Phone Systems - Interesting??? - Part Deux

Yes, well, telephone solutions for small to medium sized businesses continue to be interesting. If you recall from the previous post on this subject, I had been leaning towards the use of VoIP for our new business phone system. I was under the impression that since residential services based on VoIP seem to be killing plain old telephone service (POTS), that the same should hold true for businesses. The fact that we would not require dedicated POTS lines and private branch exchange (PBX) gear must make VoIP the cost winner, right? Not quite.

Continuing with the idea the VoIP was way to go, I attempted to determine whether or not using Skype rather than a hosted VoIP service was viable. The savings offered by a Skype solution were attractive. However, Skype relies on third party solutions to pull together the crucial auto-attendant, and directory services. The results of using these third-party applications were disappointing. I tried both Call Butler, and Pretty May, and both were not functional or reliable enough to be used in a business environment. I believe that Skype-based solutions or equivalents are very promising, and will be widely accepted at some point in the next year or so. If a Skype-based solution is not feasible at this point, then perhaps the $1000 per month (plus hardware costs) for a T1 and hosted VoIP with calling plan offered by Verizon should win out. However, this seemed pricey.

I subsequently reviewed a proposal I had received from an Avaya distributer prior to going down VoIP road. The price quoted didn't seem right; too cheap. It was around $500 a month for a T1 and a PBX with all the functionality offered by a hosted VoIP solution (except for the potential to have snappy ring tones). I continued to work with this person and to get the best solution for us at a price comparable to the cost quoted by Verizon. The result is two T1s bonded together using special hardware resulting in a 3 Mbps symmetrical Internet connection , 6 POTS lines feeding an Avaya PBX, 10 phone instruments, a polycom speaker phone, and spare ports to support additional phone instruments. The price appears to be between $1000 and $1100 per month. Same functionality. Twice the speed and capacity to the Internet.

Verizon's prices for business-class hosted VoIP were inline with the hosted prices quoted from another provider, so it seems like, at this price point, our company is better off with a more traditional business phone solution at this point in time.

Since we have another month or so before we need to make a commitment to Internet and phone services, I will continue to investigate alternatives, and monitor the progress of solutions based on Skype and equivalents. Stay tuned....