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los123

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VOip appropriete for small office of 8 employees ?

  I am just starting to read into voIP and it's advantages. I help an office of 6 employees. The manager of the office was complaining about their high phone bills every mont which got me thinking about possibly implementing some kind of voIP solution for them.
But there are still some aspects of it I am trying to get sorted out. Currently they have a Bellsouth PSTN system. Also they have DSL for their broadband connection, it's about 1 down and about 270 up.

Do they need bandwith better than DSL to have constant high quality voice conversations?
Would they still need their Bellsouth PSTN system in order to call other PSTN customers, or could they do away with Bellsouth alltogether(save for the one line the DSL is on)  and go with some voIP service company  and still be able to make voice calls to PSTN users?
If they were to  go with a voIP service, I take it they would have to get new phone numbers?
And as far as phone numbers, do they have to pay for each phone number that they have if they used a voIP service company? Would they need multi line IP phones to utilize having several phone numbers with their voIP?
Generally, how does a voIP service company assign a telephone number to the customer utilizing the service. If a PSTN user wants to call the user using the voIP service, do they just pick up their PSTN phone and dial the number of the voIP user?
Is voIP really practical for an office such as this one?  Thanks.

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Lee W, MVP
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paddyhaig

asterisk@home is the way to go. It's easy to setup for people not overly familiar with Linux and it's free.
You just download the ISO and burn it onto a CD, pop it into a spare PC.
This PC's harddrive will be wiped and the OS will be replaced by CentOS Linux and the Asterisk PBX software.
The is some pretty good documentation on the asterisk@home website on how to set it up.
You would then need a a termination provider, I use JunctionNetworks. Very cheap and they work well.
You would probably also need three Digium TDM40B PCI cards. Call up Digium and ask them, they will explain
how they work. (FXS ports). A little research and away you go.
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ASKER

 Is it not possible for a company to buy all the equipment themselves so as not to pay any company any monthy fee for use of their VoIP network. In other words, couldn't I just purchase the gateways and servers and just use my T1 or T3 and not have to pay any company a monthly fee?
Who's going to give you the phone numbers that work from any standard POTS line as well as VoIP?  You have to get that from a company.
Yes it is possible to an extent, A fairly decent server is needed. The more powerful the better. A digium Card or Cards.
A T1 or DS3 delivering PRI channels and data. You would also need to lease some did's (Phone number's) from your provider.
You would need to work out a long distance calling arraingement with your T1/DS3 provider.
It's probably cheaper, using a Cable connection or data T1 and a third party termination provider like JunctionNetworks.