I am looking at setting up trixbox and converting my office to voip.
Currently we have an abcient phone system with 25 extensions along with a receptionist that routes virtually all calls we do have an auto-attendant that takes over in the rare case she is away or tied up on another call. The owners want to keep it that way.
I have a 16mb down and 5mb up cable connection for my data traffic and 3 dell 2624 gigabit switches. The phones are handled through 1 t-1 and another split with 5 faxes coming off of it. The current phone service is not near capacity and I will be downsizing it. I had been looking at hosted providers like bandwidth.com but have been told I should just setup my own trixbox and get polycom's.
Just looking for a little guidance.
Do I need to get managed poe switches ?
Would my current internet connection handle voice as well ?
I know that all my voice traffic could be handled by 1 t-1 should i just get that from a local provider ?
Should I get one of the services like voipstreet ?
Get seperate fax lines from local provider and leave the voice to a voip provider ?
I have a pretty firm IT background but my telephony experience is almost none so I am just looking for some points in the right direction on a few things. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
new setup need advice
Lot of questions. I'll try to chime in and give a little guidance.
You do not need managed PoE switches. However, managed switches in general is a must if you want to setup QoS. Obviously this is something you want to do when you have voice and data on the same network. My recommendation in regards to this is if you are going to change your switches I'd get PoE just because it's one less cable to clutter the area where your phones are located.
You can setup Trixbox to use a PRI, Data T1 through SIP/IAX, or standard analog lines. If you're considering using the Cable modem for voice then you're going to be doing this via SIP/IAX. I wouldn't trust a Cable modem for 25 extensions unless that thing was rock solid and you had a router which could give priority to your voice traffic. You could test it with the modem more going live with it and see how it works out.
We currently have somewhere between 20-25 extensions and 1 Data T1 is fine for us. You need to decide on a carrier and then calculate the amount of bandwidth you need depending on the codec the carrier uses. If you get a PRI then this won't really matter.
I can't answer your question regarding faxing. We currently have 2 regular analog lines for faxing as I have not found the solution that fits us.
If you don't want to deal with the telephones, then hosted is the way to go. Many offer a high SLA and should work well if this is what you're looking for. I guess this depends on if you want to take on the responsibility.
Those are my 2 cents...
Thanks for your help and actually you did answer my question on faxing.
Member Since:
2008-12-04