[voip] SIP newbie!

[synaesthesia]

Howdy,

 

Primary school is looking forward a little to the future, as we've a standard ol' ISDN system in place at the moment. Not a huge amount of money, but not far from 1.5k per year.

A brief look around SIP trunk providers and systems shows we can make significant savings but the numbers seem to either be too good to be true or I'm missing something important!

 

So let's say I was to put in place a PBX, hook up a bunch of Yealink phones that leaves me with getting those out into the wide world of telephony. So, SIP trunk required.

There's prices going from £13 per channel (BT) right down to a quid per channel. Gamma comes up quite often and I see a year old link with info £4.40 per channel per month. Plus £85 connection fee, £20 to port a number... is there anything else that should be added to that cost? There's DDI's involved but can't quite get my head around those fully, but believe we need 4 of those.

 

Does anyone have any pearls of wisdom, preferably with numbers? There's too much "Call/email us for details!" or fearmongery emails going round saying "You must act now, speak to us for details and prices" with very little actual information other than "We can save you money!"

[Edu-IT]

Fairly straight forward pricing and information from this supplier here. https://www.dial9.co.uk/voip-sip-trunks/pricing Edited May 22, 2019 by Edu-IT

[mavhc]

Nothing costs money with SIP really. Gamma gave me porting for free, DDIs don't cost phone companies anything. Calls are basically free. FreePBX is...free, and libre.

 

All I'm paying is £4.94/channel with Gamma, with 5000 free 01-03 numbers and 2000 uk mobile numbers per month per channel, which we're never going to pass.

 

Makes sense really, can get a mobile phone contract with unlimited voice, text, and 4GB data for £10/month, and that also funds the infrastructure VoIP people get for free

[PotNoodleTech]

One of the main benefits when we moved was the contracts had so much bundled free minutes etc that we don't actually spend much money on calls any more, most of it is included minutes.

[TechMonkey]

Our PBX upgrade project is one of the few IT projects I have run where I have been shocked and amazed at actual tangible cost savings right there in black and white.

 

So things to look at are what others have said really

- How many calls you want able to come in or go out. Some companies do prioritisation or even lines that are dedicated to out or in. This does not include internal, office to office calls. We get charged £1 a channel.

- How many DDI numbers you want. DDIs are just a different number someone can dial to get straight through to an office or person, rather than have to fight through the receptionist. We get charged £1 a number.

- Call charges. Some companies charge a higher channel cost but bundle free calls in. You need to do the maths and work out which way works out best for you. Don't forget you are still paying that higher figure over the Summer and your holidays when no one is really making calls. So get a years worth of call data and see if you can work out what that would cost using the two methods, how many minutes do you need to call to break even and are you anywhere near that consistently.

- Portal/user interface. I have only used one VOIP provider so I don't know if this is standard but we have access to our portal where we can redirect where calls go in an emergency. So in our power outage procedures one of the IT departments tasks is to get on that portal and direct the main number to our back up line and some of the DDIs to mobiles. That may not be a major consideration but I would count it as a loss if we moved to a company that could not do that.

 

Actual connection is a biggie is your current pipe big enough to handle the added traffic or do you need a second, dedicated line. Do you want your calls suffering because everyone is streaming Wimbledon or that one pupil is downloading an ISO? We have a BT line and got SIP turned on without any problems and no extra cost but I have heard others say that they had a fight and BT tried to charge them for it to force the company to use BT as their SIP provider. I've not done the testing but I don't think VOIP adds that much extra traffic (depending on your current baseline obviously).

 

Apart from that go forth and create savings.

 

EDIT: Maybe as a helpful guide would people be willing to put an average monthly call time and average bill if they know? I'm really interested in the difference between companies that bundle minutes and those that offer PAYG.

Edited May 24, 2019 by TechMonkey

[synaesthesia]

Perfect, huge thanks all. School's budget is amazingly tight and were not expecting huge savings from the "mere" £110 monthly they spend currently. That's a significant saving to them over a year even if they overestimate usage!

[TechMonkey]

Well I think we slashed our phone bill by about a 5th, very rough guesstimate but I'm sure our bills were around the 5-600 pound area and we are now down to around £100 a month.

 

In fact I did the quick sums and for the past 12 months (May 18 to April 19) we had an average call time of 40 hours 46 Minutes and average cost of £128.04. Or a total call time of 489hrs 13mins for £1536.47.

[mavhc]

Don't pay for DDI, that's a scam. Phone company aren't paying anything to have them.

 

7000 free minutes per month = 5.8 hours/working/day if you go over that you might addicted

 

Only cost is £5/month per simultaneous channel. Handy if you can QoS the internet connection, but voice always <100 kbps, so 1000 calls on a 100 Mbps connection. Reserve 1% per 10 calls.

[Edu-IT]

We pay about £80 a month, averaging about 30 hours a month on calls.

[psumner1992]

We took on the project of looking to find ways of saving money on our telephony and the same as you the price looked too good to be true, but after nearly 2 years with Gamma and 3CX I can happily say it was the best decision we ever made and the inclusive pricing is exactly what they list.