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Do-it-yourself Cisco IP phone system: oxymoron or money-saver?
Q. Our company, a small retailer with 2 branches 1000 miles apart, is considering migration to a hybrid or IP phone system, with the end of connecting these locations via fiber link. We've had a system quoted and found that labor is (shock shock) about 20% of the price. Aaggh. Now although I am a computer guy, I don't know much about IP phones in particular and what peculiarities can be expected from the difficulty level. So, I'm looking for opinions: Can a normal computer tech read a book and install a small, simple IP phone system? Or is this equivalent to a 3-year-old entering the Chess Olympiad?
A. i suspect you mean access tails over fibre rather than dedicated end to end fibre link. if you have plenty of bandwidth then things are always easier.... We've had a system quoted FWIW i think the phones are fairly easy - complications are with WANs and gateways to PSTN (which you always need on a real system) with a LAN QoS is simple when you havebandwidth to burn, but things get more complex with the WAN and cisco do an equiv to a small PBX in extra software for a router - look for call manager express. look for manuals in www.cisco.com/tac for general stuff, or here for CME: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps4625/tsd_products_su... if you use a dedicated router per site for CME you will make it much easier to sort out the phone system If you have never worked on a PBX system before, don't sweat the 20% labor cost (that is acutally really cheap!). Phone systems sound simple but they are just as complicated (if not more than) a computer network or a server. If your server or network goes down, yes people complain, but when was the last time you pickup up your phone and didn't get dial tone? In your situation you also have the complication that your two locations are not in the same locality, so you have to make sure that 911 works properly because this is a life-safety issue. If 911 doesn't work in an emergency because your phone system was configured by someone who didn't know what they are doing (you) it would have dire financial concequences (i.e. gross negligence) for yourself and your company. Also since your locations are 1000 miles apart, you need to think about internal and external dial-plans, least-cost routing, conferencing, etc.
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