I've been spending the afternoon looking at some VOIP solutions for a client of mine (a small church with about 6 employees). At this point in my research, the main thing that has struck me is that these plans are much more expensive than I would have thought.

The church currently has PBX system (from Comcast, I believe) that has broken and doesn't seem to be fixable. So now they're looking into VOIP solutions before they talk to other traditional phone service providers. Their current monthly phone bill is around $520, which I thought sounded like a lot, and like a figure we could easily beat with a number of VOIP services...until I looked into them.

One of the current hot names is ringcentral.com. They charge a minimum of $25/user/month. At first you might think that's only $150/month for this number of users, plus maybe $10 for each phone number they use. The problem is that the church currently has phones scattered around the campus. Some are used in classrooms and are mostly there in case of emergency situations. I've been told that they want to keep these phones in use. That would bring the total number of phones up to at least 20, making it at least as expensive as the current system, and that's before adding the phone numbers in or any other features, and it's also for the least expensive plan that doesn't have as many features or talk minutes.

Vonage appears to be even more expensive at $40/month, and other services seem to go up from there.

The only service I've found that would save money no matter which way you cut it is Ooma Business. But the more I look into what they offer, the less confident I am in their product. First of all, much of the setup relies on DECT between the hub and the phones. I have to create this unwieldy system of four hubs to even support 20 physical phones, which is the maximum the entire system can handle. There are other concerns I have but I won't go on.

What do you folks recommend for an operation of this size? Do you know of anyplace that gives discounts to 501c3 non-profits?

Asterisk.

If you don't want to roll your own, you can get it pre-installed on a PBX appliance like this one.

You can probably get the monthly costs down to $25-$50 a month for a small church, although your upfront costs will be a bit higher because you have to purchase the phones and PBX appliance.

Yeah the main difference here is that using a hosted solution means you're probably paying for a direct indial / line for each extension. Given you won't be need to make 20 simultaneous calls, that's probably unnecessary.

I've been looking at this for Australia so different market but even for a hosted solution I can get 20 external lines for A$240 with 40 direct indial numbers. That's about 1/3 of your cost for a hosted PBX. 8 lines/20 DIDs is only A$140.

Otherwise buy a prebuilt PBX appliance like John linked and you can have basically unlimited extensions. You just buy a number of direct indials / lines that you need so if only 2 calls are ever made simultaneously you can keep the cost much lower. As far as the VOIP provider is concerned they don't even know how many extensions you have then. Your monthly cost can be a lot cheaper then with an upfront cost of hardware. You do need to support that though which can require a little bit of setup time.

If you want to roll your own there are a number of Asterix distros like Elastix. http://www.asteriskexchange.com/listings/category/60

Need more info on the requirements.

What exactly are all these distributed 'phones'? Are these single line telephone sets or phone stations with multiple lines, ability to call other 'extensions', and other business phone features?

Is the desired solution to utilize a small handful of 'phone lines' to make outbound and receive inbound calls, and also allow the various phone locations to call each other like internal extensions?

Do you need to control inbound call routing, such as ring a different phone location if the first one is busy or no answer?

How is the campus currently wired for telephone? Does all the phone wiring route back to a central wiring panel, or a very few wiring panels in different buildings?

Do these same buildings interconnect via Ethernet, with reasonable excess bandwidth?

Can't comment on your hardware needs, but as a service voip.ms has been fine and affordable for us for home use for the past number of years. The let you run what ever hardware you want and configuration, which is both good and bad...

I would not suggest this. I am an FtOCC certified mofo, and administrated an Asterisk box with T1 and SIP trunking for years. I am a firm believer in getting as much crap/headache hosted outside of your building as possible. Make it someone else's problem to wait for Verizon to repair your T1 at 2AM. You're going to save time, money, and your sanity.

I switched our business to OnSIP a few years ago based on someone's suggestion on this BBS (Phoenix32?) and never looked back. I don't have to ever call Verizon to service a T1 again or deal with mind-numbing Caller ID issues. Get some Polycom phones, point them to boot.onsip.com and watch it just work. Take a look at the plan without per-seat fees. Looks like it's right up your alley.

Ooo, I like the looks of OnSIP. That's appealing.

The biggest challenge with this site is the wiring. To be honest, it's kind of a mess. There's an older building that houses the offices, and a newer one where the equipment rack is that holds the modem, router, and main switch. That connects to the older building via fiber through an underground conduit, as the offices were about 500 feet away. From there, it's pretty much a series of switches through the building, with the offices practically daisy-chained.

It's not set up the way I'd like, but I inherited some of the mess and there's not much I could do about it anyway. The old building is a horrible hodgepodge of additions and old construction, full of cinderblock walls.

