Business phone system - where to start?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. Have you looked into Asterisk software? It is a PBX application running under Linux on an x86 system. It is freeware developed mainly by a company called Digium. Digium sells PC boards such as one to terminate a T-1, for example. It might be a very worthwhile, and much cheaper, alternative to other PBX systems mentioned in earlier replies.

A. The other thing that I noticed is that a headset on my desktop Mac, connected directly to the network which has the DSL modem (I have a static /29, so there's no NAT on my DSL service), performs noticably better than a wireless phone going to a Windows laptop (with a faster CPU than the Mac!) which goes by 802.11/g to a Linksys WAP/NAT/router and then on to the network which has the DSL modem. In *theory*, the DSL line should be the bottleneck in either case, because everything else is faster than the DSL's maximum bandwidth. In *practice*, the more hops things take, the less well it will work. Another factor is that a laptop is frantically trying to conserve power while it's sitting idle. Laptops really not a good platform to run a lot of network I/O without someone interacting at it. If it's in its screen saver, don't expect it to be high-bandwidth I/O. Unfortunately, the cordless phone doesn't have a Mac driver yet, so I can't try it on the Mac desktop and see how much the cordless aspect of the phone cuts into performance. I hope that will change soon. What this all means is that you have to do some engineering and empirical testing before you get something that you will find satisfactory. The first thing that you try probably will not be what you want to use. What looks good on paper may not be the best solution. This site is a really good resource for new PBX systems. Also you can request a quote for voip systems there as well. Just put in your requirements and vendors will contact you back with thier solutions. http://www.pbxinfo.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=RFQ&file=index

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