Inflow Communications Deploys a ShoreTel VOIP phone system for Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort

Inflow Communications worked with Mt. Hood Meadows to deploy a ShoreTel Unified Communications system.

The problems that had to be solved:

1. Mt. Hood Meadows had an antiquated Toshiba business phone system that was years beyond its useful life
2. Cost savings was very important (when is it not?)
3. They needed a better way to intelligently route calls from their guests to the appropriate department and employee.  Previously, guests might get transferred into a big black hole.  Guests don’t like this and it’s not conducive for business.

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Unified Communications and Mobility – The Death of the VOIP Handset Part 2

ShoreTel has just released their “ShoreTel Mobility” suite of products. This provides the following functionality:

• Your Smart Phone becomes a secure SIP VOIP Extension off your corporate PBX over any Wi-Fi network (home, corporate, public hot spot, etc) or your mobile carrier’s data network. The “hand-off” between the cellular, 3G, or Wi-Fi networks happens automatically without dropping the call.

Think about the cost reduction opportunities here. How many mobile phones do you manage in your business? What if you could significantly reduce the mobile plans on each phone? What about employees whom travel internationally? What if they could become a SIP VOIP endpoint to your PBX and completely avoid international roaming? Do the math, it could be a lot.

Perhaps it’s enough savings to allow you to start migrating away from that tank of a legacy PBX to VOIP. Notice I said “migrate” and not “forklift”. Inflow Communications can integrate a VOIP phone system platform to your legacy PBX, deploy mobile integration to your smart phone users, provide Unified Communications tools to all your employees (regardless of what phone system they’re on), and we can do it at a pace that makes the most sense for your organization.

We’re happy to do a free technical and economic analysis / design for you.

Beyond incredible savings and a very quick ROI, ShoreTel’s mobility solution offers a lot of features. Tune into my next blog to learn more.

Travis Dillard is the President of Inflow Communications. Inflow Communications is a Portland, Oregon-based company that designs, deploys, and supports enterprise-class VOIP, business phone systems, and Unified Communications solutions to businesses throughout Oregon, Washington, and California.

Can I use SIP if my PBX is behind a NAT firewall?

Yes, using SIP registration, this is possible.

Two Types of SIP Providers

In my experience, I’ve come across two types of organizations who sell SIP service.

Provider 1

This is a traditional LEC or CLEC who offers SIP as a “me too” service—or in addition to their traditional analog lines, PRIs, Internet T1′s, MPLS, etc. Often they will require that you purchase their T1, provision 23 to 30 SIP trunks on it, and charge you the same as a standard PRI. Additionally, they can’t / won’t offer the additional flexibility of SIP trunks (porting numbers across calling areas, fail over, etc.) I haven’t seen very many of these products sold by agents or direct sales reps. It makes sense to me. Why sell an unknown (SIP) when you can sell the good old all mighty PRI? After all, there are no cost savings advantages. Note, this is me generalizing. It’s not the case with all SIP providers. In fact, I’ve recently worked with one that requires you to use their T1, but will offer the porting flexibility and cost savings benefits of SIP (.01/minute LD, 40+SIP trunks on the T1, etc).

No wonder less than 10% of businesses have moved over to SIP. It’s not because it doesn’t work, it’s because they don’t know about it! Your average telecommunications sales representative isn’t educating their customers.

Provider 2

The second type of SIP provider breaks the traditional mold of telecommunications providers. They can offer SIP trunks over your own bandwidth, can port and source numbers from most areas of the country, can provide fail-over, and are usually MUCH less than your traditional CLECs and LECs. [ read more ]

SIP Trunks Without an IP PBX

Can this be done? We’re doing it. By using third party equipment, we can terminate SIP trunks and convert back to traditional PRI signaling. This extends the benefits of SIP trunking to those that don’t want to upgrade their PBX yet.

Don’t get me wrong – if your organization needs to upgrade their phone system, but doesn’t have the money, by all means use the 40% – 70% SAVINGS associated with SIP trunks to justify the purchase. We’ll often wrap the phone system acquisition into a lease, convert the customer to SIP trunks, and still save the customer money AFTER the lease payment.

Sorry, back to converting SIP trunks to traditional connections…So far it works great. Depending on the scenario, it’s solved some other issues too. In our testing, we’ve realized that  this SIP conversion  equipment drastically speeds up the fail-over between two Internet connections. That’s because this equipment negotiates between the two Internet connections and reestablishes SIP trunking on the backup should the primary fail. In some cases, we were on a live call when we killed the primary Internet connection and didn’t drop the call! Other times we dropped the call but the SIP trunks were back up within seconds. Ask your traditional PRI provider to do that! [ read more ]