bzbee
IS-IT--Management
- Mar 15, 2010
- 21
Howdy,
My wife's medical practice is moving to a new building that is under construction. With the move, they're planning on scraping their existing digital phone system with a new one. At the new site, there will be a need to have around 25 handsets sharing 6 or so lines (right now they have 4 lines but are getting complaints from patients experiencing busy signals).
Our first decision to make: Hosted PBX or Premise PBX? Personally, I like the hosted pbx as it's one less piece of hardware for the practice to maintain/update (they're not tech folks and I don't want to be their support person..especially on phone matters). The drawback with hosted is that our ISPs (cable, DSL) are not especially reliable (DSL is better than cable but folks get mighty nervous imagining the phone system down).
If we go premise pbx, should we use TDM/Digital or IP based? One of the techs is suggesting that we go with an ESI digital system but I'm a little hesitant to go that route considering that it will require separate phone lines (unless we can run them over the planned Cat6 lines) and doesn't offer all the flexibility in moving/programming phones that office staff could be expected to handle. As far as needed features the digital system should meet the needs now but I wonder about flexibility/upgradability for the years to come). Also, a large majority of stuff selling today is IP based so I wonder if tdm is being weeded out (don't want to be the last person buying a betamax player
What kind of lines to use. At a former job, I had to support an Avaya IPO 500 that we had POTS lines connected to it. It worked but I always felt we were getting nickeled and dimed when trying to add additional POTS lines. Currently the office has 4lines but I think going to 8 would provide enough breathing room. We've had a vendor come out and pitch SIP trunks but that still relies on a reliable internet connection no? We should have fiber up in the area when we move to the area and I'm chomping at the bit to use that for networking and telecom needs. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated here as we want reliability without forking over a ton of moola to Ma Bell.
Well, that's all the questions that we have now. I can appreciate that different folks will have different answers that work perfectly for their environment but would like to see what logic folks use for their decision to go with x as opposed to y.
Thanks for the read and any advice you can dole out.
Have a great day!
chris
My wife's medical practice is moving to a new building that is under construction. With the move, they're planning on scraping their existing digital phone system with a new one. At the new site, there will be a need to have around 25 handsets sharing 6 or so lines (right now they have 4 lines but are getting complaints from patients experiencing busy signals).
Our first decision to make: Hosted PBX or Premise PBX? Personally, I like the hosted pbx as it's one less piece of hardware for the practice to maintain/update (they're not tech folks and I don't want to be their support person..especially on phone matters). The drawback with hosted is that our ISPs (cable, DSL) are not especially reliable (DSL is better than cable but folks get mighty nervous imagining the phone system down).
If we go premise pbx, should we use TDM/Digital or IP based? One of the techs is suggesting that we go with an ESI digital system but I'm a little hesitant to go that route considering that it will require separate phone lines (unless we can run them over the planned Cat6 lines) and doesn't offer all the flexibility in moving/programming phones that office staff could be expected to handle. As far as needed features the digital system should meet the needs now but I wonder about flexibility/upgradability for the years to come). Also, a large majority of stuff selling today is IP based so I wonder if tdm is being weeded out (don't want to be the last person buying a betamax player
What kind of lines to use. At a former job, I had to support an Avaya IPO 500 that we had POTS lines connected to it. It worked but I always felt we were getting nickeled and dimed when trying to add additional POTS lines. Currently the office has 4lines but I think going to 8 would provide enough breathing room. We've had a vendor come out and pitch SIP trunks but that still relies on a reliable internet connection no? We should have fiber up in the area when we move to the area and I'm chomping at the bit to use that for networking and telecom needs. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated here as we want reliability without forking over a ton of moola to Ma Bell.
Well, that's all the questions that we have now. I can appreciate that different folks will have different answers that work perfectly for their environment but would like to see what logic folks use for their decision to go with x as opposed to y.
Thanks for the read and any advice you can dole out.
Have a great day!
chris
