In part one of this two-part article, I talked about some of the considerations you needed to take into account when embarking on your VoIP path: how to pick a vendor, what type of service, determining your needs, etc.
In this article, I’m going to cover the meat of what had to be done to get it up and running. The process itself was not hard, however, there were several kinks that had to be ironed out before it was running smoothly.
We, being the happy-go-lucky geeks that we are, decided to buy our own PBX hardware, with embedded Asterisk software. We found the Ipeya SIPS listed on eBay where they sell their IP PBX as a package with 5, 10, or 20 phones included. The price couldn’t be beat when we compared with buying the phone and PBX seperate from another vendor.
Unfortunately, the software on the Ipeya is fairly weak and unintuitive. It’s perfectly suited for personal or home office usage, but trying to squeeze the functionality we need for a small business is a lesson in patience. It’s a custom UI built on top of the Astersk system for VoIP, and provides an adequate interface to the major sections you need to get yourself up and running.
One of the big problems right now is that out-of-the-box solutions are few and far between and none I have seen to date are mature enough to be a sleek, sophisticated solution for an Asterisk UI. VoIP is a new technology and the software support has a long way to go to catch up.
Before buying your software, be sure to insist on a thorough test drive with the vendor to see how easy it is to navigate and make changes to your system.
2 Responses for "Installing Corporate VoIP: Part II"
[...] Part II [...]
I am curious to find out how many VOIP lines there are in North America….I have scoured the internet but cannot come up with a concrete number….any suggestions? or do you know of a website that has this info?
Leave a reply