Voice over IP and the internet

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. I work for a small food company in the UK with a main office and one branch office. We would like to 'link' the main office phone system to the branch office so that phone calls can be made 'internally' (or sort of) between the two offices. If we could reduce the cost of phone calls then that would help justify any up-front spend on a system. Our main office has a Norstar Meridian Modular system, the branch office currently has no phone system. We cannot get Cable/ADSL in our area but we can get ISDN or Leased Lines. A leased line would be costly - approx ?500 install then ?800 rental p.a. for 64kb. Mind you, our phone bills are somewhere around that cost p.a. between the two sites so a leased line is a possibility.

A. One phone system supplier has suggested using a Samsung VOiP solution that sends up to 4 voice calls over the internet between the sites (4 calls at once limit is fine for us). We connect each site to the internet using ISDN at each end and an ISP which gives us a fixed-cost-per-month access contract (e.g. surftime or friaco). We understand that voice quality would be 'lower' than normal PSTN voice calls... but can anyone comment on their experience of 'voice over IP' AND specifically whether they have actually used the internet (via ISDN, or not) to carry the 'voice data' in a business environment ? I work for a small food company in the UK with a main office and one branch office. We would like to 'link' the main office phone system to the branch office so that phone calls can be made 'internally' (or sort of) between the two offices. If we could reduce the cost of phone calls then that would help justify any up-front spend on a system. Our main office has a Norstar Meridian Modular system, the branch office currently has no phone system. We cannot get Cable/ADSL in our area but we can get ISDN or Leased Lines. A leased line would be costly - approx ?500 install then ?800 rental p.a. for 64kb. Mind you, our phone bills are somewhere around that cost p.a. between the two sites so a leased line is a possibility. One phone system supplier has suggested using a Samsung VOiP solution that sends up to 4 voice calls over the internet between the sites (4 calls at once limit is fine for us). We connect each site to the internet using ISDN at each end and an ISP which gives us a fixed-cost-per-month access contract (e.g. surftime or friaco). We understand that voice quality would be 'lower' than normal PSTN voice calls... but can anyone comment on their experience of 'voice over IP' AND specifically whether they have actually used the internet (via ISDN, or not) to carry the 'voice data' in a business environment ? I'm in a one-person "branch office" and have used the commercial Net2Phone IP-to-PSTN service for all long distance calls for maybe a year now. Not one person I've called has made any comment about voice quality or lack thereof. So I assume it is reasonable. It would depend on your ISP's connection quality, though. Mine happens to use 1B of my ISDN, but even when I've tried it through a 30-40K dialup it has sounded about the same, so four calls across 2 B channels seems doable.

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