VoIP phone systems

[Brandon]

We're currently working on project to upgrade all of our phone systems, bringing them out of the dark ages.

Our current system runs ok, however it's very much out of date, when a phone breaks, we can't replace it. We currently have an Avaya PBX system on Digital and Analog (yes, we have a few..) phones. Each desk has two CAT-5e ports ran, one for the phone, one for the network. The phone system consists of a full rack, as well as a PBX the size of a large deep freezer. All phone lines coming in are VoIP, however our phone system still uses them as it would Land Lines (It's give or take 15 years old).

So far, we have three things in mind, I'm wondering if anyones ever used them, and what they think. Keep in mind, we have around 160 phones throughout the building, looking for something that will support 200, but can be expanded apon.

First up, is a new Avaya VoIP system, which odly enough, has been the most costly. They also keep coming up with "extras" to add in, that will require more space. The demo seems to cover most of our needs, but we're looking ad the administration side of things, as we don't have any one person to dedicate to just phones.

Second, Cisco VoIP. This one thus far has been the chepest (I know, right?) but the administation side has us iffy. The system would add six 1U devices (That's six differnt devices to check when something doesn't work) as well as we would have to replace all of the blades in our Switch systems to PoE. We would also be stepping down to 10/100 at the desktop level (The phone gets the network connection, then sends a second cable to the PC, gigabit phones are costly.. and few).

Third, ShoreTel: This system sounds really good. Everything is unified and simple to manage, all comes in a single rackmount system. The phones are PoE, however it can be powered using a PoE "Gateway", however the phones will still more than likely kick us down to 10/100 to the desktops. Most of this is just hearsay, as we have no quote yet. I'm going to a demo of this product in the morning.

Anyone used any of these? Any thoughts?

 

[scotty]

I have a fair bit of experience with a variety of VOIP systems. It's surprising that Cisco is coming out the 'cheapest'. But Avaya is known to be pretty pricey. ShoreTel is one of the few systems I haven't used, so I can't speak too much there.

Cisco is good, but make sure you do your due dilligence as far as licensing maintenance. Cisco tends to be pretty pricey in the long term to maintain licenses. If you or the Cisco reseller has some good Cisco qualified staff to install the system, it's hard to go wrong with Cisco.

One system you may want to consider is Mitel. They always represent a happy middleground with me between cost and everything else.

To be honest, the most success I've had with VOIP systems is actually with Asterisk/Trixbox. Trixbox and Fonality (it's big corporate overlord) has been selling professional systems and hybrid hosted solutions for quite some time which quite frankly are way cheaper and offer many more features. There's various levels of professional paid support, so it's not the sort of thing where you have to hop on a forum when your system is down. Plus, you're not locked into 1 vendor's hardware, so your hardware selection goes up about 10 fold. You can actually use Cisco phones with it - I always surprise people I'm demoing a system and I bring a Cisco phone along . Cisco phones actually aren't all that great compared to what else is out there. Astra phones like the 57i are nothing short of stunning, and you can do so many different things with their interface. TB also wins on ease of administration. Cisco and Avaya don't compete here. You can have various levels of user permissions, so since it sounds like ease of day-to-day administration is a concern, TB definately is the winner.

One big thing you'll notice with TB is that 'everything's included'. Cisco, Mitel, and others nickle-dime you to absolute death to add relatively basic features. This has been a big selling point with a few TB installations I've been involved in. You end up with 6 or 7 different boxes which 1 is very capable of doing.

With Trixbox and Fonality behind the Trixbox product, it's very much a professional solution that can compete with the big players, so you'd be doing yourself a disservice not to at least consider it. The only problem with Trixbox is that it doesn't have the massive channel that Cisco and others have. You're not going to find that many people who are going to come to your door pitching a Trixbox set-up. And since most phone companies and phone vendors are tied to 1 or 2 vendors, most will "not recommend" anything but [Insert big companty name here]. In that arena, it's hard for TB and smaller vendors to compete quite frankly. And part of that depends on you, some people are married to the channel, so rarely consider nothing but. There's credit in that, but there are good alternatives.

My preference is usually a close tie between Cisco and Trixbox depending on client needs. Cisco is obviously the biggest player (Avaya is more popular in Europe and Asia), so I sometimes get clients that purchase a Cisco system purely on name alone. But if I get the opportunity to demo a Trixbox system, it usually wins. It offers the same or better support, has way more features, and is usually significantly cheaper.

