Avaya is expensive, propriatary and basic.

Fonality is inexpensive, open sourced and robust.

You should have paid a consultant to do this research for you.

Thanks for your comments. I should have explained a little more about our setup and the nature of the few problems we have had.

First of all, we have two locations - it sounds like you have much more, but I’m sure your experience will be similar. The calls that we are having problems with seem to be between the two offices. We have 2 T1’s between each office (with broadband aggregators) so I didn’t think that bandwidth would be an issue - apparently it is, but it is definitely manageable. The quality of phone calls between locations is comparable to talking on a cell phone - not a big deal since it is internal communication.

As far as the VPN requirement restrictions I am guessing that you are referring to softphone licenses - they can be quite expensive but with as many systems as you plan on purchasing I’m sure you can get a quantity discount. Keep in mind that these are concurrent user licenses so you can get five and as long as you have five people on the road at a time you should be fine. Also, I don’t know if this is an option or not, but you can take your full set on the road and, provided you have a broadband connection, still show up as a local user to others in the company - I thought this was pretty cool but a bit impractical for travel.

Two things have blown me away with the Avaya system - first of all, if you care about having a wireless headset I would go with 4620SW IP phones - for $150 you can get a wireless plantronics headset that doesn’t require a lifter on the phone or anything - this has been hands down my favorite feature with this phone.

The other feature I love is the ease of use with the administration interface. After spending a couple of months with this thing I swear we know the interface better than the guy who installed it - ease of use is very important to me because I don’t want to call a repairman for every little thing.

All in all I am very happy with our decision to go with the Avaya. Let me know if there’s anything specific you would like to know more about.

Preston

As for the poor nature of the calls, I would call them back. Sounds like a QoS issue. In house your calls should be perfectly clear, if all the QoS is configured correctly.

However, since this is such a big decision I will likely not choose Fonality unless the vendor can give me some sort of quality and uptime SLA.

I would like to know how this system is working today as I have to make a decision in about a week.