VoIP Blog - A moving experience. By Stewart Twynham

Wow,
Being a Voxhub partner (www.voxhub.com) i'm amazed at the figures you are banding about. £12k-£14k for a 20 phone system! What, is it made from gold?

You should be paying half that.
OK i'm not fully clued up on your requirments but i've read nothing that worrys me in suggesting you are paying way over the odds.

Voxhub is an hosted asterix based system with many many happy customers.

Hi Brian,

Actually, I think it's pretty spot on. First of all it's 30 users + several remote staff as well (including myself!) This doesn't include additional phones for offices (e.g. training / board rooms, reception, etc) - and apart from the server room, the spec of the phone hardware is high (all Cisco). In fact, comparing with the voxhub site we're actually paying quite a lot less than is quoted there for the phone hardware!

It's an important point, though. What I'm quoting is an "on the road" price including all phones, outboard power supplies for non PoE handsets, DECT headsets, wired headsets, software, additional UPS, two additional PoE / QoS switches, configuration, weekend installation, sysadmin training, user training, Asterisk integration training for myself, PRI conversion, PRI cards and 12 months of priority support. No extras. Just add VAT.

Moving to Asterisk has allowed my client to afford to "spec up" many areas (e..g. 10 DECT headsets for sales staff rather than wired ones). But clearly you don't have to do that - a VoIP phone with display can be had for comfortably under £40 these days, compared to a top of the range Cisco at around £250. This can make a big difference to price when you need 30 of them!

Does that help to clarify the situation?

Kind Regards,

Stewart

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Hi Stewart, I adopted single user Skype a few months ago, using SkypeOut a lot. To begin with it was fine and I was pleased.

But about a month ago the call quality dropped away: I could hear okay but my interlocutor could hear their own voice echoing. This problem has persisted despite my visiting Skype’s help website and reporting the issue. So Skype is currently unusable!

We were origianlly introduced to this three years ago with poor results but since then we have found these to be because the supplier did not spend enough time/ money on backup etc.

We moved offices and tried Vongage. In our opinion this for businesses is just not good enough. Calls falling out - the number of calls being diverted to mobile because the Vonage system did not work. Customer service/backup was poor.

In the end I did a lot of research and found a company in north london (Voxhub). For over 12 months we have had a system which is excellent, not only for continuity of service, but also for support backup on an 0207 number.

It probally costs more than BT, but allows us to move site at little or no cost and for customers to contact us on the same number. In addition the choice of being able through a control panel to have calls re-directed any where on the planet has made the extra costs worthwhile.

We are a two-man operation so far. But to make it work well we decided on using a top quality internet supplier which is only for the phone system and this does add to costs.

Overall I would recommend it to any business. Flexibility comes at a price but comparing to a BT type system is probally not fair since this is not a level playing field. Also being able to make changes without getting an engineer in each time has its savings not only in his costs, but also in our waiting time.

Paul and Matt, Thanks for your comments - your experiences seem to be typical and illustrate something I really want to grapple with in this blog.

Even though you are only talking about a small VoIP setup - the solution we're proposing for the recruitment agency is a complete system for around 30 users - the quality of service issues are almost identical. It simply comes down to this:

• If you download a file from the Internet (or even over your internal LAN) and it takes a couple of seconds longer, or slows down, speeds up, or misses a chunk - there is no major issue.
• Try this with voice information rather than data and the results are staggeringly poor: unintelligible speech - something you cannot get away with even on internal call, let alone with customers.

One of the things we'll be trying in the next few weeks with our customer is to make the system work over the internet to the remote offices. We'll need to experiment with going over the Internet (via a VPN) to see how it performs without any compression, optimisation or (Quality of Service) information. We'll also try routing it over the Internet directly (outside of the VPN) and using a variety of different compression techniques including GSM (the one used on mobile phones) and G.729 - these are also called "codecs".

There are costs/benefits/advantages/disadvantages with each method, and I'll cover those all off in future posts.

I have recently introdued Voip into my accountancy business because We work in various locations, so it is very cost effective to control how my calls are received. It also allows me to get other people to answer the phone in different offices, or divert it easily to my home or/and my mobile via the web login. The added feature of receiving voicemail onto my laptop ensures I never miss a phone call (not always good i agree!!).

My Voip provider is emailitis. I found them to be very efficient and they answered all my questions fully.

I highly recommend this way of working if you have various offices.

Did you review the pure VoIP offering from ShoreTel?

I'm not associated with them in any way, but when evaluating a new system for our international offices (we're an SME, so cost was also a prime consideration, both installation and call cost), they stood head and shoulders above the rest.

We didn't finally go with them, but for reasons that had nothing to do with their product or pricing.

ShoreTel UK
18-24 Stoke Rd
Slough, Berkshire
SL2 5AG, UK
+44 (0) 800 652 8645 Free
+44 (0) 1753 757200 Tel
+44 (0) 1753 757210 Fax

Hi Sam,

I hope to be covering the hosted route (and there are many providers out there) as part of an upcoming market summary.

Although many are reluctant to even consider hosted solutions - hosted telephony isn't new (it's been around for over a hundred years - and you probably already use such a setup in your own home) - it's the VoIP bit that makes them exciting because of the flexibility to work from almost anywhere. But they aren't the panacea that they are sometimes made out to be.

In this particular case, the lack of CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) is where hosted solutions fall down. So where your telephone system and CRM system / computer network need to be talking the same language, hosted may not be the way forward. But give it time, and I'm sure that will change.

Stewart

Hi Stewart,

I hope that your research into Hosted VoIP goes further than looking at just the prices for phones. Your comment about VoxHub having expensive phone pricing depends on whether you consider the fact that VoxHub phones are all pre-configured to work as soon as they are plugged in. OK, so this is not something that is obvious as the majority of online VoIP services sell you phones and then just email you the configuration for you to do yourself.

We made a decision 2 years ago to not supply phones unconfigured and expect the client to work out how to set them up. Lots of problems occur when phones are not set-up correctly and we wanted something that worked immediately for our customers. We can ship a phone out and know that it will work when plugged in. We will take your comment as a bit of good advice and update our site to inform the visitor of the fact that our phones are preconfigured.

In my experience customers want something that works and they dont want to fiddle about with networks, worry about QoS, play around with config files and other activities that give VoIP a bad name.

Your blog is an interesting read. I am confused as to the advice it gives because it tells a story of your journey and leaves it to the reader to work out what is important to them.

Like your blog, the market is in a state of education at the moment and for the forseeable future. Expect things to change further as hosted offerings , like VoxHub, start to integrate with other online services. Salesforce.com integration is currently in our labs and wont require complex software installation with our customers to get it working. The onsite VoIP PBX's will soon lag behind online hosted offerings as hosted services can add features to all customers at the same time with a centralised upgrade overnight. VoIP is like the Internet in 1996, there is much more to come as standards form and creativity starts to kick in. And BTW, we can do CTI with windows TAPI drivers at the moment with VoxHub.

If you ever want to chat then do get in touch.

Dan Winfield
CEO, VoxHub

There are only few voip blogs out there which really impress me because most of the people are just filling in the space. You can have great insights from Axvoice VoIP blog, Vonage VoIP Blog and blogs by other big players in the voip industry.