Small office phone setup
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There's been a lot of talk of elastic and asterisk lately - so I have a question.
I have an office with 10 extensions in it on an old intertel system. Could I easily replace it with an elastic or asterick phone system and VOIP phones?
I have a 15/2 cable internet connection (don't want to upgrade it) - would this be good enough to support SIP trunks?
I also have a fax line at this office for a traditional fax machine I'd rather leave in place - would a SIP to POTS be OK for this, or would I need to continue paying for one POTS line?
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@Dashrender said:
There's been a lot of talk of elastic and asterisk lately - so I have a question.
I have an office with 10 extensions in it on an old intertel system. Could I easily replace it with an elastic or asterick phone system and VOIP phones?
I have a 15/2 cable internet connection (don't want to upgrade it) - would this be good enough to support SIP trunks?
I also have a fax line at this office for a traditional fax machine I'd rather leave in place - would a SIP to POTS be OK for this, or would I need to continue paying for one POTS line?
This is easily done with an Elastix/FreePBX system. Your existing connection is plenty!
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As far as the fax line, you'll want to keep a traditional POTS line for it. Faxing over VoIP is VERY finicky.
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Would it make more sense to just invest in an e-Fax system?
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I believe the average bandwidth for calls is 100kbps both up and down for each concurrent call. So considering you have 10 users, even if you had every person on the phone at the same time, which is highly unlikely, you have plenty of bandwidth.
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Technically you could get an analog telephone adapter and hook the fax machine up to your PBX (register as a SIP extension) or just port the number to your SIP provider. It can work well if you have enough bandwidth, but as A.J. suggested, it may be best to look at eFax here if you can.
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This is a perfect opportunity to go to VoIP.
I have a 15/2 cable internet connection (don't want to upgrade it) - would this be good enough to support SIP trunks?
It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.
I also have a fax line at this office for a traditional fax machine I'd rather leave in place - would a SIP to POTS be OK for this, or would I need to continue paying for one POTS line?
You can continue using the POTS line if you want but Asterisk now supports a single fax line for free on various distributions. So you could use the PBX to handle faxes, or give each individual user their own dedicated line which emails the fax to them.
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@ajstringham said:
Would it make more sense to just invest in an e-Fax system?
Not at this time as that would require the purchase of a scanner, etc..
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@Dashrender said:
@ajstringham said:
Would it make more sense to just invest in an e-Fax system?
Not at this time as that would require the purchase of a scanner, etc..
You don't have some MFP at this location?
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If it helps, I have a fax machine used from a HP Officejet printer hooked up to a Grandstream HandyTone 701 adapter registered to a cloud-hosted Elastix PBX, and faxes work well on their 50/5 cable connection.
But I agree with Chad about the 2 Mbps upload being a potential bottleneck.
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@Dashrender even if you do have to buy a scanner, those are a couple hundred dollars. I assume people have to scan stuff in at least sometimes now as it is, no? e-Fax is more about receiving faxes than the sending.
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@ajstringham said:
@Dashrender said:
@ajstringham said:
Would it make more sense to just invest in an e-Fax system?
Not at this time as that would require the purchase of a scanner, etc..
You don't have some MFP at this location?
I don't have a location to send the scan other than over the VPN to my office, not desirable. (and the local drive is not a valid target - super old MFP).
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@NetworkNerd said:
If it helps, I have a fax machine used from a HP Officejet printer hooked up to a Grandstream HandyTone 701 adapter registered to a cloud-hosted Elastix PBX, and faxes work well on their 50/5 cable connection.
But I agree with Chad about the 2 Mbps upload being a potential bottleneck.
Yeah, the up is the only potential problem. If someone is on the phone and tries sending a large email attachment, you could have issues. Is this a DSL connection at that location?
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@Dashrender said:
@ajstringham said:
@Dashrender said:
@ajstringham said:
Would it make more sense to just invest in an e-Fax system?
Not at this time as that would require the purchase of a scanner, etc..
You don't have some MFP at this location?
I don't have a location to send the scan other than over the VPN to my office, not desirable. (and the local drive is not a valid target - super old MFP).
What is the make and model of the machine? You could probably scan to email and that would work well.
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@ajstringham said:
@Dashrender even if you do have to buy a scanner, those are a couple hundred dollars. I assume people have to scan stuff in at least sometimes now as it is, no? e-Fax is more about receiving faxes than the sending.
You would be incorrect, they do not scan - our EHR supports uploads, true, but they prefer to have barcoded fax pages sent into their system, and this is what we do.
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@coliver said:
It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.
It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.
I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.
It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.
I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.
You could probably get away with it if it is just 3 calls... but again if someone starts listening to Pandora while another person is sending some sort of attachment you may run into issues.
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@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.
It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.
I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.
You could probably get away with it if it is just 3 calls... but again if someone starts listening to Pandora while another person is sending some sort of attachment you may run into issues.
I'll kill pandora and all other streaming services at the sonicwall.
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.
It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.
I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.
You could probably get away with it if it is just 3 calls... but again if someone starts listening to Pandora while another person is sending some sort of attachment you may run into issues.
I'll kill pandora and all other streaming services at the sonicwall.
Good luck I would have a riot on my hands if we attempted to do that here...
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@Dashrender said:
@ajstringham said:
@Dashrender even if you do have to buy a scanner, those are a couple hundred dollars. I assume people have to scan stuff in at least sometimes now as it is, no? e-Fax is more about receiving faxes than the sending.
You would be incorrect, they do not scan - our EHR supports uploads, true, but they prefer to have barcoded fax pages sent into their system, and this is what we do.
Wow. That's really weird...well, all in all, it might be easiest to spend the little bit of money it takes for a POTS line to maintain it just for the fax.
