Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

eme jota ce

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 26, 2005
193
0
Chicago
We have a small office (5 employees) that is converting over to Macs. While we are at it, we are looking at switching to VOIP.

Does anyone have any positive or negative experiences with VOIP in a small office? I've spoken with Speakeasy and Vonage. Vonage doesn't seem quite powerful enough for an office with a receptionist who receives all calls on main number with a voicemail menu to direct caller to 4 others when she steps away. Speakeasy has been 2 weeks delayed in providing a few references for me to contact in the Chicago area.

Anyone have any suggestions for us?

Thanks,
eme jota ce
 

ChrisA

macrumors G5
Jan 5, 2006
12,541
1,653
Redondo Beach, California
We have a small office (5 employees) that is converting over to Macs. While we are at it, we are looking at switching to VOIP.

Does anyone have any positive or negative experiences with VOIP in a small office? I've spoken with Speakeasy and Vonage. Vonage doesn't seem quite powerful enough for an office with a receptionist who receives all calls on main number with a voicemail menu to direct caller to 4 others when she steps away. Speakeasy has been 2 weeks delayed in providing a few references for me to contact in the Chicago area.

Anyone have any suggestions for us?

Thanks,
eme jota ce

You need to run your own PBX. You then connect the PBX to one or more service providers.
The PBX supplies voice mail and email/voicemail gateways call routing and so on. It's
the central switch the all the pnones connect to. You can buy one or build one or hire
a consoltent to do the work. Depends on your skils and time which is best. There are
a few Open Source PBX systems now

Look at asterisk. I've set it up several times. It's very robust and been out for
several years. has wide suport, uses standard parts available from many suppliers
http://www.asterisk.org/

Documentation (PDF of a book) is here
http://www.asteriskdocs.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=11

It uses open standards so you can hook it up to any number of providers (You will still need POTS for 911 calls even if everything else is VOIP) It's about as flexible as you could ask for and can scale to "way big" Uses almost any hardware. You can run the PBX server under Mac OS X now but I'd suggest using Linux on a powerfull PC. Ive gotton it to run on a low-end (100Mhz Pentium I) PC notebook to support two phones but I'd suggest using a server class machine with redundant power mirrors drives and so on if you bussines depends on the phones working 24x7 for years with zero down time

Look here for more info
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=VOIP+PBX+and+Servers
 

eme jota ce

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 26, 2005
193
0
Chicago
Thanks ChrisA,

We have an old PBX here in the office. I think they paid big bucks for it back in the day, but the whole system seems outdated and is slowly falling to pieces despite various service calls by technicians.

I was under the (mis)impression that a VOIP service could eliminate the need for the PBX and other hardware (our VM hardware is a separate unit - also failing) in exchange for some Cisco phones and some sort of device to prioitize voice traffic over data traffic. Possible? Practical? Dependable?
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.