OK, end Trixbox plug.

 

[Brandon]

Sounds good, I'll have to look into it, I'm just wondering if it's demoed local here. I'm looking over the webpage as we speak, going to see what all I can find out about it, try to bring it up later.

We're all for big name killers, we (being my boss) bought a BMC software package.. that cost a fortune, which we just dumped after six months of being unable to support it, let alone the people/hardware needing support! For a new project called K-Box. It does the same thing, and one quarter the over all price, including training!

So they're really open minded about things that aren't so big. They had a bad habbit of pulling information from Gartner research... Good info.. for major major players.. but not us.

Thanks for the info.

 

[scotty]

Good on you, if you have any questions just shoot me a PM. I've done a lot of Trixbox systems (as well as a fair amount of Cisco), and even plain vanilla asterisk from back in the day where there was little or no GUI. If you want to play with it a bit, just throw it up on VMware. They even have a pre-made VMWare image. You can't run it on VMware in production though. Trixbox's forums are excellent too, with a lot of very knowledgable people on there.

I have nothing but good things to say about it. Whenever I install a Cisco or Mitel it always amazes me how much better Trixbox does most things. Cisco is good, but it's very expensive, and configuration is a bit of a pain (I still find myself calling tech support for a few things that really should be simple tasks).

The only general advice I would have, which would apply to any phone system, is planning planning planning. Phone systems aren't usually the sort of thing most IT people delve into, let alone plan from scratch, so it can be intimidating as a new venture. You'll make your life a whole lot easier putting the phone system on it's own VLAN or subnet and separating it as much as possible. Otherwise, have fun!

 

[Brandon]

Ok, first thing, holy crap..

I just sat through a Webex with a salesman, and wow. For less than a quarter of what we looked at with Cisco and Avaya, we have run two systems with auto-failover (Buy two full systems, with everything for fault-talerance).

The Admin and reporting side fit our needs perfectly, letting us generate MSSQL and CrystalReports to the intranet. Call recording on ques, I could go on for ages..

Perfect man, waiting on the VMWare image as we speak, can't wait to get it into ESX.

I owe you a Beer my friend

 

[scotty]

No problem! Glad to help. Looks like you're going pro that has some multi-site and fault tolerance capabilities built in. That's something the CE (community edition) unfortunately does not. Another advantage to pro. My experience is primarily with CE, but pro is really slick. And yes, it's a LOT cheaper! The great thing is that virtually every feature is included. No add ons down the road, no licensing issues, it's just there and it works. The HUD is also a great tool which I've had fantastic success with. It absolutely blows away Cisco's and others call presense utilities by a light year. And if you think it's impressive now, supposedly there's a ground-up new version coming in the next 6 months which is supposed to be even better. In one office which has an older NEC system, I showed HUD's stupidly easy drag-and-drop functionality to the receptionists and they were amazed. They had about 100 extensions so I bought her a 24" widescreen and they pretty much cried.

And like I said you can choose virtually any SIP supporting phones you like. You'll notice Astra's are probably the most popular as you can do lots of neat things with their LCD displays. Polycom's are quite good too, as they have excellent speakerphones. Grandstream's are cheap, good for utility room or staff room phones where only something very basic is needed. People are very particular about phones so I'd recommend purchasing a few and playing around with them in a test environment. In the end they'll all work anyway so even if you don't like one you can always use it for the staff room.

Just remember with VMware timings are way off so don't expect to make actual calls. Clicking around in the web interface is fine though. I'd recommend any of their 'platinum certified' boxes - a couple DL360's should do the trick if you're doing the failover thing. And with those you'll also need interface cards (to connect to the outside world) for either POTS lines or T1/PRI's. Rhino's seem to be the most popular these days, and spending a hair more and getting the cards that have hardware echo cancellation is well worth it.

Like anything with Linux based DNA, Trixbox is highly cusomizable so you can do some really funky things. Like I said shoot me a PM if you have any questions or need help planning, I've done more than a few TB systems. Glad I could be of some help!

