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angry-on-the-phoneI have seen it time and time again.  A small business with multiple phone lines, wants to save money by switching over to VoIP.

The business owner, usually not knowing anything about the technology other than it can save them money on phone bills, typically hires an outside consultant to come in and revamp their inner office workings.

Equipment is ordered the system is built and installed, and everything seems like it is working.

Then the problems creep up…  Call quality issues, from echo, to voice stutter, to the complete inability to make a call to specific phone numbers or making calls at all, render the newly installed system virtually unusable in a functioning day to day business.

Case in point, a medical office I visited today.

A good family friend had fallen prey to the unsavory business practices of a local IT company and their “Great VoIP System” which was installed a few years back.  He had told me a few nights before my office visit of his call quality issues and general distaste for the company he had hired as they seemed unwilling, or were unable to resolve his issues.  He then told me that he was paying them a monthly maintenance fee for his phone system and his computers of nearly $450 a month on top of what he was paying for the VoIP phone service.

When I arrived at the office today, I spent a few minutes in the waiting room waiting for the owner to arrive, and I was able to speak with the receptionist and get her input on the phone system and its issues. She recounted the call issues and failures, as well as standard business phone features that were non-existent or that just did not work properly.

The picture started getting clearer. At which point my family friend arrived and took me back to the server room.

Upon inspection of the office equipment I quickly realized what the problem boiled down to.

The company hired to install said phone system did everything they could to leave the end user with problems down the road.

Now on a normal VoIP deployment that I do I insist on certain things.  Those being a Cisco router and a Cisco switch. Why? Because they work and they work well.  You can program them to do just about anything and for a VoIP deployment that is critical to eliminating problems.

This company looks like they went to the local Best Buy, grabbed whatever they thought they might need and headed out to do this shoddy install.

Here are a few key issues with this install:

  1. The T1 Router used…  I have never seen anything like it before, not to say it is total garbage as I have not had the time to really inspect it, but a good Cisco router it is not.
  2. The switch used… an unmanageable, off the shelf, home consumer based product, which was providing connectivity but nothing else.
  3. The worst wiring termination job I have ever seen.

All three are very common, dare I say, Rookie mistakes I see regularly, and they were all present at this office.

No wonder call quality issues were so prevalent. This office deployment was using less than satisfactory equipment. The switch does not support QOS (Quality of Service) rules to help the telephone voice traffic flow properly on their network and back to their provider Broadvox, and who knows if it even supports VLAN IDs to differentiate traffic on their internal network at all.

Now if that were not bad enough, this so called “IT Company” then overcharged this office for phones (Grandstream GXP-2000) and for a phone server, which does not have the most basic of features enabled, such as intercom and call parking or find me-follow me, and that system is not being backed up, or even maintained for the $450 a month service charge.

First problem to solve, Junk equipment.

By getting better equipment on the back end I will eliminate most problems the end users have been hearing while attempting to make or receive  calls.

Second problem to solve, missing phone system features & backups.

I will be setting up a new phone server for less than $500 which will be using the PBX in A Flash distribution of Asterisk.  It will support every possible feature asterisk has to offer, and will be backed up nightly so no voicemail or system configuration is ever lost. Switch from Broadvox, to Nexvortex, as the rates at Broadvox are about to go up significantly.

Third problem to solve, Grandstream Phones.

For now I will continue to use these as they have 15 of them and while they are not such great phones the users already know how to use them, which will eliminate training on new devices, and the replacement cost is just not justifiable at this time.

But the real question is, Why wasn’t this done to begin with?

The IT company hired previously either didn’t know or just didn’t care and left their clients in the worst possible situation.

So my advice to any business owner would be:

If you want VoIP for your business, get multiple quotes,  get the names and numbers of other businesses who they have done installs for. CALL THOSE BUSINESSES and ask about their phone system.

I have found that clients who are happy with their systems love to talk about how great they work and how much money they are saving, some of my clients will even let me use their offices for a demo.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

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If you don't know what you are doing, stop selling businesses VoIP!!10.0101
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