Moving Office, need advice on Phone System

Collumbo

Hi, hopefully someone can tell us what we need here.

We are a small company with no more than 10 guys at any one time sitting at their own desks. 99% of the time, there are only 6 of us permanently in the office. In our current office, we have 1 Eircom phone line, with phones at each desk. We have a few phones in the office, but we basically share the 1 phone line. For international calls, we mostly use Skype which of course slashes our phone bill.

We are moving into a new office soon, and currently awaiting Eircom to arrange a phone line to be set up. The previous tenants cut whatever cables that were there as they were with some other phone provider, Perlico I think, so we basically had to arrange eircom to set up the phone line again and ensure it is working before we move in. We would like to be able to have at least 6 phones, possibly more, and the ability to make more than 1 call at any time. Even 2 concurrent phone calls would suffice. I have heard much terminology about what we need to do this like PSTN/Switch and that type of thing, but we are bewildered by the number of options and the different things that both Joe Bloggs and various companies are telling us! We are also considering ISDN - we have heard it may reduce the phone bill. I have looked at some prices. We also need to be able to have broadband (which is available in the area) and also the fax machine must be left on. I am assuming that one phone line should be reserved for this...

Can anyone tell us:
- what are our options for the above? how many phone lines do we need to get in?
- what pieces of hardware do we need to buy?
- is VOIP a practical solution? if so, who is the BEST company to go through? is there much of a reduction in quality? what do we need for that solution? are the phones different to ordinary phones?
- can anyone recommend a good one-stop-shop than can provide the most practical and cost-efficient solution?

any advice here is greatly appreciated as we get confused every time we speak to different people... ;-)

Thanks a lot

cgarvey

You can get a cheap basic PBX from eircom .. the Interlink 2+8 which will allow you share 8 internal phones across 2 phone lines (and will work with ISDN which will give you a bit of a saving over 2 analogue lines). If you're talking about physical phone lines you'll need ISDN (which gives 2 lines) or 2 physical analogue lines (regular phone line). Check with them if the Interlink supports Caller ID if that's important to you (they usen't).

In my experience VoIP offerings here are not quite business grade (in terms of QoS), but if it's not terribly important to you, then yes it is a viable solution. Most business solutions (Blueface.ie is the only one I can think of off hand) will allow multiple inbound calls and multimple outbound calls. If you plan on simultaneous calls, you'll probably need a decent upload speed with your broadband. Phones can be SIP phones, USB phones, regular phoens with an ATA adaptor, or use an Asterisk server (and associated SFX/O hardware to use ordinary phones with). Asterisk is a software based PBX, so it will allow you to easily handle internal calls, and external calls across multiple lines (and even multiple VoIP providers if you want redundancy).

Asterisk + Blueface business package is what I'd recommend not knowing any more about your situation. You'll probably need to budget for someone to come in to set up Asterisk for you.