 

[Brandon]

For server types, they are giving us everything. Pro everything, call center, backup system, (two 1U Dell servers, dual quad core 2.66 xeons, 8 gb ram). Quoted with that, and 140 phones, it totaled at $43,000. Our phone budget was set to be around $175,000..

At this point, we're just trying to figure out how the PoE will work, we have a second call set up for in the morning to get most of these out of the way, as well as let the call center managers take a look at the system.

As for the VMware, the Fonality salesman doesn't seem to know about it, said he would get back to us, though.

 

[Tamarin]

I know it sounds dumb, but it sounded like you already have two lines run to each desk for the existing phone/network... Couldn't you just put in the 10/100 PoE switches next to your current gig-e switches, and just patch the phones to the PoE switches and not move the computers off Gig-E? Or are you wanting to leverage softphone-type features?

Tam

 

[Brandon]

I know it sounds dumb, but it sounded like you already have two lines run to each desk for the existing phone/network... Couldn't you just put in the 10/100 PoE switches next to your current gig-e switches, and just patch the phones to the PoE switches and not move the computers off Gig-E? Or are you wanting to leverage softphone-type features?

That's what I suggested, but they seem to think it "complicates" things more than it needs to. I think the big thing they seemed to worry about, was just adding a new switch system to the network, as the phone system doesn't rely on switches, but punch downs (Our current network runs on punch downs as well.. won't get into that one however..).

Seeing how low the price went, I might bring it up again, see what they say.

 

[scotty]

I've heard this from a variety of VOIP people. I don't really think it complicated anything personally. It really depends on your existing environment and what kind of existing cabling you have. I suppose in some instances is 'could' complicate things, but it's a stretch.

Best practices tend to lean to putting VOIP systems on their own subnet, VLAN, or physical switch anyway.

 

[mgraves]

Normally I'm not into promoting the big incuments, but I've recently seen a new Nortel installation that was pretty impressive. It was the first all SIP Nortel site I've seen.

If you're going to consider Trixbox then you should definitely examine SwitchVox as well.

Michael

 

[Brandon]

We couldn't sell OpenSource to the executives, so it looks like Avaya, Cisco, and Shoretel are our main choices.

ShoreTel has the lead right now, however Avaya has a good offering. We're waiting to see what avaya will cost us, however..

Still waiting on Cisco's responce as well, they just keep coming back with questions :/

 

[scotty]

Wow, that's too bad. I've seen a few really good open sourced solutions loose out to big name solutions purely because some executives aren't comfortable with FOSS type solutions. Oh well. At least now you know it exists - Trixbox is a really neat product with lots of uses, big and small.

And there's the issue of the contractors pyramid -- CHEAP/FAST/GOOD (pick 2). People inherently assume that if a solution is waay cheaper it can't be any good. Oh well. Glad to have helped.

 

[Brandon]

See, that's the problem now.. Avaya came back with a god-awfuly huge system.. that's three (THREE 3 3 3) times our budget.

Shoretel is chiming in at half of our budget.. over half a million less than Avaya. We get Cisco's quote next week..

Oh yeah, and the Avaya quote didn't include phones.. ha.

 

[scotty]

Wow. And don't expect Cisco to be cheap either.

Given that Avaya (and Cisco) are coming in several fold over your budget, it might be a good time to a re-evaluate with the executive/powers-that-be why exactly they're not comfortable with the TB solution. From the sounds of it, you could go ahead and pre-purchase dozens of hours of support and still be way under the competition. Hundreds of huge companies, even several large US government bodies (supposedly) use Asterisk based solutions.

But then again, it might be because the CEO is a big fan of the show "24", and wants the same ring tone as CTU and Jack Bauer (Cisco phones). Seriously, I've seen that! I've seen tons of big purchasing decisions made solely on how the [Boss] likes the touch and feel of the device.

 

[mgraves]

But then again, it might be because the CEO is a big fan of the show "24", and wants the same ring tone as CTU and Jack Bauer (Cisco phones). Seriously, I've seen that! I've seen tons of big purchasing decisions made solely on how the [Boss] likes the touch and feel of the device.

That's funny, but so very true. Of course you can use Cisco phones with Asterisk given a SIP image load...they just don't get you much for the added cost.

I have a Polycom IP650 on my desk right now and it is a wonderful phone. The just released IP670 is the same phone with a backlit color LCD. It's $430, WAY less than the color Cisco.

Michael