PhoneBoy2
@shawcable.net
| Re: [Equipment] VOIP PBX Systems - what are you running? What do you want to know?
Asterisk can probably do all that for $10-20k and no need to deal with high priced Telecom techs. If you have in house IT people who know Linux then your good to go. That is one of the biggest advantages IMHO. If your voicemail card fries on a proprietary system your looking at proprietary pricing to replace the part (sometimes your looking at $2000 just for those proprietary flash cards. In Asterisk it could be as simple as getting another hard drive as Best Buy or wherever.
You are right though, a lot of the cost depends on the phones when your talking about that many. That is another advantage of Asterisk. You are not tied to one vendors phones and proprietary interface. With Asterisk everything is based on the SIP open standard so you have all sorts of options depending on the price vs features required.
I don't have a magical crystal ball but everyone seems to think that proprietary phone systems will go the way of the dinosaur within the next few years. They are pretty much all but dead and buried for high end systems from what I am reading. Everything coming out now seems to just be a glorified server with with a brand name stuck on it and running Asterisk or some customized version of it. |
