VOIP Solutions

[Jason Scott]

Hi

We are currently thinking of moving away from our old PBX, I wondering if anyone had any recommendations on what solution suits the education market the best. At the moment we have CSG pushing there solution, is anyone using this?

https://www.csg.co.nz/solutions/cloud-solutions-new-zealand/cloud-telephony-solutions/

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Jason Scott

IT Manager

021 367 663

MCSA

[Tim Harper]

Hi Jason,

The Ministry's Connected Learning Advisory Service does have a guide about VOIP - it is linked from this page:

https://connectedlearning.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/200319525

The direct link is here:

https://connectedlearning.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/209632013-Choosing-Telephone-Systems-Internet-VoIP-or-Traditional- 

If you would like a more customised response fill in the form at http://query.connectedlearning.org.nz and one of the team will get back to you.

Connected Learning is a free service provided by the Ministry of Education for all state and state-integrated schools in NZ.

I am one of the team and work 0.6 of my time in that role.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 03 443 5167 (messages cannot be left on this number)
Mobile 027 443 1236

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

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[Mike Etheridge]

Your local ISP may have a VOIP offering. After getting in a few providers for scoping and a quote, there was no comparison between the others and our local, regional ISP in terms of service, initial and ongoing costs. It’s great calling up a help desk and getting an immediate answer from someone in the same town as you. If you have a local ISP, I would recommend including them in any investigation you do.

Mike

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[Sam McNeill]

Hi Jason,

In my last year at StAC I explored the CSG solution, Vodafone's VoIP as a service, various solutions from MainComm and also priced up a Skype For Business integration which would have given us a tight Unified Comms solution but I was surprised at the cost of hardware to support it.

I guess the question to consider is do you want any infrastructure on premise or a full cloud VoIP solution.

[Patrick Dunford]

Lots pf people do PBX cloud. 2 talk is a provider we have used for a few schools and other customers.

If you want an in house system 3CX is pretty good, runs on multiple platforms now. We have done a few installations of this using 2 talk just to provide the lines.

[Patrick Dunford]

Unless you use PCs or other devices with an app or something, any solution will need phones on site. These are cheap enough, but can add up as they would cost around $100 each.

On premises would be server hardware (it could be a VM running Windows or Linux), and any licensing costs needed.

[Jason Scott]

Thanks everyone for your advise, I have a couple of options to explore now :)

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[Blake Richardson]

We have been using Avaya for 4-5 years now with Vodafone providing our coppier trunks via a primary rate connection. We looked at SIP but it was still pretty new at that point. VF sold us the whole package and it continues to work well and is very flexable.

Blake

[Patrick Dunford]

Avaya is a proprietary system, therefore everything costs way more than it should. Pay hundreds more for each phone etc, pay license fees per user, locked into planned obsolescence etc.

I used to maintain an Avaya system, and we used to get phones off Trademe secondhand. Avaya obviously saw what people were doing, and brought in a new version of their software, that introduced a new additional per-phone license fee of approximately $100 for each phone, in addition to the hardware cost of the actual phone itself. I seem to recall the phone server (a proprietary hardware box) cost several thousand to purchase. The one they had was damaged in a power surge, and it was able to be patched up, but they were quoted the price for a new one.

With these proprietary solutions you just keep paying through the nose for everything. They can introduce new software that makes your old phones obsolete so you are forced to upgrade them, and so on.

On 16/03/18 13:47, Blake Richardson wrote:

We have been using Avaya for 4-5 years now with Vodafone providing our coppier trunks via a primary rate connection. We looked at SIP but it was still pretty new at that point. VF sold us the whole package and it continues to work well and is very flexable.

Blake

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[Patrick Dunford]

4 years sounds about the timeframe we put in new 3CX systems into a couple of sites. They didn't have all the bells and whistles of Avaya but they had plenty of useful features. SIP's been around much longer than that.

On 16/03/18 13:47, Blake Richardson wrote:

We have been using Avaya for 4-5 years now with Vodafone providing our coppier trunks via a primary rate connection. We looked at SIP but it was still pretty new at that point. VF sold us the whole package and it continues to work well and is very flexable.

Blake

[ictdi...@kowhai.school.nz]

We put in 3CX (virtual server running onsite) and use 2talk to provision the phones. Put in by our schoolwide IT supplier. Yealink phones are cheap at around $100. Took a bit of tweaking to get the setup running as we want but works well now. Great being able to run a phone from any network port in the school. We looked at using the phone speakers as a replacement for our old classroom PA announcement system but they weren't loud enough to be heard in a busy classroom. Someone is going to make a killing when they make a cheap phone with a loud integrated speaker that can do both roles...