* AstriCon and more good news
How prevalent is Internet Telephony now? You may have it and not even know it. A customer I visited last fall had a phone system installed by an independent exchange carrier at full telephone company rates. But the phone lines connected to the telephone service provider over VoIP equipment. The phone company saved a bundle, but they didn’t pass the savings on to the customer. Shame on them.
If you haven’t fought the phone system upgrade battle for a few years, get prepared. The bad news is that the technology changed drastically and the terminology changed as well, so you have a steep learning curve. The good news is that you’ll save money by the double handful.
Take the handset, the big bulky thing with a screen you see on 24 in the CTU conference room as Jack Bauer saves the world. The big corporate Cisco desk systems like that one still cost a pretty penny, especially when you get the ones with huge color screens. But a VoIP phone to replace your old multi-line handset will cost less than you paid for the phones you have today. Finding a suitable small to medium business handset that costs more than $300 takes work, and some are around $100 now.
AstriCon, the convention of open source telephony hardware and software held in Dallas last October, got a great overview from Network World’s Phil Hochmuth in his story “AstriCon brings corporate adoption of Asterisk to light”. Several complete phone system “appliances,” including hardware running a Linux operating system supporting the Asterisk open source phone system software, reduce installation headaches considerably. You don’t really see Linux, you see a phone system interface through a browser. Even better, configuring such systems takes considerably less work than using a command line interface on a bulky piece of expensive hardware buried in a phone closet. Read how easy all this can be today here.
Telephone systems have traditionally not been do-it-yourself projects for small businesses, so many consultants/dealers make their living doing this for companies. Looking for a consultant? You will find an international listing at VoIP Info, and another good resource at ShopForVoIP.
In the old days, you needed phone system hardware for each office where employees had a telephone. No longer. In fact, you don’t even need phone system hardware at all if you don’t want to pay for it. Internet phone providers, and perhaps your own ISP, will host the phone system server at their location. The only hardware you need is an Internet-capable telephone and an appropriately fast Internet connection. Work at home? Put an office phone there. Have workers in other locations? Put an office phone on their desk, and you can connect to them just like they were any other extension on a traditional office telephone system.
Such flexible features come thanks to the computerization that runs Internet telephones. As voice service becomes just another computer service, we can start treating telephone calls like e-mail messages and forward them wherever we want. That’s the idea behind products like PhoneValet, a Macintosh-based software package that provides tiny businesses the phone features formerly reserved for global heavyweight enterprises.
If you feel like you’ve stumbled into another world of technology you’ve never seen, let AstriCon help out. They posted the presentations from the conference here. A list of their tutorials can be found here.
You don’t have to rip out your traditional telephone system to get many of these new benefits. Internet telephony services can “bolt on” to your existing service and provide specific features, such as free or darn cheap long distance calls, call forwarding from desk phone to home phone to cell phone, and data about who’s calling. But if you want to tie together your office phones to your data network to your cell phones to Wi-Fi cordless phones for use in the office and in public Wi-Fi hot spots, I suggest you get some help.
The phone market will never be the same (thank goodness). Remember when Ma Bell was the only game in telephone town and you were thrilled when long distance prices dropped below three dollars per minute? Those days represent the dark ages of telephony. Consider this period the beginning of the communications Renaissance, and hang on as voice calls become as fascinating and flexible as every other Internet-based service.
