T1B

Ok so lets hear it, who uses some type of VOIP, P2P or Skype type phone/conference system? Anyone ever thought about building their own PBX?

I'm trying out Skype for home for shits and gigles. Purchased 3 months of service (Skype In) to have my own phone number and until the end of 2006, anyone can make free phone calls in the US so its basically a full system, unless of course you want to make international calls or you want to use other features that requires you to pay for outgoing calls.

The reason I started to look into this is that I'm interested in building my own PBX for work to replace our old 20 year old Siemens system we have. With a basic system, you can build a simple PBX using an Open Source system called Astrisk, you can get a PC card that can take a T1 line input and then you just need VOIP phones and you have a PBX system. You can build a system that will work with a T1 line (24 lines) and your local/long distance provider and for the cost of a PC and the $2000 T1 card plus the price of the VOIP phones, you are set to go. If you are a smaller business with perhaps 4 or 5 regular POTS phone lines, you can just buy a regular modem for $10/per line and you are set to go. Alternatively for home/business use, if you have a really good internet connection, like a T1 or similar DSL/Cable, you can just buy a few VOIP lines (can't be Skype though) for about $24/line and then run the software PBX call system.

No professional experience here...but I know someone.

But, that was years ago. Their VoIP system relied on an "AT&T Call Box" thingy...

And that;s what my friend (as IT Manager) spent much of every day fixing.

Horrible system, but my money says that things have come along quite a ways from the "early days" of VoIP.

These days any company that is considered large has some component that is Voip. Siemens, one of the large players only really sells full or partial VOIP systems. What I have noticed looking around is that support for the old 'cable' systems tend to be large and very expensive. When I talked to Siemens, they were big on selling a mixed system, but even with that, we would have needed new phones so my thinking is, we already have a good ethernet network, why waste money on a mixed system within our confines. Now a lot of large companies with lots of money would rather pay for internet and use it both for data and voice do to the options that it provides. After playing around a bit, I really can't argue with that, however, I don't know that our single T1 is ready to do both jobs along with Video conferencing so what we will probably do is that we will still keep our T1 for the 24 phone lines but all communication within the confines of our company will use VOIP.

Anyway, yes things have come a long way in terms of quality and reliability. The big question is, does a home built software PBX offer enough reliability compared to a state of the art system that costs 10 times as much.

That is what I have to figure out now!

I use the AT&T Call Vantage VOIP. I've had it for about 18 months and have no complaints whatsoever.

Never have, no need to really, but I'd like to know more about voip. APC, the people who make battery back up UPS's just sent me a magazine about their voip product. I like their UPS. It works great and has an easy monitoring interface. not sure of the cost.

VOIP is a fairly simple concept. Basically at its base it is a voice transmission system that goes from one machine to another over TCP/IP. What makes it neat is that in theory you can be anywhere in the world with your machine (IP Phone, PC, Handheld, etc...) and as long as you log into your PBX or VOIP provider, you can receive calls. What is neat about this is that if you are talking from a VOIP phone or VOIP PBX to another VOIP phone, it doesn't cost you anything so for example, at home you could set up a voip based pbx for free then give your whole team some softphones on their laptops/handhelds or you could all get voip capable cell phones. When a customer calls your main office line, they could get your employee's phone wherever it is in the world. If their voip phone isn't available, the PBX system could do a ringall of all their known numbers including their cell phone. If all that fails, they can leave a voice message. Most VOIP PBX nowdays allow voice mail to be retreived by phone or through the web or they can even email you that you have voicemail and include the message. Also since you can get voip based lines and phone numbers, you could get several of them and save money on long distance and communications between you and your guys as well as for your customers. If you have lots of contracts/work in certain major cities, you could even get phone numbers in those cities and make it look like you have offices in multiple cities.

Bigger companies get bigger contracts and more work!