VOIP PBX solutions for small business

In the last years I have moved office twice and over the life of my business I have had four formal offices not including working from home for the first couple of years.

In my first office I outfitted it with a PABX solution with 6 extensions and 3 rotary lines.

The solution cost about $3500 to install and was way over my needs at the time. In fact we never used all the extensions nor the features.

In my next two offices I decided to be sensible and only install the lines I needed and the phones I needed so I had one line in for voice and one line in for fax / Internet. It's expensive enough paying for all the line rentals alone.

The Telemarketers all used Skype for their outgoing calls and for a while we trialled SkypeIn numbers (local numbers that are routed to your Skype Account). But we found the quality of the service to be significantly lacking in quality. We also found that in an open plan office answering calls on your computer was counterproductive to getting work done.

Now as I have grown and I have more people working for me and we are on the phone more I have a much more complex telecommunications need.

At the moment we only have two lines, but they are single lines, we can't transfer between lines and we can't put people on hold.

We use a couple of disparate systems for telecommunications too. We used to use an external voicemail to email solution for the primary line. So when the line was busy or not answered a virtual answering machine would answer the line and then email me the call as an audio file.

Then in the last month we have been trialling a Live Operator Solution where an actual person in a call Centre answers the call and depending on the enquiry sends us an email with the call details or answers their basic questions on products, directs them to one of our websites and then emails us the details.

We also use a Virtual fax machine where our incoming faxes are actually sent to us as an email. So far I have never set up properly the email to fax solution on our network, but this is a priority for this month.

All these solutions are not expensive, but they are not overly cheap.

We generally spend all up between $400 - $600 a month on telecommunications excluding web services and access, so reducing this cost by a few hundred dollars a month will be a good starting point.

Of all these solutions the only one I am keen on keeping external to the business is the External Live Operator. The others I want to bring in house in an integrated telecommunications solution

In analysing my needs I stripped it back to a basic need for a telephone system with:

• Multiple Lines in and Out;


• Low Cost Calls to outbound numbers;


• A single main line in for my 1300 Number;


• Direct lines and phone numbers for individual staff members;


• Voicemail for those lines;


• Virtual faxing both in an out;


• Physical fax machine for those times when a virtual fax is not appropriate;


• Transfer calls between extensions;


• Call Holding;


• Future IVR (where the initial call is answered by a machine and then routed IE If you would like support press 1 etc);


• Ability to route calls to external locations (sales people and telemarketers sometime want to work off site);


• Initially 4 lines but expandable easily up to 16 lines.

So there are a lot of requirements I need and there is one big requirement to reduce costs and support the growth of the business.

Trying to research the VOIP PBX solutions out there is a task in itself, and even for a highly technical person there is just so much confusion.

In the end after hours and hours of research I have settled on an all Linksys solution set which provides everything I need in a couple of simple boxes and should be simple to install.

It's all kept together by a Linksys PBX SPA 9000 which acts as the PBX along with a couple of VOIP telephones a new router and a couple of VOIP lines through IINet.

The hardware will all arrive this week and the setup will start next week.

The hardware is cosing less than $800 and I am really keen to discover just how well the solution will work.

Doing the ROI on the money, I discovered I could save immediately about $200 a month on the various services we have not to mention the call costs which in some cases will be reduced to almost nil!

Not all of the above requirements are fulfilled straight away, but I wanted to install all of this in steps and get used to it first.

So once it's installed I will discuss the process involved in installing it and how it all works together.