Now an aside. Our new phone system is in. PRI should be installed Monday. SBC has moved the date out a number of times, but the guy that's assisting in the phone system installation, who also works for the SBC reseller that ordered our PRI for us, says he's coming out to test it on Monday, and I'm confident in his confidence.

We've purchased a 3Com NBX system. Specifically the Superstack 3, with redundant hard drives and power supplies and 250+ hours of voicemail recording. I add the "+" because I've been told that the 250 hours was the figure with the original Superstack 3 with a 10GB hard drive. They put in whatever hard drive is most cost efficient--rumor is it's a 40GB now. And we get to use all of it. Of course, we've got 3 hours of voicemail on our old system, so having 1000 hours now isn't gonna matter that much. :)

The NBX can technically be called a Voice over IP (VoIP) system, but that's more of an added ability that it has. At it's core it's an ethernet based system. All of the phones are ethernet based. By default they work at layer 2, so they never even touch IP. But they definately can.

I fell in love with the NBX a few years ago when I saw it on an episode of Hometime. Of course, they had the money to install a (installed, at the time) $2000 phone system in a house. My wife doesn't quite understand why I would want one at my house. To me, the idea of making everything in a home or business ethernet based makes perfect sense. Make every jack an active ethernet jack. No more wondering "What is this one" or "How do I move this extension". Even a lot of VoIP systems are simply VoIP at their core, and still use "traditional" PBX style phones. I did some serious looking at phone systems (I wasn't going to make a $30,000 purchase for my company based just on an episode of Hometime), and found that my original feelings were accurate--I like the idea of a networked phone.

One thing that the 3com system differs from it's competitors in is in the idea of one large system as compared to multiple connected systems. Most VoIP systems are strongly centralized. You've got one massive server that runs most everything. Some systems, like the Shoreline, add some redundancy by separating out call management to seperate devices that can be spread throughout the network, while still being managed as one system. For most companies, this is probably ideal. For us it isn't. We don't have the resources to spend on the redundant high speed WAN connections that a traditional VoIP system would need.

The NBX, on the other hand, operates independently at each site where we install it. The systems can communicate with each other, allowing for simple site to site calls. But if the line goes down, everybody is still up and running happily. No phone calls are lost.

Enough about the system, though--onto why I brought it up. I've got a 3Com phone at home right now. Like I said, they can easily do IP--they just don't by default. I've got the phone running over the XP VPN server that I built. But one of the difficulties that I've faced since I started looking at phone systems is the fact that upper management will probably want a phone at home, but I won't want to maintain some sort of VPN router for their house. Originally I was also concerned about getting them static Internet IPs, but the XP server removes that need. Now if only I could remove the need for the VPN server (without punching holes in the firewall).

Each of them has a Windows XP machine at home already. It finally hit me this week--I don't need a separate router. So, here's the plan:

I'll configure the broadband firewall at each person's house to use a "unique" address range. I'll have to maintain records of this. I can't have them all using 192.168.1.x like they do now. So perhaps Manager 1 will use 10.0.1.x, Manager 2 will use 10.0.2.x, etc.

I then enable IP routing on their XP workstation at home, and give it a static address in that range.

I set up their networked phone with an IP address in that range as well. The phone, though, will use the address of the XP workstation as it's default gateway.

I configure the remote access settings of their user ID to route traffic for their specific 10.x.x.x network through their VPN connection. (I realized this morning that I'll have to do a blog entry on this)

Now, when their VPN connection comes up, the phone connects and is available for use. When they disconnect, the phone goes offline. All they really have to do is plug the phone into the switch on the broadband router, and everything should work.

I'm looking forward to trying this out this coming week. I'll keep everyone posted.