[asterisk-users] Digital Phones

[Stephen Bosch]

Salvatore Giudice wrote:
> Nortel digital Meridian phones are like $400/each. At least that was the
> price of the phones at a hotel I did a job for recently.

Still?

(Is Nortel even making these phones anymore? I thought they spun off
their telephone set division -- anybody heard of Aastra? ;) )

> When you go to SIP, you may save on the capital costs for the phones, but
> other costs will increase. These are related to:
> 
> 1.) increased support requirements for supporting VoIP
> 2.) additional licensing may be required from your vendor to support SIP or
> IP media
> 3.) increased costs associated with mitigating potential damages since your
> voice services are now subject to the same outages as your network
> 4.) increased training costs for staff to become proficient in VoIP
> 5.) increased costs associated with monitoring QoS
> 6.) increased costs associated with reconfiguring your network for VoIP and
> QoS - many times new switches may have to be purchased in addition to SBC's
> etc
> 7.) additional costs associated with rewiring physical space to accommodate
> additional Ethernet ports required for phones 

Yes, 7 times.

> Sometimes, if you already have digital - it may not be worth switching to
> SIP even if you save a ton on the handsets. Whenever we switch over a hotel
> to VoIP, we always run into these extra 'hidden' costs. 
> 
> If you want to do digital with asterisk, I think you'll need a T1/E1
> multiplexer that supports digital phones.

Is this anything like a channel bank, only for digital phones?

Can you suggest any examples?

-Stephen-