Cutting the costs of VoIP
<<<... Companies spend an average of $309 on each IP phone. The range is $204 for Avaya to $392 for Nortel. The $416 figure for the "other" category in the graphic below is a compilation of figures from numerous IP-telephony vendors that didn't have enough statistical response to be counted individually. They include Alcatel, Siemens, NEC and 3Com. Why such a disparity among vendors' handset costs? It depends on customers' requirements. Most IP telephony vendors offer handsets that span quite a price range ($100 to $450), depending on the features customers want, which is using the handset and the expected life span of the device.
Avaya customers, for example, frequently use handsets for contact centres. Agents may share them and are rough on them. So customers opt for less-expensive phones, knowing they will replace them frequently. Cisco and Nortel customers tend to lean toward feature-rich handsets for their knowledge workers and executives, because the IT department has "sold" the system internally on the multifunctional devices that will improve productivity. Handset costs often are the most expensive part of an IP-telephony implementation. Several IT executives said the high costs slowed their adoption and they are looking toward lower-cost Session Initiation Protocol-based handsets or soft clients to reduce overall end-station costs.
In some cases, companies will wait to deploy IP handsets until they are satisfied with the costs of PBX-vendor devices or the quality or interoperability of SIP phones. In other cases, they are looking to use more open source devices when it's time to upgrade or replace existing IP handsets. Ongoing operational costs Ongoing operational costs also varied by vendor and roll-out size. Perhaps the most interesting general finding is that operational costs scale quite well. The more users on the system, the more users each IT staff member handles. In other words, the per-user cost generally drops drastically when the roll-out size increases. more>>>