Matthew Buck’s Blog – Principal Engineer at RatwareUK

Could this new Draytek 2820 VOIP product be a further nail in the coffin for conventional telephony methods? Recently I implemented one of these, and at approximately £400 + VAT (including a couple of IP Phones), I have a fully functional local exchange, providing the usual functions such as; auto attendant, voicemail, hunt groups, call-logging, music-on-hold, conference calling etc. On each of the IP Phones you can set the voice compression method and from the IP-PBX you can swiftly implement upstream QOS, governing the VOIP system. After 2 months of constant use, I’m told that there is “no difference” to the quality of a conventional telephone line and no difference in the features of a conventional local PBX.

The Draytek is serviced by a 10Mbps/700Kbps Internet connection provided by Virgin Media, with a failover WAN2 USB Modem providing Orange 3G. It’s in a server room so it’s powered by an existing UPS, just like your conventional phone system should be.

The SIP provider is Draytel. They provide a host of telephony services. In this case; providing 5 simultaneous SIP Trunks (5 lines) including 2500 UK land line minutes for just £19.99 + VAT per month. That’s a better deal than BT and you aren’t tied to their ridiculous local exchange programme, which prohibits you from taking your phone number when moving your office. When this client moves, they’ll simply ensure broadband is present and then plug their Draytek router in. No reconfiguration, no costs, no downtime – phone and Internet moved simultaneously.

This small router provides support for up to 30 extensions, the next model up provides 100. Are products like this going to signal the death of conventional telephony?

I’ve been speechless for a while, because Dell have outdone themselves with their new thin client – the Optiplex FX160. Basically, thin clients don’t need hard drives. They run a local operating system such as Windows XP Embedded from solid state flash media. This flash media may only be around 2GB in size – just large enough to hold the operating system image. This makes the thin client very fast and very robust.

The 160’s are supplied with an embedded image providing a cut-down XP desktop with immediate support for Remote Desktop Connection, VMWare and Citrix. A quick modification to the image via a deployment server and you’re booting straight into your virtual environment. The units are fast, ultra-small and have a really low carbon footprint. Once more, this new thin client and a strategy of virtualisation takes away the need to “rebuild” systems on failure. There’s less to go wrong and no maintenance required. There’s more consolidation, security and control.

Dell Optiplex FX160 is now RatwareUK’s thin-client deployment of choice and a perfect partner when virtualising a network and desktop streaming. At approximately £270 + VAT per unit, this product is extremely cost-effective.