Last month we moved into our new office. It's larger, brighter, funkier and altogether better than our old building, but as a result it's quite a bit more expensive. One of the goals of moving was to try and reduce our operating costs in areas other than rent which, we discovered, is a fairly immutable concept to our landlord.
One of the larger monthly outgoings from our old building was the phone system. When we moved in (this was back in 2005) we shunned the expensive proprietary phone systems in favour of an Asterisk box. This saved us a boatload of cash in capital expenditure, but still left us with a question of how we connect our internal phone system to the outside world.
Back in 2005, the quality of ADSL connectivity was good, but not perfect. As a result, we took a decision to use ISDN instead of an alternative VOIP product to manage this connectivity. This was not cheap. BT installations were high, the monthly service costs for the ISDN was high and the ISDN card to power the Asterisk box cost around £1k. On top of this, we only had 10 concurrent lines for an office of more than 30 people. If 11 people wanted to be on the phone at the same time, 1 person was going to be out of luck.
Fast forward to 2010. We've been with BeThere broadband for 5 years, and their service has been very, very good. Virtually no downtime and excellent bandwidth throughput. I spoke with a couple of other companies who had bitten the VOIP bullet and they explained that, done right, it would suit us better in the long run. So I put together a test Asterisk install before we moved office, selected a VOIP provider in Gradwell, and had a play around.
Generally the service was excellent. My only issue was one of upstream network bandwidth. If someone in the office was uploading a large file and consuming most or all the upstream bandwidth, the call quality would drop below an acceptable level.
When we moved office, it was a simple decision. Get 2 ADSL lines. One for VOIP traffic, one for everything else.
This has a number of positive effects. Setup costs were a lot lower. Monthly cost are FAR lower. We also now have more concurrent lines than we have people in the office, so we don't have to worry about all the lines being busy. On top of all of this, we are no longer tied down to our physical building as we were with the old setup. If we want to move, I just grab our Asterisk server, plug it into the net somewhere else and update 1 IP address in the Gradwell control panel. No more waiting for BT to do whatever it is they do.
The only concern was one of quality. Would anyone notice a drop in call quality? Well, four weeks in and I'm happy to say that I've not had a single complaint. In fact, the quality of service is so good that after a few days I completely forgot about the new setup.
And with that, the only really old communications technology left in the office is a fax. I hate fax machines. It's sat in the corner, yet to be installed. Someone asked if they could fax me something the other day, and I laughed and said we don't have a fax machine.
Death to faxes. Unless they run over TCP.
