Are you sold on hosted versus a low-cost deployment in house? I use Vitelity for call termination ($1.50/month for a DID and 1.5 cents per minute avg.) and host my handsets off of a system running Asterisk on Debian 5.1 with FreePBX as a frontend. (This is for my personal phone system and not the University.) If you're interested in doing something similar I can forward you specs and instructions on how to get everything running. You can also purchase relatively low-cost hardware from Digium – their Switchvox line is Asterisk-based (they're the maintainers for Asterisk) and is very configurable and easy to deploy.
For handsets I've always preferred Polycom hardware – the speakerphones are superb – but you can use just about any SIP-compatible hardware or software to do the job. If you wanted to go very cheap you could just buy everyone a USB headset and use softphone clients to handle calls. Considering how low Asterisk's hardware requirements are you could do a whole system in house for about $2,000 – 10 Polycom handsets, an Intel Atom-based server (an Atom 330 or 550 CPU is a good choice being dual-core) with say 160GB of HDD space and 4GB ram, and even a conference room phone if you wanted. Vendors like voipsuppy.com have 10-pack bundles available and also pretty good prices on the single desk handsets. A client of mine runs a law office, with multiple locations, off of a similar setup. Happy to help if this is a route that interests you. ---- Jack Kramer Computer Systems Specialist University Relations, Michigan State University w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955 From: "E. Peeters" <ml2...@ibarras.com<mailto:ml2...@ibarras.com>> Reply-To: NT System Admin Issues <ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com<mailto:ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com>> Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 18:18:06 -0500 To: NT System Admin Issues <ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com<mailto:ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com>> Subject: Hosted VoIP recommendations Hello gang, We have a production facility with a small office that we are looking at hosted VoIP for. Voice/data contracts are up for renewal and the PBX is sufficiently outdated that it is no longer supported by the manufacturers (nor are the handsets) so an all-in-one VoIP solution seems like s good bet. We'd probably end up with 10 handsets. I'm partial to Speakeasy/Megapath because I have been a customer of both in the past and pretty happy with their data service, but I've also looked at 8x8, TelCentris and Velocity. Am I missing a big fish? Any comment on the suppliers above (or any other we should look at) much appreciated. Thanks, Eric Peeters Ibarra's ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