The current system uses analog phones, and they all run back to a hideous mess of a phone block. The phones in the new building would be the most difficult to replace, as those are wall-mounted and I don't even know where their lines run back to (not much institutional knowledge in this place). This whole post is to say that some of the spots in this place only have phone lines, and some of them only have CAT5.

I don't know if this information has helped at all or just confused it.

Well, somehow you need to assemble a functional plan of where you want to end up.

Analog phones can be made to work with VOIP tech. You may well need to bite the bullet on the existing old building wiring panel and restructure it into an understandable and functional form. Hopefully the newer building has some sort of wiring panel already, you just need to find it and map it out.

There may well be forgotten equipment still connected to some lines, and still in service stuff that has not yet been brought to your attention, such as fax machines in odd locations, even dial up modems or alarm system interconnects.

If the CAT5 is being used for 10 or 100 mbit Ethernet then there are 'spare' wire pairs in the cable that can carry analog phone signals. Or use the 'spare' four pairs in each CAT5 cable to create a dedicated 100m it link for VOIP service. Or run gigabit through the cable and use the bandwidth for everything.

Lots of fun to be had in bringing old infrastructure into the future, kicking and screaming.

One way to do an end run on unforgiving interior construction is to run new wiring around the outside of the building, possibly through the roof or attic, and sometimes through the air ducts (plenum rated cable).

Wireless deskphones do exist. I have used Grandstream phones before and they're not the best. The build quality isn't very nice and the software can be a little buggy. I've even had one that ran Android (the one I linked probably does, too).

I don't know how reliable the call quality on a phone like that would be, but we have someone in the office that I gave a UniData WPU-7800. It's a handheld WiFi IP phone. He uses that thing all day walking between the office and the warehouse, moving between access points, and there are never any issues. Wireless might be a viable option for some of your extensions.

Whatever you do, I would suggest you standardize on one phone model. So, try to find something that ticks all the boxes for every situation. Also keep in mind that you can mess around with powerline networking or perhaps using a separate WiFi client bridge. I have a Polycom VVX 500 set up on powerline at home for when I work remotely. I've been on calls for hours at a time and never had any hiccups.

I'm using Vonage Business (was Vocalocity), it's like $20/month/extension. Phone numbers were no extra charge.

What I did is many of my phones are set to the same extension, so I don't get charged for them.

I'm using Panasonic KX-TGP550 phones which, while simple, are extremely reliable. They've been running for years with no issues.

I've gotta remember to call them and delete my fax line, it's been over a year since I last got a non-spam fax and probably more than a year before that for the previous non-spam fax.

Thanks guys, those are great suggestions.

Where there is ethernet, it's all gigabit. I'm pretty certain that the amount of phone traffic on the network could be carried by the available bandwidth. These are not the most bandwidth-hungry users. Although we do have some security cameras on the same network that might take up a good chunk.

That UniData phone might be a good option for one or two of the users here who need to go all over the campus for certain tasks. I installed a Unifi system that covers about 90% of the place so it should be able to work almost anywhere.

This place has an even more patchwork electrical system than it does phones and network. I've tried powerline for a few single use cases in the past and had nothing but failure with it, unfortunately. I've used it in other sites with a lot of success, particularly with recent powerline devices, but not in this place!

Thanks Larry. I'm not wild about going the DECT direction. I'm not sure why, even though it would solve some of the problems I'm having.

For really, REALLY affordable VoIP, you could also take a look at Voip.ms.

Their stuff is very feature rich (every calling feature imaginable included gratis), works well (with a decent enough internet connection at the site).

BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices).

Thanks, Mark. I'll look into that service a little more when I get a chance. Their site is a little overwhelming

Rob, do you know whether, with OnSIP, I can assign one extension to multiple phones? That would really help with the monthly costs if I could have all the little-used phones in the non-office locations share an extension.

Yes. Multiple devices can share the same extension, no problem.

My extension, for example, rings on my desk at work, my desk at home, and my Android SIP client all at once.

As for voip.ms, I believe you can make a PBX-like experience using their service and sub-accounts. We did used to have a single SIP number hosted there, so I am a believer in their service. But, it's more geared toward people configuring a single line, or plugging the SIP credentials into their own PBX (Asterisk, etc) as a trunk. As a PBX, OnSIP will be a more complete solution, but at a relatively higher price. Their interface is also more user-friendly and your client might actually be able to take care of simple things themselves. However, voip.ms could be a lot cheaper.

Ok, I just got off the phone with OnSIP and was very impressed by their customer service. Now I'm really hoping my client will go with them. It seems like the perfect solution for them.