[GRLUG] telephony shake-up again

[George (Skip) VerDuin]

What a story Greg!

On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 08:07 -0500, Greg Folkert wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 16:24 -0500, George (Skip) VerDuin wrote:
>>SNIP<<
> Or $607/month total cost. Or 18.4610706% the cost per month or almost
> $2700/month in savings.
This is a shocker.  Think in terms of "order of magnitude" difference?
In my world make or break was more in terms of one penny out of thirty.

How long did it take for the economics to shift this far?

>>SNIP<<
> The best part of this: We no longer have to be hardware maintainers, nor
> do we have to worry about disaster recovery, that is Aretta's problem
> via contract.
Like insurance?  Let's hope it doesn't come to a test.  The solution you
mapped "feels good" from the perspective of (below) with lack of
redundancy.  Especially as we grow more physically remote while also
growing more interdependent on the intellect of others.

Recently I had contact with a Grand Haven based application service
company holding a contract with our beloved large phone company for
t-3(?) data service to a small server rack that hosted their database in
their own brick & mortar.  When the cable hardware was damaged the
contract was voided by the big company but the small company got the
black eye for missing their up-time target.

The small company addressed the problem by moving the server to Battle
Creek adjacent to trunk switch hardware on the Chicago-to-Ann Arbor
fiber run.  It is sometimes hard to be a small fish with big fish
feeding in the neighborhood.

> In summary, If you have a distributed work-force and would like to have
> a unified phone system, I'd give a hosted Asterisk setup a hard look. If
> you only have one brick and mortar building and don't really have an
> "upscale" Internet connection... (read as a T-1, or other guaranteed
> uptime Internet service)  your phone system will only be as reliable as
> your connection then, you might look at a Key-System from the likes of
> Panasonic or similar (initial cost and setup ~$4000 for 10 phones).
What started me down this path has more to do with feature
experimentation than with those issues needed to run a business.  Very
few really care if my phone doesn't work, but I'm gratified to be
participating in something solid enough to run a business over.

What am I looking to do?  Put automatically rejecting phone calls that
do not carry a caller ID [something I dub as phone spam] at the top of
the list.  I also want access to voice mail from afar pretty badly.

Thanks so much for your example -- it is refreshing to see it close to
home.

Warmest regards from here,
George