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we're a small but expanding service provider and currently still have a rather old Nortel PBX system which either lacks some of the features I'd like to see or is impossible to configure without calling "the phone guy" every time. Thus, I was looking into replacing this system with a newer IP based PBX. The features that I'd require are the following:

  • Extensions
  • Hunt Groups
  • Certain actions based on office hours (e.g. forward to cell phone after 5pm)
  • Auto attendant
  • Call Recording
  • Voicemail to Email
  • Currently 8 extensions
  • On hold music
  • Call queues

Now, I've been trying to do some research but am quite frankly still rather confused as to what would be optimal for us.
We currently have 4 analog lines with our Verizon FIOS subscription. For us service quality is very important as we work in the financial industry and I don't have any patience for outages in our phone service, dropped calls, echo, etc. like what I read a lot about in SIP based services, so I'm not sure if SIP trunking for us is the way to go. I do however want to increase the number of simultaneous incoming/outgoing calls we can take but again, not quite sure what the best option for us is (e.g. I see Verizon offers a PBX trunk line service). When it comes to the actual PBX system, again, not really sure what would be a good choice. I've looked at e.g. 3CX, SNOM One, Cisco's UC500, Allworx, etc. but really not sure what to go for.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Tom

TJF
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1 Answers1

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what I read a lot about in SIP based services, so I'm not sure if SIP trunking for us is the way to go

We had the same concerns, however we trialled a SIP service for a few months and eventually ditched all our ISDN lines in favour of SIP, so the only way to know is to try it.

I've looked at e.g. 3CX, SNOM One, Cisco's UC500, Allworx

These are all good, some of them more expensive than others (Cisco, I'm looking at you). The one we chose to deploy was Swyx as we could deploy it for a fraction of the price of Cisco's CallManager (as it was known back then). Our entire system cost < $50k (but we only bought a small handful of physical phones, the rest were softphones with headsets).

Mark Henderson
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