What’s IT all about?

Installations of VoIP PBX’s are rarely as simple as you might think, but not for the reasons you may assume. I attended one recently, not as the primary consultant but as an extra pair of hands, and it was obvious pretty quickly that the tricky aspects of the project were the ancillary jobs. Installing and setting up the PBX itself was quite straightforward.

Firstly, a bit of background. The situation was ideal for a VoIP PBX installation as the company were relocating to bigger and better premises, and so needed to sort out a new phone system anyway. Also, the company MD had recently come into contact with the owner of Concordiax, whose PBX I am now reselling. Their new premises had been stripped almost bare by the previous occupants, to the extent that the CAT5 patch panel had been removed, leaving a mass of cables poking out of a wall. And that’s where the fun started, albeit before I got involved. By the time I arrived, a couple of days into the job, a new patch panel had been installed, necessitating the time-consuming process of determining which wall port terminated where.

Also by this point in time the phone lines had been installed. The company had opted for a BT Featureline service, where a number of analogue lines (4 in this case) are serviced by a single number, and incoming/outgoing calls cascade through busy lines until an available one is reached. This setup required the use of a Digium TDM400P card with 4 FXO modules (see here) in the server that the customer had already acquired.

The PBX software had been installed and partially configured by the Concordiax consultant when I arrived. One of the staff members had been shown how to set up new extensions, as one of the objectives of a successful installation is to make the company self-sufficient for day-to-day administration such as MACDs (Moves, Add, Changes & Deletes). However, the consultant had only just started to assemble and configure the 20 or so SIP telephones that the customer had chosen. The selected phones were Aastras, mainly 9133i’s but with a couple of 480i’s for the receptionist and directors. I hadn’t seen these phones in action before and must say that they are very good value for money (the 9133i’s can be found for under £100). They have very good speakers and microphones for hands-free operation, a built in 2-port switch to allow you to ‘daisy-chain’ your PC, look and feel pretty solid, and have a pretty intuitive and effective web interface. Definitely worth a look if you are considering buying a SIP phone, and there is a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) version too.

For much more than the 20 or so phones we were configuring, I would seriously consider an unattended install. It was just about bearable doing them by hand, but I think we were getting close to the point at which it would have been quicker to set up a TFTP configuration server.

Top tip

For smaller installations, consider using fixed IP addresses, and align them with your extension numbers. For example, extension 201 is at IP address 192.168.2.201. That way the user can access the basic configuration easily or, should there be a problem, you can easily interrogate the web interface of the phone without having to work out what IP address it’s on.

Once the phones were configured and on desks, a number of test were run to ensure voice quality was OK and that outgoing calls could be made. A basic dial plan was setup for this purpose, although that would obviously be amended to ensure that the most cost effective route was being used at all times.

ADSL had still not been enabled on the line to be used for internet telephony at that point, so the PBX was effectively in ‘POTS’ only mode (although, of course, internal voice traffic was carried on the data network). However, it was interesting to see just how happy the customer was with their new phone system all the same. Instead of a pretty basic PBX with very limited functionality, they now had a system that could offer all the features of a top-end ‘traditional’ PBX. During the last couple of hours the consultant was able to setup a number of features, including ring groups and a time-sensitive IVR. I believe that even if no calls were ever made via an ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Provider) the customer would remain very happy with their new system.

All in all an interesting experience bringing home what is good about the PBX as well as what is important to a typical customer.