Cutting the costs of VoIP
<<<... It's vital to understand the cost components of VoIP. For example, it's great to find very low-cost VoIP deployments, for instance, with an open source solution. But if that solution requires significant training and programming and support is mediocre, it may be worth spending the extra money to go with a solution that is not open source. VoIP cost metrics Nemertes tracks VoIP costs in the following categories: Operational start-up: These costs include planning, installation and troubleshooting.
They cover the amount of hours staff spends on each function multiplied by the average hourly rate of the staff involved. They include the outside consulting costs companies incur. Capital: These costs include IP switches and phones. Although Nemertes gathers the average costs of gateways, network upgrades related to the VoIP implementation, IP video and audio bridges, management tools, unified messaging, and traditional voice mail, the comparisons presented here do not include these additional figures. Ongoing operational: These costs cover the time and money companies spend managing and maintaining their VoIP systems.
Operational start-up costs On average, organisations spend $355 per IP-telephony user for operational start-up. The per-user costs vary, based on the size of the roll-out. Companies with smaller roll-outs, or those with fewer than 300 end stations, spend an average of $588 per unit on operational start-up, while those with more than 5,000 end stations spend $132 per unit. IT and telecom staff distribute their initial planning time, as well as the time spent installing the IP PBX, among more users as the roll-outs get larger. So it makes sense the per-unit cost decreases as the roll-out size increases. With smaller roll-outs, those costs don't get divided by as large a group, so the per-user cost is higher. more>>>