Internet, Email & Telephones > Email & Communication Services

Moving Your Office Phone System To The Cloud

By Tim Watkins-Idle

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What we did

Outside help

We were able to take advantage of a scheme run by The Helplines Association for some free consultancy. We used this to refine ideas about what would work best, to assess some quotes from suppliers, and to do some of the actual configuration and installation. This was very helpful, and saved hundreds of pounds.

Hardware requirements

The biggest expense was for new handsets - we bought them very cheaply from an independent supplier; the downside is that they’re not as well supported, particularly regarding software for computer integration, but they work fine.

Another potentially significant expense is a new network switch. This is generally necessary because VOIP phones need a power supply, which is best delivered by Power over Ethernet (PoE) and so you need a PoE switch. Otherwise, you need to buy power adaptors for each handset, which adds to the cost and to also the number of wires under everyone’s desks. Eligible organisations can get very cheap Cisco switches through the technology donation programme administered by CTX as we did.

The system is managed (as all hosted VOIP systems are) by a “powerful” - but complicated - web-based console, which can do all sorts of thing, most of which we don’t need - at least yet. A large amount of time has to be spent learning how to use it.

What we have spent

A lot of the phone budget isn’t affected by the change - the bills for mobile internet, broadband and the odd analogue line continue as they were. I think that there will be a small saving on call charges, but it will be small. However, we were paying over £600 per year to maintain the old system. Now system maintenance is included in the monthly hosting charge and if a handset breaks we will have to get another one. The other major saving is of £1,000 per annum for line rental. We'll also save around £200 per year in electricity as the new system uses very little power.

The cost of the move to VOIP was a little over £2,500, so it will pay for itself in less than two years. It’s worth noting that without the free consultancy, we would probably have spent another £1,000 or so on the installation, configuration and training on the new system, and had we not been eligible for the CTX scheme we would also have needed to spend hundreds more on a new power over Ethernet switch.

What we have gained

We now have the ability to call and transfer calls from the office to staff outside seamlessly, whether it’s to someone working at home or even if they’re out and about, when their iPhone will take the call via a VOIP app.

Some staff are also considering using the phone software on their PC and do away with their handset altogether. Some software called 3CX seems to have all the functionality we require from a free software package, but it’s early days, and call quality doesn’t seem as good as from a handset.

What we learned

Extra expense

The transition is more expensive than you expect, with extra costs, such as new headsets, power adaptors for some of the phones which are not directly connected to the PoE switch, the disposal of old kit etc. Plan for some contingencies when budgeting.

Make sure before you start that you know your contractual notice period to your existing supplier(s) - if your organisation has signed up to a one-year notice period this will significantly affect when you can think about the change.

Plan for downtime

Porting numbers from the old system to the new is supposed to be relatively straightforward, but tends not to be. It isn’t always done on the day which is promised, and there is time - at least one hour, during office hours - when you are without any telephone connection at all. Ours were off for about two and a half hours. If telephones are essential to your operation, you will need to plan for this downtime.

Some analogue lines are still necessary, and they may be mixed up with the old telephone cabling. A month after the transition, I removed the old ISDN cabinets and our analogue lines stopped working, so I had to call in BT, at some expense, to reconnect them. This is why there are odd bits of telecoms kit on the walls of all but the newest offices, as people generally don’t take the risk of taking it out. The other option is to budget several hundred pounds for an engineer to come and remove all the old wiring and equipment.

Finally, keep your users happy - different sets of instructions for different users are helpful.

Future developments

One aspect of VOIP technology area which has yet to mature is that of computer-telephone integration (CTI). Currently there are a variety of applications which read telephone numbers and let you click on them to make a call through your phone, but they tend to be very hardware and software specific - Telify, for example, works with the Firefox browser and some handsets. Some handsets also come with software add-ons for Microsoft Outlook so you can call by clicking on a contact. Some are free downloads, but others are very expensive. In the future, I would hope for software for all makes of phone which reads numbers on all programs, but this is probably years away. I would be very happy to be proved wrong!

Conclusion

It’s still early days here, but things are working fine so far. We have new kit which works fine, and our on-going costs are much lower. There have been some problems with poor call quality, and failure of calls to connect, but these are few and far between. Finally, should the need arise, it would be possible to switch to a new VOIP supplier- the equipment can all be reprogrammed to work with other systems with (it is said!) relatively little fuss.