Are any of you guys using Voice Over IP and what do you think? I have a small non-profit of 10-15 people that currently use a PBX phone system. We are considering an upgrade that costs about 23,000 (Coral-Flexi with 15 bridge conference calling) or possibly trying out the new VOIP to try and save some money. If you have any thoughts or experiences with this technology please share. We probably spend about $28,000 a year on the telephone and $16,000 on conference calls. I know the pros and cons fairly well as written, and added them below for your reference, but if any of you have any experiences that would be some good information to have. Advantages: Voice and data convergence. Internet telephony merges data and voice on to a single network to create revolutionary ways of communicating. For instance, innovative customer service and e-commerce applications let Web surfers click a button and talk with a customer service or sales representative. Internet faxing. Sending faxes from your computer instead of a fax machine .Better than PBX. Small and medium-size businesses can use Internet telephony to link their branch offices into a virtual private telephone network. Employees can dial a local extension to reach one of the company’s remote locations without incurring long-distance charges. Cons: Poor-quality connections. The biggest problem for Internet telephony is that the Internet was designed for non-real-time services, such as email and file transfer, which don’t require a guaranteed QoS (quality of service). Therefore, telephone calls that travel over the Internet can suffer from echoes and distortion, especially during peak usage periods. A PC is not a phone. A multimedia PC just isn’t as good as a regular old telephone. Lack of standardization. Until recently, most Internet telephony products were based on proprietary technologies, so two parties who wanted to connect would need to run the same software. Most products aren't currently compatible with each other because industry standards have only recently been established. Maintenance - advanced Technology prevents easy maintenance when things go wrong. Thanks for any info or advice.
Landlines *never* go down except for acts of god. Internet connections always seem to go down unless you buy a dedicated T1 line.
I will try to reply later with more info, but last year I implemented VOIP here (I did most of the infrastructure, plus the actual changeover, but I didn't setup the software or configure the switches). It has been fantastic. We did Cisco phones. I like talking about it, so I'll try to be more thorough in my next post.
