Nutter helps a user who’s trying to decide between a PBX upgrade or a VoIP rollout
My company’s ROLM PBX system is beginning to show its age – parts are starting to fail, getting hard to find, and in some cases, they’ve been getting more expensive. Our entire building is wired and we had extra wiring pulled so we can add additional network jacks if needed. With changes in technology, should we get another PBX or consider voice over IP ?
This is a very good question, and there are several ways you can proceed. Vendors such as Avaya, Cisco and Nortel are just a few of those with VoIP offerings. The first thing to look at is the cost of a replacement PBX. Depending on the age of your ROLM system – and if you don’t go with a compatible replacement system – you might have to replace all your handsets as well. This is a question to ask prospective vendors. Ask for references from their accounts that had the exact kind of conversion/upgrade you’re considering. Talk to those clients and see what they learned during the process. Also talk to VoIP vendors about the type of equipment requirements they have for their VoIP system.
One book I would suggest is O’Reilly’s Practical VoIP. This uses an open-source implementation of VoIP called VOCAL that can give you some idea of what to expect in terms of implementation, functionality and other issues. This is not a project for the faint-hearted. Practical VoIP can give you some ideas of what to expect and give you an easier way of trying VoIP without having to tie it into phone lines to get things running. You can find VoIP phones for less than $100 and adapters from Cisco and others that allow you to take a single-line phone and “convert” it to a VoIP phone, albeit with somewhat reduced functionality.
Keep in mind that VoIP isn’t just for large companies; small remote offices can benefit as well. If you have some type of broadband connection at those locations and can point back to a VoIP gateway, you can also control the long-distance charges between offices by routing that traffic over IP. Check out the ping times between the locations you’re considering for VoIP. Several vendors I’ve talked to don’t like to have more than 200 ms in ping time between locations, preferring 120ms or less when possible. Since connections at remote locations may not always be the fastest, that’s another question to ask your prospective VoIP vendor or when looking at do-it-yourself options.
