[geeks] Phone system suggestions?

[Eric Railine]

On 9/27/05, Nate <nate at portents.com> wrote:
> All I know is that they're talking of growing to just over 100 people
> in the next six months.  In the past six months we've gone from 35 to
> 70.  AFAIK all we have is just a number of POTS (maybe 4 or 5?), and
> there hasn't been talk of going to anything else.  There's only one
> fax machine, and there are only 5 or so people who make regular
> outgoing calls, as the business doesn't involve that many other
> companies or partners and I'd say email is the primary means of
> communication.  I would know where to start on evaulating a PRI vs.
> multiple PRIs or anything else, and I barely have the time to even
> try to figure out where to start since I'm massively overworked and
> underpaid.

If you've got only 4 or 5 POTS now, PRI is way overkill, unless your
carrier can/will split the channels between voice & data for you.  Of
course, then you've got both your voice & data on a single point of
failure, but the price point might be worth it - and of course
depending on what you've got now for a data connection.

> We're going to be running new lines for everything at the new place.
> I'm pitching for wall plates with at least three RJ-45 CAT6 TP jacks
> running to a patch panel.  The Panasonic hybrid uses RJ-11 wires to
> the phone, with the inner pair for the analog extensions and the
> outer pair for the digital extensions, but I'm going to do everything
> I can to *not* tie us to the one four-wire RJ-11 jack + two RJ-45 TP
> jacks like we have at our current location, and heck even pitch for
> just four RJ-45 CAT6 TP jacks because we have lots of people with two
> and sometimes three computers at their stations now and we could use
> that flexibility.

If you're running all new wiring anyway, just got with with CAT6 the
whole way; you can even split the wires to have both your phones &
data running over the same cable.  Not that I'm advocating that - if
you've got the opportunity, which you appear to, go with VoIP the
whole way.

> Hmm, are VOIP phone systems like Asterisk typically run over the same
> physical TCP/IP network as the LAN?  I'm really a newbie when it
> comes to VOIP stuff like that...

As others have said, you can do either.  Personally, I would be
running them on separate physical switches, but that will obviously
add to your cost.

> > - How important is your phone service to your business?
>
> We're a developer, our customer(s) are publisher(s), so there's a
> very small number of customer(s).
<snip>
> We have no dedicated sales staff ourselves (just the CEO and project
> producers, not exactly sales staff).
<snip>
> > your accounting department,
>
> One and a half people.

Interesting situation, in regard to importance of the phone system,
anyway.  Sounds like the answer to the question is "Not as much as
most."

> It'll be a tough pitch to massively upgrade the phone service though
> because the important people don't see phones as essential as data,
> because it isn't what runs the company most of the time day-to-day
> (and the important people all have their digital phones and haven't
> experienced any service outages).

Oh, absolutely.  If it's running fine, what do you need more
money/something different for?  If it's not running fine, why weren't
you doing your job to prevent it from happening in the first place?

> on the system end, but it was a pain (what is it with phone systems
> not including a "swap extension x with extension y" function?)

You can do this on a Mitel.  From the Maintenance screen you just type in

move swap 1111 with 2222

and the 2 extensions are now associated with the opposing phones.  It
gets trickier when the phones are different types, because the types
are associated with the phones/PLIDs, not the extension, but if you
standardize your phone types it's quite simple.

> Stable is nice, but I'd also really love it if moving a phone didn't
> take 15-20 minutes out of my day.

See above.  But a VoIP solution would also eliminate this.  If you
don't go that route, look into "hoteling" features in your PBX of
choice; this essentially lets people "login" to the phone of their
choice & it becomes their extension until they log out.  This
eliminates moves entirely - until someone goes somewhere there isn't
already a phone/line, of course...

> Thanks for all the questions and points!

You're welcome.  Fun stuff.

Eric