IP telephony in the office

What is IP telephony in the concept of an ordinary office employee or a chief who makes a decision about installing a PBX in an office? As the practice of communicating with potential customers has shown, the majority somewhere have heard that using IP telephony you can save on long-distance calls and at the same time have not heard anything about IP PBXs and that it can be installed instead of a traditional PBX. Even more likely not so - the majority has no other concept of automatic telephone exchange, except as traditional. As soon as you start talking about IP, they start saying that it is expensive, it is unreliable that the quality of IP telephony is worse. But as practice shows, this is all not true.

Let's deal with these misconceptions.

IP telephony to the office is expensive

Indeed, in the case of such well-known brands as Cisco, IP telephony can be expensive. But does it make sense to overpay for titles? I think no. In most cases, you can use solutions of more budget manufacturers, and they will work no worse. Then we begin to consider solutions based on open source software. The most popular solution of course is Asterisk and the SIP and IAX2 protocols. They allow you to build a scalable telephony system in an enterprise of any scale. Today you can buy a small PC on an Atom processor and connect 10 phones, adding new subscribers to your mini-server for free . Tomorrow, when the business grows to 50 or more employees, you simply buy a more powerful server and transfer the configuration from the old one. An additional advantage, in comparison with traditional telephony, you get the ease of installation of telephony. After all, the phones will work on a computer local network, which means they can be transferred to another office or even everything can be disassembled and assembled in a new office, and there is no need to cross anything, to lay an additional cable. Everything works simply. Junction with the city can be done by SIP. Most telephony providers support it. Or buy a number from a telephony ip provider, then when you move to another office your number will always be assigned only to you.

IP telephony is unreliable

In fact, if you use high-quality equipment, then the “uptime” of the ip telephony server can be a year or more. If you do not need services like voice mail, call recording and other services that consume free space, you can do with a small SSD drive in the server and a processor with passive cooling, and then the server maintenance is almost completely unnecessary. In case you need 99.9999% fault tolerance, you can build a system with redundancy or load balancing between servers, and then the failure of one or more servers will not affect the telephony service in the company. When installing a traditional PBX, this solution simply does not exist. You can also reserve Internet channels for external connections, which will also increase reliability. Failure or prevention from the provider will not interrupt customer calls.
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IP telephony quality is worse

Indeed, many sip providers use the g729 codec, used in GSM networks, which squeezes sound up to 8 kbps, and bad channels on the Internet introduce their own distortion. But, when building telephony in the office, we don’t have to use this codec at all, we can use g711, which allows sending faxes and providing excellent sound quality. The interviewee from the other end of the country will hear you as if you are in the next room. And here we come to another great advantage of IP telephony - the possibility of combining offices.

Office unification

If you need to combine offices, you can, using encrypted channels via the Internet, call directly to another office. Thus, it is possible to build a distributed telephone network with a single numbering and an unlimited number of channels. No need to buy any licenses, wait for them for a long time. You do not need to be attached to one brand, because it uses a proprietary protocol. Technology is open to your growth. You can use the exit to the city, which is connected to the remote office. And subscribers, calling "to the city", may not know through which channel the call occurs. Although, of course, if you wish, you can set up any dialing rules, and Vasya will call only through a specific number, and it is allocated only for him, and Lena will have a free line.

Conclusion

Thus, IP telephony is already now a reliable, cost-effective solution in offices of all sizes. In large offices with an existing telephony, you can switch to it gradually by integrating an IP PBX with a “traditional” analog or digital PBX.
The technology of IP telephony still has many wonderful properties, we will probably talk about them next time. Ready to discuss your opinions on my conclusions, maybe you have something to add or correct.