Intermedia Unite phones

Poly VVX 250 Desk Phone

We’re paying about $200/month to Spectrum for several land-lines (including fax), we have a big Ricoh MP C3004ex that receives faxes (but has gotten kind of flaky), we have a remote user that’s been doing everything from her personal cell phone for over a year. My colleague is increasingly at his second home in Utah, and I like to duck out for a week or two in Mammoth, but need to be able to at least nominally work from there (or, you know, Disneyland).

But we were stuck on a hardwired ancient PBX system (a Panasonic KX-TA824 setup) that didn’t allow for anything like that. Something had to change. We started looking at VoIP solutions a few months ago.

What a process this has been. We started off looking at Crexendo, but heard nightmares (most of them before they rolled out their new platform, but some more recent) about the service, and didn’t want the multi-year contractual lock-in. We looked at Spectrum’s offering but they seem stuck in “corporate silo” world and weren’t really ready to have a “distributed PBX” style system like we wanted. I heard good things about Intermedia, and they offered free hardware (including Poly VVX 250 phones when we asked; the VVX 450 for the receptionist’s desk was like $65) and no monthly lock-in. Cost is about $20/user/month, and we needed an additional user for our conference room phone (a Yealink CP925).

The desk phones will pass through gigabit Ethernet to a computer, and can be powered by PoE. They don’t support WiFi out of the box, but there’s an inexpensive adapter.

My colleague’s phone is connected to Ethernet at the wall (with an inexpensive 10' Amazon Basics CAT6 cable) and his computer to the phone, using the bundled Ethernet cable and 5V DC adapter. Easy.

Our receptionist’s phone is connected to the Netgear GS105NA Ethernet switch under her desk (which is also connected to her Dell Premium OptiPlex 3050 all-in-one and Ricoh SP 3610SF multifunction) and the 5V adapter.

My phone is inline between my Mac Mini and another 5-port switch (which connects to my Canon MF216n multifunction, which I got because it was cheap ($99.99 in 2016 when I was first starting here) and have kept using because it just keeps working). My desk is already a cable CF, so I’m running a 3' patch cable from the switch to a TRENDnet TPE-113GI PoE injector to ditch the 5V wall wort.

Our case manager relocated to Tennessee during the pandemic (which was part of what drove this switch), and doesn’t have RJ45 jacks scattered around everywhere, so for her we’ve got the WiFi adapter (above) en route.

The conference room RJ45 jacks are all dead, too (I’ll look into dealing with that one of these days ... but not today), but we extended our WiFi signal there with a Linksys RE6300 (not my preferred solution but I wasn’t the one buying the kit), and set it up on that extended network and it’s fine.

We had a couple of rough spots with Intermedia (at first they didn’t ship all of the phones we’d requested, and the fax functionality is confusingly hidden under “Voice services”), but once we got that all straightened out, onboarding was relatively easy (though outsourced, so I did have to strain a bit to hear through some thick accents).

The system is nothing if not flexible. We have the app on our phones so we can place calls from the office main number (and turn “silent mode” on or off at our option, e.g., at the office next to a phone that’s going to ring also). We get email notification of new voicemail, and incoming faxes. I’m writing SOPs for all the various functionality. The phones are gorgeous. (We were using old Panasonic KX-T series desk phones.) All the functionality I specified when we started the process, is present:

• At least (4) “desk” phones with the capability of adding a 5th and maybe 6th down the road.
• We’re looking at the Poly VVX450 for our receptionist and whatever makes sense for the rest of the desks; the VVX250 maybe? We want “presence” at least on the receptionist’s phone so she can see who’s available to take a call or not.
• Eventually, a conference room phone (we’ve been looking at the Yealink CP925 but we’re not wedded to any particular device).
• The desktop phones will be (3) in Southern California and (1) in Tennessee and we need them all to mesh as if they were on a local PBX, with, e.g., intercom functionality, presence indication, the ability to transfer calls, etc.
• We also want cell phone (all iPhone, but Android capability would be nice just in case) capability, e.g., if someone’s at a remote location, they can be transferred calls, and make/receive calls, as if they were sitting at their desk, with only our office number showing up as the originating call for Caller ID. (Like what Nextiva does.)
• eFax capability.
• We need to port our main incoming line for voice, and our existing fax number to eFax. (310) 555-1212 voice, (310) 555-1213 fax. Both have been in circulation for decades and we need to retain them.

Mission accomplished.

Out with the old...

Our old PBX wiring