New Business Phone Line Help

[Co_Net]

Can anyone give me advice on setting up a new office telephone system.

We are moving premises and after 10 years in a serviced office - I am a little out of my depth here. Can anyone help me answer these questions:

*Do we need an ISDN2 and its high setup costs?
*Ideally we just need 2 incalling lines and 1 office telephone number - can we do this without ISDN?
*Would VOIP be a better solution if we were on a high broadband speed?
*Would anyone reccomend Virgin Business over BT?
*Can we buy any phones and connect them up to our office lines?

 

[TPTele]

Hello, you have various options but the most important is likely to be "can you keep your phone number" since you will have had it for 10 years.

First question is do you own your number or does it belong to the serviced office?

Second is do you know where you are moving too. If so please PM me with the full address and I can check if you get good broadband. If you can VoIP could be a good option.

Stuart

 

[Paul_Rosser]

*Do we need an ISDN2 and its high setup costs?

No ISDN is actually being phased out by BT in favour of IP.

*Ideally we just need 2 incalling lines and 1 office telephone number - can we do this without ISDN?

Yes, really easily. You could do this with a single vonage box which gives you two extensions and you can configure one number for both, use normal BT phones etc.

Do you just need two lines total or will you have more people working for you than that?

Or you could look at a hosted solution, but that may be overkill

*Would VOIP be a better solution if we were on a high broadband speed?
Yes

*Would anyone reccomend Virgin Business over BT?
Both are pretty similar

*Can we buy any phones and connect them up to our office lines?

Depends on what setup you go with, if you go for a VOIP solution you might need to use special VOIP phones, some do come with a convertor (such as vonage) which allows you to plug any normal phone you like into them.

 

[ryedale]

We recently bought our own premises and set up a VOIP solution which is working very well for us. It gives us multiple incoming lines from one number

We used http://soho66.co.uk/7448/all/1/Multi-User-VoIP.aspx to provide the service and bought the following handsets which are excellent .

http://soho66.co.uk/101313/all/1/Grandstream-GXP2130v2.aspx

Call quality is very good but we are on a good line (80Mb down, 20Mb up) so I couldn't say how good it would be on a standard ADSL line for example.

 

[Aspire Utilities]

Hello

In regards to your questions I feel there are a few options but I agree as above, firstly can you keep your existing telephone number and do you have any contract time left with existing telephone provider??????


Ideally we can look at a analogue line , which broadband will be set on but what other handset features are used, call divert etc???

VOIP is a really good option with decent internet and priority set correctly so voice over data, will reduce any call quality issues.

Virgin/BT are similar to be fair

And yes you could purchase handsets to use, I do deal with solutions for your query so if you wanted me to look at options for you and could provide address details for new base, we can have a look to see what may suit you best.

Regards


Paul

 

[HumzaWTelecom]

Hello,

We can provide you with Welcome Hosted solution and would recommend deploying this we can provide quality of service through the routers that we deploy and partition the bandwidth for Voice/Data.

Each voice channel only takes 100kb meaning even on a poor ADSL2 we can supply up to 4/5 voice channels before suggesting to seperate connectivity for Voice & Data.

I wouldnt recommend either because if you use BT or Virgin for the service and utlise another supplier for hosted/voip, you will have a lot of issues.

My suggestion is to use one supplier start to finish because you have one neck to strangle should any problems arise.

We supply a range of Cisco/Polycom or Yealink handsets or can send out headsets which connect onto a soft phone application meaning reduced costs for hardware.

If you wanted to go down the ISDN2 route we also supply this with least cost routing for your calls and you can pick up a second hand switch online for cheap.

Should you wish to discuss this further please get in touch.

Humza

Welcome Telecom

 

[Dan Hartman]

Hi @Co_Net,

I think an important question to ask is how the business is going to scale over the next 5 or so years, as this is the typical lifetime minimum lifespan of a telephone system. If you have plans for growth, you don't want to invest into any infrastructure that will hinder that growth.

As others have suggested, if decent connectivity is available at your location there are a variety of VoIP solutions that can fit your needs. It comes back to your business objectives over the next few years. Get in touch if you want to discuss further...

Cheers
Dan

 

[GraemeL]

Answers to most questions about quality phone systems are here http://www.voipfone.co.uk/ , @cjd is a forum member.

G

 

[cjd]

Can anyone give me advice on setting up a new office telephone system.

Yup

*Do we need an ISDN2 and its high setup costs?
*Ideally we just need 2 incalling lines and 1 office telephone number - can we do this without ISDN?
*Would VOIP be a better solution if we were on a high broadband speed?
*Would anyone reccomend Virgin Business over BT?
*Can we buy any phones and connect them up to our office lines?

So long as you can get a reasonable broadband connection VoIP is always better - both in features and functionality and cost. BT intends to kill ISDN by 2020 - it's now a legacy product.

You have a lot of very generic questions - give us a call on 020 7043 5555 and talk to one of the support guys; they're not sales staff - they won't try to sell you anything.

 

[Dan Hartman]

BT intends to kill ISDN by 2020 - it's now a legacy product.

Sorry to be "that guy" but it's actually 2025... That said I completely agree, there is no real benefit to ISDN when high-quality internet connectivity is available.

 

[cjd]

^^^ quite right.

It means that ISDN will get no further investment and all the good guys will be looking around for new job leaving the ship to sink. In practice it'll be dead much earlier now that it's been announced.