Steven wrote:

> We were thinking about a move to VoIP. Is this feasible for a business
> with a measily 10 lines or so, or is the business world not quite ready
> for that? I accept there'd be a risk of broadband going down, but with
> POTS fall-over from the VoIP provider we could live with that... IF
> there'd be benefits elsewhere.

Depends how much of a benefit you'd like to see in order to counterbalance a
lack of incoming or outgoing phone calls. For some businesses it could be
fatal.

> The features we'd like are:
>
> * 10 IP Phones

What's your budget?

> * Ability to receive calls on 10 DDI's
> * Voicemail
> * Internal/ External Call transfer
> * Route a DDI to a teleworkers phone at home or mobile

All standard features for any IP phone system, but I recommend you steer
clear of systems that require you to license individual components
[voicemail licenses, user licenses, etc on top of the cost of the handsets]
as that's a bit of a fuck on.

> * The box to run everything (Preferably an all-in-1 solution, and maybe
> look into something like Asterisk later.)

Asterisk usually is all-in-one and is unlikely to require more than one
server for only 10 handsets. If you do want to move to Asterisk later, pick
a PBX that uses Asterisk-compatible handsets, ie SIP handsets, one example
of which is Mitel. A lot of Mitel's current handsets are SIP and MiNet dual
mode so can be used with both Asterisk and a Mitel controller. However, you
haven't mentioned why you don't want to just use Asterisk from the get-go?
There's plenty of Asterisk-knowledgeable people out there so finding
someone to design and install it shouldn't be a problem. Throw a brick at a
bunch of VoiP-knowlegeable people and you'll likely hit one.

> Easily achievable, or should we stick with ISDN?

The one thing you haven't mentioned is how many simultaneous calls you
expect to have, because that will determine how much bandwidth you'll need.
But in general, yeah stick with ISDN, because you aren't likely to be able
to afford an internet connection that can match your ISDN circuits for
reliability. You can of course mix and match, so you could have 2ch of
ISDN2e and then an ADSL Max Premium to effect cheap DDIs and LCR.

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