Notes from the Watertower

A Local PBX installation

for a change, I thought I’d write about an installation I did recently in a local independent school…

They wanted a small system to replace an ancient Panasonic PBX. Their existing set-up comprised of what might be considered fairly “normal” for a lot of small businesses - 3 standard analogue lines, a Panasonic PBX and a dozen desk phones.

Features they they were looking for were primarily a voice mailbox facility for most members of staff, (up to 70 staff members), even if they don’t have a phone on their desks. Additionally, they are looking at remote phones - they have a rather odd 2-site set-up (administration building separate from the main school with independent broadband connections) and wanted to link both sites over the Internet to save phone bills, and look at placing outgoing calls via the Internet in the future to save of call fees.

From my point of view, it was all fairly straightforward - I was able to do the installation during half-term break, so the school was quiet, then come the following Monday morning when we’d gone live, I was on-site to guide them through the new system. (They had a new receptionist too!) Everything went well on the morning, I was able to make some “tweaks” to the system for them and talk to them about what was important for them - pupils being late or absent was one area where things get very busy in the morning with parents calling in, so we’re looking at a time-based automated system to manage that. Tracking down absentees - automatically phoning their homes is another thing we’re looking into.

An immediate advantage was the ability to install the desk phones anywhere where they had existing Cat-5 Ethernet cabling. Moving an existing phone had always proved troublesome as it was done using standard telephone cabling back to the existing PBX - structured cabling hasn’t quite made it into the administration building of the school yet - but they did have a rather good Ethernet network already in-place and working. The phones we chose had 2 Ethernet ports and acted as an Ethernet switch, so could go in-line with the desktop PCs, and working to a budget, we chose a nice console type phone for the receptionist and more basic phones for everyone else. An inexpensive ATA was used to make an existing analogue DECT phone work.

Job done!

Or are we? Not quite - Looking to the future, we’re lookiing to migrate them over to a pure VoIP solution in the fullness of time - I’ve been monitoring their broadband usage for a few weeks now to make sure it’s going to be suitable, but the plan is to migrate them to a good business quality ISP with a router which can manage QoS/Traffic shaping, then we can migrate outgoing calls over the Internet connection (Incoming still via their BT lines), then once we’re confident it’s all working, port their number into the VoIP platform and we can then cancel the BT lines.

One thing I noticed almost right away was that their existing 3 analogue lines do very occasionally become all busy - especially in the mornings, so already we’re putting excess outgoing calls over the Internet, but migrating their ISP will give them a much more resilient connection to place all their calls over.

Will they save money? Interstingly, I’ve never sold VoIP on money saving, but rather on features and benefits, but in this case; Yes. Even if the call costs over the Internet were the same as they pay BT, what they’ll save is the cost of 3 BT phone lines, so £35 a month (approx). Not a lot, but in the long-run it’ll mount up. Of-course call-costs over the Internet are generally quite competitive with BT, so there will be savings to be made there - especially calling the teaching buildings of the school using their Internet connections rather than the PSTN.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Internet, Telecoms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.