[geeks] Phone system suggestions?

[Eric Railine]

On 9/23/05, James Fogg <James at jdfogg.com> wrote:
> To "phone guys" Lucent/Avaya is crapoid. And horribly expensive and
> their VoIP stuff didn't work 3 years ago (corrected by now I hope).

Can't speak for the PBXes or Avaya in particular, but the Octel
voicemail that Lucent sold is another piece of technology that Just
Works.  And has a *ton* of features that I've found hard to replace in
some other systems.

> And yes, Nortel might seem cold and distant, it's Unix based. It's
> strayed considerably from *nix and I never knew what *nix it was based
> on, but it has a *nix core.

I think most phone systems are *nix based at their core.  The older
Mitel PBXes are some proprietary *nix variant, while the new ones are
either Linux or VxWorks (depends on model).  And while there was a
trend in 1999-2002 to market next-gen PBXes on a Windows platform,
that misbegotten "idea" seems to have faded considerably, and most
vendors are using or planning to migrate to a Linux/VxWorks/*BSD base,
it seems.

> Having worked for a few "communications" companies that sold both phones
> and routers I've noticed that there is a fundamental difference between
> the way phone guys relate to their machines and computer guys relate to
> theirs. A greybeard phone guy will program all but the largest phone
> sysems from the operators console (phone plus DSS or busy-lamp-field).
> Put a phone guy in front of a computer to configure a system and he
> suddenly wont recognize his own systems.

Agreed.  There's a huge difference in the mindsets of phone guys and
data guys.  Many of the phone vendors have problems with this because
their senior phone guys can't/don't want to learn any of that "PC
crap", while the data guys tend to have the same hang-up regarding the
"old phone technology".

Meh.  It's all fun to me...

Eric