It's a Sunday afternoon, a bit cloudy, grass is growing like a weed, wife is running for a local School Board position and I'm going to escape from the insanity of all that to blog about VOIP. Yes, the phrase get a life has crossed my mind from time to time. In this installment, I'll try and cover the basics of our current phone configuration.
About 10 years ago, maybe even longer, we installed a phone system called TeleVantage. At the time it was a great choice for a small business like ours. It provided all the features of a big PBX (call queues, call routing, conferencing, agents, auto attendants, etc.) at a cost we could afford. Since we had experience with installations of this sort...it was a no brainier for us to do the installation ourselves. We brought in a T1 from XO just for phone, picked up a bunch of local exchange phone numbers for direct inward dialing (DID). DID is what allows each of our staff to have a totally unique telephone number and to have that number ring their phone when dialed direct. In addition to the DID numbers, we also ported our 800 number to the XO circuit. It took about a day to configure the server and get the service up and running. Overall cost was about $20,000 after you factored in the cost of the hardware, software, 10 analog phones, some licensing and initial fees from XO. Not bad at the time considering the alternatives to equal the feature set we obtained from TeleVantage.
As I mentioned in my first Transition to VOIP blog entry, we anticipate a savings of about $2,000 a month when we complete our transition to VOIP. The amazing thing about this is the amount we currently pay in tariffs and taxes --fees that do not apply in the world of VOIP.
Ok, so what are the components that go into a VOIP solution and how will we implement them to ensure a seamless transition from our current phone system?
First, lets talk about the components of VOIP. We're going to move forward with a version of an Open Source system that has been modified and packaged as a product called Switchvox. Switchvox was recently purchased by a company called Digium and is packaged as a Free version, SOHO version and SMB version. There are a variety of differences in the feature set of each, but the biggest difference is the "switchboard" application available only in the SMB version.
Switchvox is available as a turnkey hardware installation or a software installation on existing hardware. Since we already have the perfect server for Switchvox, we're going to go with the software version, and thus save the cost of purchasing hardware. In our case, the hardware we have is a beefed up Dell 2950 with dual processors, 2 GB of memory (which we'll upgrade later to at least 4GB), redundant power supplies and a raid 5 hard drive configuration providing us with about 400GB of disk storage.
As indicated, we're going to be purchasing the SMB version of Switchvox and going with our own hardware that will price out to be around $3,500.00 US dollars. In addition to the software, we're going to need some phones. For that, I'm still up in the air. My test phone to date has been a Polycom 550. I'll decide later if that's the way to go for everyone or if we want to look at another model or brand. The price of the 550 ranges from $220 to around $390 depending on where you look. I seem to always find decent prices at Amazon...and in this case, that has been the lowest price I've seen to date.
Alright so the plan is something along the lines of this. Install the free edition and test the functionality, purchase a SIP account to enable inbound and outbound calls through the public telephone exchange, duplicate our setup on the free edition and then upgrade the free edition to the SMB edition. After that, we'll put IP phones on each persons desk and port our DID numbers to those phones. That will enable us to start using to the phones and VOIP in general without disrupting our current service or our 800 number. Once we're comfortable with the VOIP system, we'll then port our 800 line over to the SIP account and be on our way.
To be fair, I've already done some of this. I've installed the Switchvox free edition, purchased a SIP account, duplicated our queue structure on Switchvox, and purchased the Free to SMB upgrade. In my next blog, I'll discuss how that went, the learning curve I went through and how things are looking as we move into the next phase of our transition.
As you read along, please feel free to contact me at any time to discuss your current phone situation and what VOIP might do for you.
Email me directly at ndallago@infoquest.com or call me at 800-622-4403 Ext. 41