Late in August a long time customer contacted me and asked for a quote to move their existing phone system to a new location “before Christmas”. 3 days later a second contact in the office said “the office is moving in coming weeks but the retail shop is staying put for the moment” at which point I strongly suggested a meeting and then after arranging that for the Friday, a 3rd person said the following day “we need to book you for Saturday week…” I thought to myself “well, that escalated quickly.”
Due to a legacy arrangement with the SIP lines, an Avaya IP Office was used as a SIP to BRI converter in front of their Panasonic NCP-1000. We often use an Avaya as a converter and it works invisibly as well as providing additional functionality on the front end such as voicemail with email, easier auto attendants, etc. Due to a number of recent changes in the business and the segregation of calls to different lines of business they were really getting to the limit of the existing Panasonic system and either it or the Avaya would need an upgrade to support remote extensions in the shop so I suggested an updated system with considerably more functionality as it would only be a small portion of the relocation cost. Contrasting on-premise and hosted systems showed that on-premise would be more economical for the customer and would provide the features they needed including the ability to have staff work from home in the event another COVID lockdown prevented them from attending the office. Since many of the staff wear glasses they find it easier to have them work from home rather than struggling with foggy glasses.
The Yeastar P550 would be more than adequate with capacity for 50 phones and 25 simultaneous calls but they are hard to come by at the moment so the fallback was the newly released P-Series Software Edition that starts at 100 phones and 25 simultaneous calls. The intention was to run the P-Series SE on one of the customers’ existing servers under Hyper-V but they are too old to support it so the fallback was to run it on a Dell Micro PC which seems to be working fine for the 25 phones they have at the moment. Very low processor load.
Despite the very short timeframe the new comms room was built and equipped with air conditioning, the data cabinet procured, consolidation point installed to join the existing cabling and a few copper pairs from the MDF for the existing NBN connection, replacement router and network switch since the existing ones would still be required in the short term at the retail shop and the phones deployed in both locations. It was then a simple matter to deregister the SIP trunk at the old location, register it at the new location and they were up and running.
This shows the flexibility in moving circuits around and being able to connect remote sites easily.
For your next relocation, contact us and see what we can do for you. If you need your move “escalated quickly” we will do our best to accommodate you.
