Francois Labreque wrote:

>> Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, VoIP is
>> still an immature and very experimental research technology that isn't
>> yet usable in the real world. (Unless you have absurd amounts of
>> resources to throw at the problem, in which case almost anything can
>> be made feasible.)
> 
> You are wrong.  It is a fairly new technology (e.g. less than 10 years
> old), but there are lots of people who use it everyday in the real
> world.  Office buildings, call-centres, schools, hospitals, etc...
> 

Small community college in middle of no where USA migrated to VoIP. For
them, it was a cost balancing act between maintaining a POTS exchange or
swapping everything out. They were already running cabling to every
office and most of the class rooms for internet connections, running
multiple cables wasn't really a cost problem. From what I saw of the
wiring closest, it actually cleaned up everything. The only trouble I
heard about was that this happened while they re-modeled the campus as
well, so their nicely designed fiber links between buildings fed the
backhoes that were doing landscaping.

Compare the cost of having and maintaining a telephone exchange. I can't
imagine the phone companies sell/rent those very cheap, when you want to
have different numbers for each phone, instead of just extensions.

>>
>> I can't *begin* to imagine what advantage VoIP would offer us as a
>> company. (Apart from the obvious benefit that next time our Internet
>> access fails, I won't be able to contact our ISP to notify them, and
>> next time our VPN goes down, I won't be able to contact HQ to get it
>> fixed...)
>>
> 
> See above.
> 
> Besides, I'm sure in the event of a complete network outage, you'll be
> able to find someone with a cell phone to contact the ISP.
> 

Keep one telephone in the network control room. You won't need to keep
the whole PBX just to keep one line active. What it also means is that
when the network does go down inside, you don't have everyone calling to
tell you.

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