Voip Voip Voip

[simplesimon86]

looking into voip - can someone please help:|

 

[chrishankinson]

What you thinking?

I can almost hear CJD charging this way, but until he gets here, what you thinking?

Got a few options really, hosted or on premise. Multi tenanted or private. Really depends on level of functionality required, budget, level of integration etc. At the lower end of the spectrum you can look at hosted systems in a multi tenanted environment a la Gamma Telecom, or on premise systems (almost all manufacturers provide VoIP systems) or go up to heavily integrated systems such as Microsoft Lync.

 

[simplesimon86]

well at the moment our H/o has 10 channels of isdn30 and 2 analogue lines - one for fax one for failover.

and a cisco uc500 the costs are hideous. average £800 per month

so would like to keep the same functionality but decrease the costs.

 

[LG-William]

Hi,

Have you considered a hosted/off-site PBX or would you prefer keeping a physical (albeit VoIP based) PBX in the office?

 

[simplesimon86]

would prefer to keep it in the office if possible

 

[chrishankinson]

as far as i am aware the UC series will support SIP out of the box, you simply need to add licencing (if required) and point it at the SIP trunks. you can then use some VLAN's and direct the voice traffice over a portion of the leased line. this would immediately halve the line rental cost. might also be a good idea to run an analysis of your bill with a couple of providers to give you an idea of the reduction in call costs.

or was it the cost of renting the Cisco UC that was the problem?

 

[leemason]

would prefer to keep it in the office if possible

I've just put a specification together for a customer of mine to implement at Asterisk based (Open Source IP PBX) for 75 users with and ISDN-30 (20 channel). It came to about half the price of a proprietary solution. In addition the Asterisk system gives them so much functionality that the other solutions can only dream of! If you are interested let me know and I can send you over a copy more specific to you. How many telephone users do you have?

 

[Leo-InstallingIT]

Is it the cost of the UC500 you are looking to remove? (i.e the lease/finance cost)

As Chris has said SIP trunks are included with the UC500 upto the number of phones you have.

If it's the cost of the PRI ISDN (30) you are looking to reduce, it is probably worth looking at getting some bandwidth that will accomodate 10 SIP trunks.

Is that what you are looking at doing?

 

[cjd]

There's nothing wrong with the Cisco stuff, it's the access costs and call charges that kill you. The solution to high access costs is to cancel the ISDN and use SIP trunks which - in our case anyway are free. To do this you'd need two ordinary exchange lines and 2 broadband connections.

Sadly, I don't know how you would connect that Cisco PBX to a SIP trunk and suspect that it's not possible (one of our geeks will be able to tell me tomorrow). It may be possible bi-pass the in-house box altogether and use SIP directly to the Cisco phones but again that's fraught with problems because, although it's theoretically possible to force Cisco phones to accept SIP, in practice it often turns into a nightmare of installation and support.

From our point of view, we'd say look at selling the Cisco and going to either a hosted SIP solution or an in house PBX with SIP trunks. (For this last option you need to find a really good SIP expert - not Joe round the corner who thinks he knows something about VoIP) and you'd still likely need new phones

If you want to talk it through with someone, give us a call on 020 7043 5555, tomorrow.

 

[Leo-InstallingIT]

Just to add to cjd's post, you can connect the UC500 to Voipfone SIP trunks without a problem.

The only thing you may have a problem with is stuff relating to DDI's and CLI combined due to Voipfones account number placement.

 

[cjd]

Just to add to cjd's post, you can connect the UC500 to Voipfone SIP trunks without a problem.

The only thing you may have a problem with is stuff relating to DDI's and CLI combined due to Voipfones account number placement.

If you ever need a job....

 

[leemason]

The problem is that handling DDIs and CLIs properly can be pretty important. Especially if you want direct dial to each staff member or you have mutliple inbound numbers or you want know who is calling you.

 

[Leo-InstallingIT]

I agree, the UC500 range will handle DDI's and CLI's perfectly well, but unfortunately Voipfone will only show one of those details at a time.

So you can either know who is calling you, or know which number they dialed. Not both at the same time.

There are other SIP providers that will support both.

 

[simplesimon86]

someone please 'voip me up'

 

[chrishankinson]

someone please 'voip me up'

I feel like I havent voiped enough people up this week. This is something we can do and I'd be more than happy to put a quote together if you would like. Have you got support on the UC or would you need one of our guys to config it?

 

[simplesimon86]

I feel like I havent voiped enough people up this week. This is something we can do and I'd be more than happy to put a quote together if you would like. Have you got support on the UC or would you need one of our guys to config it?

not supported - but maintained if thats what you mean?

 

[chrishankinson]

not supported - but maintained if thats what you mean?

i guess so; what im really getting at is if we provisioned the trunks, would you be ok with us providing you the config details and then pass these to your maintainers, or would you like one of our engineers to dial in remotely and configure the UC to use SIP?

 

[simplesimon86]

i would like to do as little as possible...

 

[chrishankinson]

Always the best way!

How many trunks of ISDN do you currently have?

If you would prefer to drop me an email PM me and I'll send you my address.

 

[simplesimon86]

have 10 channels of isdn30 and 30 users.

 

[WebBandit]

For a basic voip yet very very high quality voip, I would suggest vonage.co.uk I have used them for the last 3 yrs for my businesses....

 

[chrishankinson]

Without having knowledge of your WAN infrastructure getting installation pricing is a little difficult; it may be easier to ask your maintainer do make the changes remotely, if not our engineers can do this.

Trunks are usually £7.50 each per month, but I'll even do them at £6.00 and throw the DDI's in for free.

Setup from the network would be £245 with DDI setup charges at £2 each.

hope this helps.

 

[simplesimon86]

this may change things.......BT is my maintainer would you trust them to do ANYTHING?

 

[chrishankinson]

BT maintain Cisco equipment???

Probably not then.

We could do it, but we would need to understand a bit more about your WAN & LAN setup to understand what would be involved, would just require a quick call from one of our Cisco guys to run through a few things. It fairly likely all would be fine, we could dial in remotely and configure everything.

 

[simplesimon86]

yep i got the system through BT.

ok pm me some contact detail if possible - happy to give you a call

 

[leemason]

If you wanted to replace the CISCO equipment for something more flexible and cheaper to run and/or expand and you want to go Open Source I recon the costs would be about the following:

1. Decent server (HP Proliant): £900.00
2. Replacement handsets (x30 - 25 basic plus 5 high spec): £2,200.00
3. Analogue telephone adapters for FAX, etc (x2): £80.00
4. ISDN adapter for server: £500.00
5. PoE/QoS network switches: £500.00

So that's a basic hardware cost of about £4,200.00. Installation and configuration would be extra to this but once you have this in the ongoing costs would be significantly cheaper. I've added an ISDN card into this to that you can start off by using your current connections but later can migrate to VoIP for calls (or use a combination of the two for a while).

The ongoing support costs of such as system (hardware and software) would be around £100.00 per month. All of these prices exclude VAT.

You can finance this partly by selling the CISCO. Dependent upon which CISCO handsets you have (and assuming they are SIP compatible) you could even reuse them on the new system saving over half the cost.