[Discuss] Paperless falling behind the Phoneless Office?

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 08:19:26AM -0500, Kent Borg wrote:
> My employer is doing a network switch upgrade over the weekend, it
> seems to support a new VoIP system.
> 
> Why,  I wonder?  We have $40 phones that seem to work, why replace
> them with $400 phones?  (Or whatever they will cost.)

Cost.

The desk phones we use are $120 each, have better sound quality
inside the office, and have speakerphones as good as the ones we
use in conference rooms. The controls for sending callers
elsewhere are better than the POTS phones we had before.

The service, though... the service is much cheaper. 

> I *did* use my desk phone yesterday--for a personal call, because my
> personal cell minutes are low for the next couple days--but mostly
> it just sits there, unused, sometimes for weeks on end.  When I

If your company is small, everybody gets an individual POTS line
that will go for $40-60/month.

If it's a little larger, you get Centrex service for
$35/month/line.

We pay nothing in service costs per-line now. We pay a dollar or
two per incoming number, and between 1 and 3 cents per minute of
actual use.

For a typical programmer who calls her boyfriend once a day to make
plans for the evening, this costs us about $2 a month, instead of $35.

For a salescritter who is on the line for two hours a day, we pay about
$30 instead of $35.

There are a lot of people in the first situation:  they need a phone,
but not very much.

-dsr-