When we upgraded our Verizon FIOS, I immediately did a bandwidth test and found that our upload speed remained the same. Our ADTRAN IAD (Netvanta 1335) is setup with VLAN 4 for Verizon FIOS and the interface has a fixed traffic-shaping rate formerly set at 2 Mbps (the old upload rate). Once I changed this to 5 Mbps, the bandwidth tests passed. That’s the only change required on our end to upgrade our FIOS Internet connection.
As for our ADTRAN 1335 (IAD) experience there's only one thing I'd change. Whenever we reboot our IAD, which hasn't been very often, our Voice Quality Monitoring (statistics) are dumped. Of course we can backup the data to an Excel file but it's just not the same as having accumulated statistics in one dashboard. We did setup a port in the ADTRAN IAD for port mirroring and a monitor port for a laptop to run Wire Shark should we run into issues. The easiest maintenance has been the ADTRAN gear--whereas a year or two ago I would have argued the IP-PBX would be the easier of the two to maintain.
Our Panasonic NCP1000 was upgraded to a Version 4 OS and that was a problem. I can say that our long day of troubleshooting, compounded by waiting on the phone for hours for support probably has changed my thinking too. The upgrade just wouldn't post to the system and we could not get the system back online with the former software because the DSP card failed. Perhaps the system and hardware were among the first installed, and there were possible manufacturing defects or quality issues. According to the Panasonic support engineer it was probably due to an electrical surge by turning the system on and off. (How much electrical protection does one require?) The good news is we had a spare DSP card on hand, not the same capabilities but ample for what we needed.
One other complaint is the inability to provide individual call appearances for each call, meaning--make each call show as a line appearance. Because SIP uses bandwidth there's no square system or line appearances for each line and SIP trunks are virtual, since you buy concurrent call sessions (CCS) that you configure/contract in whatever increments you can support with available resources. After getting pressured by the "community" we settled on using Call Park. This meant programming two buttons with a Call Park and a Get Park (retrieve the call) button and then printing new desi's for the phones. Once a SIP call is answered at an extension, placing it on hold puts the call on hold at the extension only, and getting it somewhere else is by transfer. In some cases we transferred the calls but couldn’t get there fast enough before the calls bounced into voice mail. So I may be in the equipment room answering a call and then needing to get it to my office. Now this may sound trite and it isn't because unless you have enough buttons on your phones, then getting a Call Park and Get Park buttons may not be options. Traditional telephony vendors try to outsell the other guy by selling cheaper phones (less buttons = less real estate = lower bid). The "work around" is to tell the users to use dial codes to park calls and then retrieve them with another dial code, and even then it becomes a disruption to smooth call handling.
So in welcoming a new era of telecommunications I wonder, what next? When our contract expires in two years (no we will not let it "auto renew") my inclination is to explore Verizon’s offering so we might yield answers to my questions. I would like to still experience Verizon's SIP trunks and any beneficial cellular packages and enhanced features. Two years is a long way off and what I want specifically added for our ideal SIP trunks:
* Network voice mail/auto attendant with basic reporting capability (My bet is it is cheaper than the electricity cost to run our system)
* The ability to transfer calls to cell phones without tying up two concurrent call sessions for the call
Whether or not this happens through a provider, it's interesting that today we pay the most for cellular services, with bandwidth costs being second and voice services (SIP trunks) being third.
