On Sunday 01 October 2006 23:17, Chris Hellyar wrote: > That is extensions, pager modems, dial-out points for consultants, > support connections for telemetery systems.. We have a dual channel > primary rate with 40 lines enabled on one site, and a secondary feed to > a second nortel PBX with a single channel and 8 channels. 2 consoles, > and average 180 inbound calls an hour 8:30-5 weekdays. (DDI and pilot)
Ah, you know what they say about assumptions :) > > You are up for a wad going with an OSS solution too really. The handsets > > are the killer. At around $250-$300 a handset that's near $40k - assuming > > you need handsets. > > Yeah, dedicated handsets for an PBX are that sort of money anyway, the > high spec ones we currently use a few of are over $500. Yeah, $250-$300 is about as low as you'd want to go for a general use IP handset. > > You'd also want either a highly redundant server or multiple redundant > > boxes to handle that many handsets, depending of course on how critical > > the phone system is to the business. So there's another $5-$10k > > You've obviously never seen a Nortel BCM PBX. They are a standard ATX > form factor motherboard running embedded NT or Linux with some special > cards to handle Codec conversion in hardware and ISDN etc. Nothing > flash. It's not until you get up to meridian scale PBX gear from Nortel > it has anything that even looks vaguely redundant. Medium sized PBX's > (250 or less extensions) seem to be going the PC M/B way. Must save a > truck load in development. Yeah, I come from a PC background rather than a telephony background so I don't have a lot of knowledge of traditional systems. I had heard that more off the shelf PBXs were going to standard kit. Still, if I was building an Asterisk server to service that amount of extensions I wouldn't do it without some sort of redundancy. > I think some money perspective is in order. Two current tech proprietary > IP solutions I've looked at for this have been in the order of > $180-$200k. > > No pun intended, you're quite often talking telephone numbers when you > price phone systems. But, they are important to the function of any > business, and as an IT person you can really limit your career if you > get the phones wrong! :-) Indeed, more traditional telephony systems are extortionately priced. You're paying stacks for that ATX board. Taking into account your PRI interface cards and a channel bank or gateway for your DECT stuff you would probably still come in under $20-$30k. Add that to your $40k for the handsets (and another $5k for some high spec handsets if needed) then you are still a mile away from a traditional solution. As you can probably tell some of this is speculation from me as I haven't had first hand involvement with a system install of this size. hads -- http://nicegear.co.nz New Zealand's VoIP Supplier
