VOIP for Businesses Newbie: Needs some guidance

[Porksword]

So i just started looking for a phone system for a small business of 4 people and I need a phone solution that gives me 4+ lines with individual #s and mailboxes. Is VIOP the way to go for this without having to buy a pbx type sytem? I found a bunch of terms in the descriptions of phones that make no sense to me. Such as:

support SARP/RARP, ICMP, DNS, DHCP, NTP, TFTP protocols
Support NAT traversal via STUN & symmetric RTP
support DIGEST authentication and encryption using MD5 and MD5-sess.
Provide easy configuration thru manual operation (phone keypad and Web interface) or personalized automated provisioning via central configuration file for mass deployment.
Support for Layer 2 (802.1Q VLAN, 802.1p) and Layer 3 QoS (ToS, DiffServ, MPLS)

[Porksword]

bump

[Gav]

VoIP is probably the way to go. Although, you do need quite a bit of knowledge to get it set up.

www.pbxes.com is an interesting service, you may want to check it out ~ it makes life a little easier!

[Toknee]

Check out www.talkswitch.com

Good value for the money, I have installed about 40 of these systems, and probably one of the most feature rich systems out there, and at a good price.

[N10248]

The cheapest solution (and the most scalable) is Asterisk, its free and theres even a mac version now http://www.sunrise-tel.com/ this supports many lines, malboxes and other useful tricks, only downside is it takes a lot of messing around with config files to get it perfect.

You would need either a 4 port FXO card - to get 4 seperate outside lines into the box although many old 56k voice modems are also compatible, with the mac version you can even use the USB apple modem

As or phones, as long as SIP is supported the rest doesn't matter, STUN and NAT traversal don't apply for a completely local setup.
For 4 line phones, Cisco 7960's are cheap as hell now on ebay, they have 6 lines and mailbox lights and buttons and are very reliable.

Thats the DIY way of doing it, the alternative is buying a solution which would cost more but would be up and running a lot quicker.

Bye