BCM50 help connecting to remote office

[ImConfusedAllTheTIme]

My Company is looking to setup a remote office in a different city and I'm looking for some help for recommending a solution. Currently the remote office will consist of one person, but we would like the ability to expand in the future. Our main office currently has a BCM50e

The main feature we're looking for is the ability to forward calls from our remote office to our main office. So if someone calls our remote office locally and the phone is either busy or no one is there to pick it up, it forwards the call over an IP network to our main office.

The two implementations I'm considering right now are; setting up an IP phone connected through a VPN to our main offices BCM50, or Installing a separate BCM50 at our remote office and connecting the two

So my questions are, would both of these implementations provide us with the features we're looking for? can the IP phone receive local calls and forward them to our main office?

Thanks in Advance

 

[bluemr2]

If you go with the IP phone solution, there will be no local (to it) trunks. All calls would go in and out through the 50e. It would act just like another extension, so it could be forwarded. 911 would have to be provided through a different phone. Connecting 2 systems will work for forwarding also. You would be able to have local trunks and working 911. For 1 phone this is obviously much more expensive, but gets more reasonable as you add more phones.

 

[oldestgeek]

You could also install an IP gateway at the remote office and connect it to a gateway at the main office. Plug the analog line into the gateway at the remote and the other gateway into an analog trunk port at the main. You could assign that line to ring and appear only on the IP phone at the remote. These gateways are made by Algo and a number of other cimpanies and are pretty cheap. One drawback is that on calls from the PSTN to the IP phone you have double the latency. There is also other setup scenarios where you could use the same gateway to connect an analog phone and an analog station port off your BCM.