Phones in Classrooms

[JATSO]

Morning All,

 

Our Head Teacher wants to put a portable phone in all the classrooms and some other areas that only have internal access.

 

Our current system is an NEC SL1100 we have 3 external Lines and 10 Terminals 5 of which have external access and the other 5 only have internal access.

 

We want to increase the number of internal access terminals using portable handsets by 17.

 

We have been advised by our current supplier to upgrade our system at quite a cost and was wondering if anyone on Edugeek has had to change their system.

 

Thanks

[TechMonkey]

If you mean change to a whole new system, yes. We chose 3CX. You license per simultaneous call, so if you have 3 internal calls and 5 external calls at once, you would need enough licenses to cover those 8 calls. When you look at calls it is surprising how few calls happen at once though. They don't make any distinction between internal and external extensions, you can just restrict an extension to not being able to make external calls.

 

Biggest cost for us was handsets. You do have the option to use softphones and the IT department has gone over to softphones completely, so no handset just a headset and the 3CX client.

[paulellam]

We had to expand our SL1100 system and we had to a buy a box with an expansion card in (it looks just like the SL1100 unit.) I dont think it was very expensive.

[DGardiner]

If you mean change to a whole new system, yes. We chose 3CX. You license per simultaneous call, so if you have 3 internal calls and 5 external calls at once, you would need enough licenses to cover those 8 calls. When you look at calls it is surprising how few calls happen at once though. They don't make any distinction between internal and external extensions, you can just restrict an extension to not being able to make external calls.

 

Biggest cost for us was handsets. You do have the option to use softphones and the IT department has gone over to softphones completely, so no handset just a headset and the 3CX client.

 

Id echo this, Our trust 3cx instance covers 10 schools now our average peak concurent calls is about 6 with bursts to about 10.

[JATSO]

What sort of handsets did you buy?

[DGardiner]

What sort of handsets did you buy?

 

Yealink T48S (£150) for the school offices, and heads where they wanted.

 

Yealink T40G/T42G (£50) Everywhere else

 

Usually order our phones from voipon, they will send you the MAC addresses on order so they can be preconfigured in the system for auto provision by the time the phones arrive its just a game of plugin and go

[Chaniel]

Is your current system using ISDN lines or SIP? ISDN is being phased out by 2025 so you should be looking to migrate anyway if you're using it.

 

I can't personally speak for 3CX but I have heard good things. Supported handsets are here: https://www.3cx.com/sip-phones/. The Yealink phones can be inexpensive and decent, ranges from £35-100+ per handset depending on functionality. Yealink T40G is about £45 ea.

Edited July 8, 2020 by Chaniel

[JATSO]

Is your current system using ISDN lines or SIP? ISDN is being phased out by 2025 so you should be looking to migrate anyway if you're using it.

 

I can't personally speak for 3CX but I have heard good things. Supported handsets are here: https://www.3cx.com/sip-phones/. The Yealink phones can be inexpensive and decent, ranges from £35-100+ per handset depending on functionality. Yealink T40G is about £45 ea.

 

I thought it was ISDN, but in a conversation yesterday with the sales rep from the current provider I thought he said SIP( i will check) but he said we would need upgrade from NEC SL1100 to the NEC SL2100 and they would utilize some of our bandwidth from our broadband or provide a router and the extra phones we want.

[johnathanadams]

FreePBX or 3CX are great, handsets are about £30 or £40 if you want gigabit passthrough, should save about 80% of your costs

[Chris_Cook]

We've also replaced our old system with 3cx at one school. Its was about 60-70 internal phones, and 5-10 external lines. Not too difficult, especially if you work with a supplier on setting it up.

 

We got Yealink phones, T46 for offices and reception (and 2 blf field extensions for reception). T41 and T42 phones for other users depending on if we daisy chained the PC from the phone.

 

You will also want to think about POE switches and data points where you put the phones.

 

Its worth doing though. You have can have control of the system, and the cost savings can be really good.

[mikewlisd]

I self implemented FreePBX system. I knew nothing about VOIP before starting, but am quite technical. We were using cloud based SIP system Jive, which previously we could qualify for federal discount, The discount went away and the phone cost was the driver for looking at new phones system. I looked at a few including 3cx but I was keen to have on premise control. We were lucky enough to be able to keep all our Jive Polycom phones, so zero phone cost was a great start.

 

I learnt all I needed to implement from crosstalk solutions excellent youtube series of FreePBX videos. I set out doing a proof of concept, using an old Dell optiplex 790 (still running our live FreePBX 3 years later).

 

We contracted crosstalk solution for a once over before we went live and made a few minor changes, but good peace of mind. The number port was the most stressful part of it and didn't go smoothly, mainly because Jive subcontract out the SIP Trunk service to someone else so took a while to trace down where our number was registered and get it released. Luckily we did it over summer so super low call volume.

 

We reduced phone cost going from a fix monthly per extension to per minute usage billing. We went from ~$600/month to ~$70/month. We now have full control and ownership over our configuration. We do use a SIP Trunk service from Flowroute. We have 4 DIDs but only use 1 main number and IVR to direct calls. There are no restrictions on number of outbound / inbound calls (lines) we just pay per minute.

 

I plan to upgrade to Sangoma hardware appliance and PBXAct to get all of the additional modules for future expanding. I am also going to re-look at sipstation/faxstation for fax support, because T38 is a big black hole I could waste alot of time in.

Edited October 1, 2020 by mikewlisd