savvy, I do not dare to recommend it to anyone, or in our environment.

Like others said, you want to have someone do it for you. Even if they offer turnkey Trixbox/Asterisk/Elastix systems.

Pure VOIP is pretty tricky, especially on fax side.

 

[imagoon]

I very much agree with Drebo. The main reason I don't suggest asterisk is not because it is a bad piece of software but more than it always seems to be the go to of the "jack of all trades" IT guy with "FREE!" in his eyes that will never have the time to learn it and work with it well and thus turn a simple 'one line fix' in to 24 hours of down time. If you have a pro set it up, asterisk is fine.

 

[kevnich2]

My suggestion is to look at a hosted VOIP company called vocalocity. I've turned several small businesses to them and they have an impressive record of stability, good customer service & most of all reliability. They charge per user. Since it is VOIP, it does utilize your bandwidth but given you need 20 user's, if all 20 were using it simultaniously, it would consume approximately 2mb/sec of bandwidth and given you have a 20mb/sec fiber optic connection, your connection would more than provide enough for it. It is a hosted VOIP solution, you don't have to buy any equipment other than the phones themselves. The downside - if your internet goes down, so do phones. The good thing is that your customers wouldn't know it as they'd simply be directed to your company's voicemail or the individual phone's voicemail. You could even put a redirection to an employee's cell phone if you wish. I'm not in any way associated with vocalocity but after 3+ years doing business with them, I've been more than pleased with their service.