IP Phones????

[ace2109]

Hi guys,
I work for a rather large company and they use mitel ip telephones. These phones are great the work on the instore cat5e network and dont have a phone line plugged directly into them.

What i was looking for is i am setting a small office up for about 7-8 people and they need a telephone system that can transfer calls between phones if required etc.

I had a look on the bay and i can pick up the same phones we use in work for about 30 - 40 quid however im sure there is more to it than just plugging them in. On the bay there is also a mitel 3100 ICP (Integrated communications platform) that on first glance i believe is what makes these phones work???

Has anyone ever set anything like this up before or can someone suggest another solution???

 

[Uhtred]

BT feature line might be worth a look.

http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/btbusinessProducts/displayProduct.do?productId=BTB-6915

 

[ace2109]

i liked the idea of an IP Phone setup and plus featureline is a BT Product, i dont really have a good relationship with BT lol

 

[NickR]

nvm

 

[TheKnat]

I'm not familiar with Mitel phones but you will most probably need a telephony server to assign extension numbers to the phones and also route the calls between the phones themselves. It won't be as simple as just buying a server and buying phones though, as you will need to register the phones on the server and then tell the phones where the server is (can be done via DHCP but it depends if the phones support it).
If they want to be able to dial external numbers then then telephony server also has to be able to handle external lines, most probably in the format of ISDN2 with the number of people your talking about.

 

[bigredshark]

The mitel platform is good, lots of functionality, however it's also very complex. You'll need the phones, an ICP (the 3100 you saw) and that'll get you basic voice connectivity. If you want any fancy features then you need extra licenses etc...

If you're looking for a solution for a small office then steer well clear of it is my advice (and the company I work for sells mitel solutions). I'd go for a cisco solution myself, with a Unity express module in a 2800 or 3800 series router and whatever cisco phones you fancy. It's not something for a beginner to set up though and it's not terribly cheap.

If you want cheap then build as asterisk box of some kind on a cheap server and use whatever SIP phones you fancy. There are lots of sites describing how to set it up but it's still a bit of brave move for something a business will rely on.

You're best bet might be a traditional phone system of some kind, for 8 users you're not going to get some of the major benefits of an IP phone system.

 

[oddjob62]

I've set up an Avaya IPOffice system before. Pretty much works out of the box (for basic functionality), but yes, you can't just buy a dozen phones and plug them in and hope for everything to work, there needs to be a centralized specialist piece of hardware/software to control them.

As BRS says, although i seem to imply that it's simple, it's not, and takes a fair bit of know how to get it working properly.

 

[NiCkNaMe]

/snip

Yep, the major benifits from an IP phone system come from using them between sites, whereby calls will be free as they are routed out over your WAN links rather than the phone network.

You will need an ICP aka as a controller which handles the call routing.

They can be configured by yourself, but without prior experiance i'd reccomend getting an expert in to do it. There's a load of things to consider, from needing to specify a range of extensions, programming the routing, the resiliency, tie extensions to DDI numbers if you wish to recieve internal calls, etc, etc

You then have to consider network performance.. Quality of Service settings (i.e making sure that voice calls are configured to have precedence over all other non critical services), Compression? (if routing between sites..)

It's certainly not as simple as just buying an ICP and some phones Mitel stuff is also heavily locked down and requires licenses for a lot of features. You also need a spare server to run the licensing software.

We've got everything going over Mitel equipment at the moment. Calls, Video conferencing, voice conferencing......

It's a great bit of kit when it works... we use a combination of deskphones and softphones (software that sits on your computer/laptop). I can be sitting in a foreign country, VPN in to the network, boot the software up and make free phone calls to anyone at work, or calls to friends/family for the usual cost of a local call!

 

[bigredshark]

snip!

Yep, the multi site features are the big part, but just integration into the IP LAN is worth it for big companies.

Of course the big problem with all mitel's features is 'when it works', I don't deal with phone stuff personally but I get dragged in every time mitel try to tell us its the network thats not working properly and they've been trying that plenty recently...

(it's a shiny new 10gbit MPLS core, so I'm guessing its not the network....).