atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Hosted VoIP vs. On Prem PBX Debate

I had a customer with a Panasonic system. Fate struck and they had a fire that destroyed 1/2 their building! Now they needed a new system that could have 1/2 of the extensions in a remote location and the other half on the part of the building that was behind the firewall and only had minor damage (smoke, water, electricity) well, not totaled.

The solution was to put a premise IP system in the repaired facility, and link the 8 extensions via IP to the mother ship. They paid one price for installation, two internet accounts, and 18 new IP phones with the ability for WiFi or wired access. The giant cable run going to the plant that melted, was replaced with a pair of network cables and an access point fed all the plant Wifi phones and paging. Any of 8 users can take a system phone home and link back to the main phone system...the 12-16 character random password keeps intruders off the system. They occupied the second site for almost a year before moving back into the burned out section. Now it's back to a single site with 2 wired and 18 WiFi phones, 2 paging speakers, and 2 911 sites from the main system.

The infrastructure is still intact for the half of the building that was behind the firewall, but WiFi was my friend and I didn't have to convert the jacks to Cat-5e 8-ping. However, I did have to convert the two wired phones (lobby, kitchen) to the new system and on the POE switch.

My office has an extension from their system. At a glance, I can look at the BLF and see if anything is broken. Someday I'll probably remove my extenson...but I'm not in any hurry.

If companies are not in the Cloud yet, they will be. Brian is correct

I talked to a person with an old Nortel. He has 4 lines from the CLEC and about 20 phones around the office and warehouse. Most of the warehouse phones only have phone wiring.
The customer doesn't care about any features. Just wants the phone to ring and intercom the office. Hard to sell him on VoIP. Monthy costs are sure to go up since you have to pay for every device.
But his current PBX really needs to go to the recycling bin.

Our office doesn't install new premise systems, only hosted at this point. We have a handful of legacy premise PBX systems out there that we still support.

I looked into the upgrade path for Nortel sets via E-Metrotel. Wow. Here's an example of someone who gets their hooks into you and never lets go. Two year old 6.0 software eol'd 12/2023, But wait! There's more. An annual fee IIRC and it never stops because, as it says: If you don't upgrade, you have no support. https://documentation.emetrotel.com/release-7-0-update-process/

It seems to me that the annual fee was pretty pricey.

The good news is an MICS or CICS Nortel system is probably pennies on the dollar.

Carl