The Anywhere Business Phone System

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Your company’s IPedge phone system can reach as far as AT&T’s IP network.

Toshiba’s IPedge® business communication system has been certified with AT&T IP Flexible Reach SIP Trunking.  AT&T offers SIP trunking on its Managed Internet Service (MIS) and virtual private network (VPN) service, which run over AT&T’s global IP network. The IPedge IP server has built-in support for SIP, so you don’t need a gateway device to connect to AT&T’s SIP trunks.

This news might sound like acronym soup, but it’s great news for any organization that has more than one location.  SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is the key that enables VoIP services to work across locations, even worldwide, over a service provider’s managed IP network, such as AT&T’s.

SIP is an industry standard intentionally designed to be flexible and adaptable, but there are many flavors as a result of the standard’s inherent flexibility.  As a result, not every SIP trunking provider interworks seamlessly with every IP PBX.  In the haste to get to market early, some IP PBX vendors delivered SIP solutions that had interoperability snafus, requiring lots of troubleshooting and custom configuration — and causing lots of frustration for customers.

Certified interoperability between Toshiba’s IPedge platform and AT&T SIP trunking means you have assured interworking and new options for extending the phone system outside company walls.  Consider the possibilities:

  • A call to your office number could ring at your desk phone, then your cell phone, then remote office, etc., until it finds you wherever you are, at home or on the road.
  • From an airport, a hotel room, a Wi-Fi hot spot or anywhere, you could change these forwarding instructions as you change locations or form temporary project teams.
  • You could collaborate with distant colleagues, customers or suppliers using shared Web browsing, desktop collaboration and Web conferencing, all linked to your email and voice mail.
  • You could log in to use your personal communications features, message stores, contact lists, preferences, etc. from any desktop or mobile IP phone, which doesn’t even have to be a telephone.
  • Your company could publish local telephone numbers (virtual telephone numbers, or VTNs) for the various geographic locations it serves yet handle all those calls in one preferred location.

At the same time, SIP trunking reduces communications cost by extending the value of what you already have.  For instance:

    • A single IPedge server can support users in multiple sites across town or across the country.
    • Calls between locations can run over your existing IP intranet, reducing long-distance costs.
    • Converging voice and data on the network reduces infrastructure costs.
    • SIP trunks use trunk bandwidth very efficiently, so you can run more traffic on the same T1.

      What’s not to like?  Think globally, act locally. 
      You can with Toshiba, AT&T and SIP trunking —
      and you know it will work.
Filed Under: Best of Both Worlds, Full Feature Phone Systems, IPedge, Mobility, Networking systems, VoIP Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In-Building Wireless Made Easy

November 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Small offices or mid-sized businesses can have affordable wireless extensions for IPedge or Strata CIX communications systems.

If you own or work for a small to mid-sized business (SMB), this scenario might sound familiar…
The work isn’t tied to a desk, but the phone system is, for the most part.  Staff could really benefit from the ability to roam the building without losing touch with incoming calls and having to retrieve them from voicemail.  Everybody agrees it would be great to have in-building wireless communications, but:

  • The facilities manager assumes the system would be too costly for the small number of users, or if truly affordable, too underpowered to support all the users who want to use it.
  • Users wonder about coverage throughout the facility, voice quality, how often they will have to recharge their batteries, or whether there will be static or interference when others nearby use their phones.
  • The IT manager definitely wants no complicated infrastructure deployment, and worries about possible interference with BlueTooth and WiFi services.
  • The security officer is concerned that confidential conversations could be overheard by hackers sitting out in the parking lot with packet-sniffing devices.

Toshiba’s IP4000 wireless mobility system answers all those concerns – and makes in-building mobility achievable and affordable for even the smallest sites.

Wireless made affordable for two or 200 users.

This cost-effective, in-building wireless solution can scale from one to 200 handsets.  If you need just a few cordless phones for a small office, get the starter kit, which includes one base station and three phones with chargers.  Then grow as you go.  You can register up to 30 handsets to a single base station, up to 40 base stations per system, up to 200 handsets total.

A quality user experience

Wireless SIP DECT telephones with backlit, color screens enable you take your desk phone functionality with you as you roam down the hall, to the cafeteria or conference room, or around the warehouse.  The voice-enabled speaker and microphone allows for crystal clear speech. The Li-ion battery supports more than 20 hours talk time and 200 hours standby time in normal operations.

The handsets have other cool features, like a back-lit keypad (for all those times you’re dialing in the dark), three soft keys, four programmable feature keys, a headset jack, high-quality speakerphone, vibration ring – even a belt clip.

Each base station can support 8-10 simultaneous calls, so if you have a group of people in a conference room talking on their cordless phones at once, all of them will have clear talk, no static.  Calls can hop between base units with no audible quality loss.

Simple to deploy and manage

Wireless handsets connect via SIP to wireless access points (base stations) that use the latest cordless technology, DECT 6.0 (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications).  Back at users’ desks, the handset rests in a stand that charges the phone and a spare battery.

Easy installation.  Sleek base stations, about 6”x8”, sit on a desk or shelf, or mount to a wall – and connect to your LAN over standard Ethernet cable.  Base stations can get their power over the Ethernet connection as well; there’s no need to plug them into an electrical outlet.  The wireless SIP handsets connect directly to the IPedge or to a SIP card on the Strata CIX system via Ethernet connection.

Easy monitoring and management.  A graphical, Web-based management tool simplifies administration and installation.  Software upgrades can be sent directly to handsets over the airwaves from one central location.

Good coverage.  In a typical office setting, the bases would be about 80’ from each other, delivering services about 300’ away in an open space or 150’ in an obstructed environment.  As long as the bases can talk to each other (an omni-directional internal antenna provides flexible options), users can keep hopping from one to another.

No interference.  DECT 6.0 technologies operate in the 1.9 GHz range (1920-1930 MHz), compared to 2400 MHz and up for BlueTooth, WiFi, 2.4 Gigahertz services and microwaves.  Your IP4000 phones won’t compete with cellular or 802.11 network services.

Worried about security?

Security could be a concern with off-the-shelf SIP wireless phones on a WiFi network.  But IP4000 phones use DECT 6.0, a completely closed, secure environment with digital encryption.  No packet sniffing possible.

So, if everybody agrees it would be great to have in-building wireless communications, but…  you can kick their buts with the facts.  Find out more about how IP4000 mobility can free your users from their desks, to go wherever the work gets done.

Filed Under: Mobility Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Cut the cord with Fixed Mobile Convergences

March 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In Short, it’s getting easier and easier to be untethered from the office phone and go mobile with today’s Fixed Mobile Convergences options.  Fixed Mobile Convergences puts your office extension on your cellular smart phone.  With this functionality you can make an office call from your cell phone and the call will actually get placed from your office (sending your office’s phone number to the caller for the caller ID.)  In addition, inbound calls to your office phone can also simultaneously ring your cell phone with a flag indicating an inbound office call with caller ID.  This also gives you the ability to transfer calls back to extensions at your office or just make an office extension call from your cell phone.  These calls can be placed and received over a Wi-Fi network or a Cellular network.

How can Fixed Mobile Convergences help your business?

Filed Under: Mobility Tagged With: , , ,