VOIP Growing pains

As I mentioned previously, we recently installed a VOIP phone system at work, based on Asterisk.

Actually love it quite a bit.  I think that for our needs, once we straighten out the few glitches that we have with it, it will work so much better than our previous phone system.

Many of the “glitches” that we are finding we didn’t find with our old phone system.  But you know why?  Because the old phone system was created about the time that President Abraham Lincoln was born.  Meaning, it was old.  It did not have any of the features of the new phone system, except for voicemail.

So some of the growing pains we are feeling are caused by getting some of these new “neat features” to work correctly.

Such as:

• Remote phones.  Theoretically, a user will be able to pick their phone up from their office, take it anywhere in the world that has a high speed connection that can be accessed via an Ethernet connection and plug the phone in and they should have the same phone number that they had in their office.  They should also be able to call back into the office at no charge.
• Virtual fax machine that delivers faxes via PDF.  Works fantastically.
• Built in conference calling.  The phone system allows you to create “conferences” that people can call into, like the conferencing feature available from Gotomeeting and various telco providers.  This feature works really well too.

The current problems we have are some echo on certain calls and the fact that remote phones don’t currently work for incoming calls.  They work for OUTGOING calls, but for incoming, they go straight to voicemail.

Little glitches, but annoying nonetheless.

Our vendor is working to resolve the issues, and I have complete faith that the issues will be resolved soon. 

Even with the issues we have now, it is a so much better phone system than we had previously, it doesn’t even really compare.

 

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