Considering VOIP in office

ronbyrne2005

Im doing voluntary work in a small charity and they are considering using VOIP for making calls to abroad landlines here and in uk and mobiles abroad.
currently the office network is 5 computers hooked up to a nortell router into which is plugged eircom broadband.

We wanna keep our existing two geographical numbers/lines (as our number is on all our promotional material etc and for the DSL broadband)

we are hooked up to a network in the UK via the broadband and the IT people in uk say its ok to use voip in our office network.

what service provider would people recomend and what is the quality of the calls like? i use skype sometimes and the quality when ringing landlines/mobiles can be bad.
What equipment will we need ? will service provider provide the hardware?

What are the savings like?i dont think there much savings on calling irish mobiles,what about foreign mobiles?

patnil

Hi,

I have "BlueFace" at home and i have had no problems so far.

They have a free trial, so you can test them out.

http://www.blueface.ie/

If you go to their forum, they have a Network Test Application, that will show you how good your connection is:

http://forums.blueface.ie/showthread.php?t=9

Their support is excellant. You should try the Network Test Application and the free trial.

As for the Mobile Rates, all rates advertised by them, includes VAT. Whereas you have to add the VAT for Eircom, etc... Given that their off-peak rate is 16c/min and the peak rate is 18c/min.

Hope that helps

Later

Patrick

WillieFlynn

I would recommend using blueface as their support is good. I suggest that you first try using VoIP for outgoing calls, so that you can get a feel for how will it works. And if you are happy after awhile then think about proting you numbers to the VoIP company.

The quality of using a hardware solution is much better than a software solution like skype.

As for hardware it depends on how many phones you want to have, a few of the manafactures are:
* AVM do a 3 phone line voip box and their products are sold by marxcomputers, if it is one they dont normaly stock I'm sure they would order it in for you.
* Sipura
* Netgear
* linksys (similar to sipura kit)
* Cisco <- do multi-line voip solutions

Cisco stuff tends to be expensive, but is more business oriented. Sipura stuff tends to be very flexiable. Most of the voip companies will sell you this stuff, just check that it is not locked to them (if it is, buy it else where). btw blueface don't lock the stuff they sell.

No matter what phones you chose, if your broadband router has quality of service option, enable it to give prefance to your phone calls over general internet traffic. Also think about what happens during a power cut, you may want to have the VoIP and broadband routers etc protected with a uninterruptial power supply.

Another business broadband / VoIP provider is Colt telecom, how ever they may be a bit pricy for what you want. As they are targeting mid to large size business.

Willie

ronbyrne2005

so a hardware voip solution does offer much more certain chance of good quality calls compared to softphones like skype etc? we dont wanna switch and find the call quality is impossible to deal with.

We are gonna keep at least one geographical line for broadband and incoming calls to landline when internet is down etc.

Can the same phone units be both geographical and capable of accepting voip calls too?
can standard analogue phones be plugged into the router for use with hardware voip?

WillieFlynn

ronbyrne2005 wrote:

so a hardware voip solution does offer much more certain chance of good quality calls compared to softphones like skype etc? we dont wanna switch and find the call quality is impossible to deal with.

Yes I found that a hardware voip solution combined with QoS on the internet router does give reliable voice quality.

ronbyrne2005 wrote:

We are gonna keep at least one geographical line for broadband and incoming calls to landline when internet is down etc.

This is also a good idea as it covers yourself from any health and safety questions, as a basic analogue phone will still work during a power cut.

Can the same phone units be both geographical and capable of accepting voip calls too?
can standard analogue phones be plugged into the router for use with hardware voip?

If you use something like the sipura3000, AVM fritz!box these ATAs will allow you to receive calls from either the PSTN line or VoIP using the same handset.

All the ATAs work with standard analogue phones, for some features like caller line identification etc you may need to tweek a few settings on the ATA, appart from that they just work.