[Asterisk-Users] Help - is voip good for in-house calls?

[Francis Augusto Medeiros]

Dear Greg,

Thanks a lot for your e-mail! Here are my comments:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 14:37:08 -0700, Greg Broiles <gbroiles at gmail.com> wrote:
> Asterisk should work fine for this application - but you and/or your
> users may be expecting the Grandstreams to look/act like traditional
> key system phones, where you've got a bunch of buttons labeled
> "Computer Room" or "Joe" and "Bob", or whatever, where you can press
> that button to call that extension.
> 
> The Budgetones don't do that - users will need to remember (or have an
> extension list to tell them) that the Computer Room is at extension
> 110, and Joe is at 111, and Bob is 112, and so forth.

This is no problem, as with the old PBX we also had to do that, and
without LCD. We used a small PBX with regular phones.

My concern was if I'd have to teach folks how to dial, but I guess
that I can still have the option to assign a number that will give
immediate access to the PSTN, so no need to make a special dialplan to
acomodate the weird numbering system we have in Brazil (sometimes we
dial 7 numbers, sometimes 8, sometimes 12, sometimes 13, etc.)


> My suggestion is that you buy 2 Budgetones and set up Asterisk on an
> old PC - so your total investment in the experiment will be < $200.
> Get that up & running, and let users play with the phones and the
> functions you can provide. If they like it, great. If they don't like
> it, you're not out much money, and you ought to be able to resell the
> Budgetones for something like 80% of the new price on Ebay or
> whatever. You can get set up with incoming and outgoing IAX
> connections via someone like Voicepulse or Nufone or IPKall (or some
> combination thereof) so you can even let people experiment with
> incoming and outgoing call quality and behavior without spending a lot
> on interface cards.

This is really a great idea. See, my biggest concern is not the voice
quality in terms of audio, but if the conversation is allowed to flow
in the same way as with regular phones. Or, in other words, if there
are significant delays that makes the communication a bit frustrating.
Brazilians do interrupt each other a lot while talking on the phone
and, on voip calls over the internet with slow connections, this habit
made the conversation a bit weird, as sometimes we couldn't realize if
the other part started to talk again... :)

We don't have in Brazil, as far as I know, voice providers such as
those you suggested. So I'll definetly need an FXO. I'm also
considering a media gateway - I don't know really if they work the
same way for the end user.

> You might also look at some of the other VoIP phones, which aren't a
> whole lot more money and might look more like the PBX/key phones that
> people are used to. The Budgetones are more similar to consumer/home
> telephones from the early 1990's.

I haven't find any other phone below $80. Budgettones, if they work
good, seems to be the best option for us.

Again, thanks a lot for helping!!

Yours,

Francis