Tim wrote:
> 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
>
> Less than 10 lines is probably the sweet spot for hosted VoIP installations.
>
>> Easily achievable, or should we stick with ISDN?
>
> You have 2 questions.
> 1) to have ISDN or not have ISDN
> And if you don't have ISDN:
> 2) to have a IP PBX onsite, or just use a hosted provider.
>
> If you really need 10 lines, then you aren't going to get enough
> bandwidth on a normal ADSL line to support 10 calls. (well, not without
> dodgy compression which won't sound so good)

Thanks for all the replies.

Just to clarify our requirements:

The 10 DDI's aren't essential. In fact, probably a luxury. The office
works fine with one number at the moment; The important bit is we have a
phone on each of the ten desks. There's very rarely more than 3 calls
going on simultaneously with the outside world. Maybe one or two
internal calls on top of that, but I presume this traffic wouldn't go
out over the Internet and back? If a limit was set of 3 external calls
it would probably go unnoticed.

> In the VoIP world, lines are a bit washy. I've spoken to lots of people
> who only have 4 people in their office, but have 10 phone lines on an
> old system. They don't want to risk that an inbound call will get a
> busy tone, rather than hitting the voice mail or call queue. If you go
> hosted, you effectively have unlimited lines into the hosting provider.
> Is your traffic mainly incoming calls or out going?

A 50-50 split.

> Jono suggested mixing and matching. This is easily possible if you have
> an IP PBX onsite.

The consensus appears to be VoIP isn't quite ready for offices then?