looking for guidance / new setup advice

[hkgonra]

I am looking at setting up a voip system and converting my office.
Currently we have an ancient phone system with 25 extensions along with a receptionist that routes virtually all calls we do have an auto-attendant that takes over in the rare case she is away or tied up on another call. The owners want to keep it that way.
I have a 16mb down and 5mb up cable connection for my data traffic and 3 dell 2624 gigabit switches. The phones are handled through 1 t-1 and another split with 5 faxes coming off of it. The current phone service is not near capacity and I will be downsizing it. I had been looking at hosted providers like bandwidth.com but have been told I should just setup my own system and get polycom's.
Just looking for a little guidance.
Do I need to get managed poe switches ?
Would my current internet connection handle voice as well ?
I know that all my voice traffic could be handled by 1 t-1 should I just get that from a local provider ?
Should I get one of the services like vitelity ?
Get seperate fax lines from local provider and leave the voice to a voip provider ?
I have a pretty firm IT background but my telephony experience is almost none so I am just looking for some points in the right direction on a few things. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jmullinix]

Well first, welcome to VOIP.

PBX in a Flash will handle the calls the way your boss wants them handled.

Your Internet connection would appear to be large enough, but you need to analyze its current usage. Each VOIP calls takes about 80 Kbps of bandwidth.

I would not do a hosted solution with 25 users unless you have managed bandwidth.

Polycoms, Snoms and Aastra's are all good VOIP phones. Trixbox, however, has problems; stick with PBX in a Flash.

Managed POE switches would help and may be needed depending on how much network traffic you have. I have an installation about that size that is doing 1000 minutes a day without managed internal bandwidth. It works just fine.

The rule of thumb for offices is about one line per four extensions. I have found that to be generally true unless the business use the phone a lot. I have found that medical practices, sales offices and a few other businesses will require up to 2 lines per user.

You already have a T-1 so it would make sense to integrate it to the phone server with an interface card like the Sangoma A-101. I like using VOIP and PSTN (PRI) in concert and you can do that with PIAF.

The installation that is doing 1000 minutes a day is using an 8Mbs symmetric fiber connection and an account with Aretta.com. They have 4 POTS lines and could probably drop one or two of them . All of their toll calls and all of the incoming toll-free calls are handled over the Internet through Aretta.

I have probably created more questions than I have answered so feel free to call me if you like. I live in the eastern time zone of the US.

 

[tomsyr]

Jump in!

One of the most compelling arguments about implementing Asterisk (FreePBX/PiaF, etc) is that you could use one or more features/modules. You didn't mention if you have voicemail or not. If you don't, you could use that module just that to start off. You could off-load the auto-attendant to the PiaF box.
Do you have the ability to do conference calls? There's another 'drop in' module that you could use.
You could buy the Dell server mentioned on NerdVittles and the forum for less then $400 - the only additional hardware needed would be a line card to interface with your old PBX system. You may then find that for the cost of IP phones (and PoE switches if desired), you can migrate off your old PBX completely.

There would be a bit of a learning curve to get going - quite a bit of reading/understanding - but all that is freely available for the 'go-getter'.
TomSyr

 

[hkgonra]

I have been reading everything I could find on the subject for the last month or so.
I am leaning towards just getting the PRI for now and maybe trying to slowly ease into true voip slowly.

 

[krzykat]

Another piece of advice I give to anyone new to VoIP is to checkout and read NerdVittles.com our own Ward Mundy has articles on there quite regularly that really stimulate the mind in the best and new ways to utilize VoIP. The more you read and educate yourself, the more excited and convinced you'll become that installing your own switch is the way to go.

 

[tabbertmj]

I would also suggest getting either the VM version, or if you have a spare machine sitting at home the ISO image. Dig in and get your hands wet. There are even free softphones you can get. So your entire cost of trying it at home is $0. Just some time. You want to start playing with calls from the outside, get a free IPkall number. It's a good way to see what you can do with it.

 

[hkgonra]

I have two of these laying around here at work just for the purpose of tinkering with this stuff.
Dual AMD Opteron 246 HE (OSK246CMP5AU) 2.0 GHz processors
4 GB DDR RAM
120 GB SATA hard drive
ATI Rage XL integrated video
Broadcom BCM5704 Dual Gigabit Ethernet

I am thinking of going ahead and getting the poe switch ( current switch is aging and needs replacing anyway)
and four of five polycom phones and sitting them on the desk of a few of my more adventerous employees ( my usual beta-testers ) and see how they like it.
Best case scenario we can slowly transition into to pure voip.

 

[hkgonra]

Another piece of advice I give to anyone new to VoIP is to checkout and read NerdVittles.com our own Ward Mundy has articles on there quite regularly that really stimulate the mind in the best and new ways to utilize VoIP. The more you read and educate yourself, the more excited and convinced you'll become that installing your own switch is the way to go.

Been doing that already , in fact that is how I found pbx in a flash.

 

[krzykat]

Sounds like you have a good plan of attack there. Should provide a nice test environment for you to start playing with things. VMware, or those servers you have there should be fine. Order those phones, and start to play. You won't regret it.

 

[hkgonra]

If I wanted to go completely voip any idea how many calls this should reasonably support ?
http://mvsord.visualware.com/myspeed/db/report?id=988409