Question : VOIP for our office

Looking for some guidance and commentary from this community.

Currently we have a ~10 year old Nortel KSU.  We have a block of 60 DIDs.  It's PRI port is hooked up to a dynamic integrated service (voice/internet) that connects with our telco via 3 T1's with one year left on the contract.  We're remodeling and I like to not have to run special cabling for the old system, and instead use standard ethernet connectivity.  We've bounced between 20 and 30 users in the last few years, but hope to see steady growth.  One location--we own the building.  

I'm trying to see what our telco has to offer, though they aren't very responsive. I'd like them to convert our "faked" PRI into 5 - 8 sip trunks.

We have a 50 Mb Comcast Business Internet connection with plenty of excess bandwidth.

I'm considering Fonality Enterprise Edition through Dell.  I like the features, but we're uncertain if we want to buy the software.  It is a hybrid hosted solution. dell.fonality.com  Anyone here use it and have any comments?

I suppose we could also try to go it alone and build a trixbox and use the community edition.

I spoke with 8 X 8 today and I like the idea of them completely hosting the pbx.  However it seems expensive to transfer the DIDs over to them.  They will charge for each number to port, plus they have a monthly reoccurring charge per number.  It really eats into our potential savings for going VOIP.  Can I "park" DIDs I don't need to transfer right away?

Any other providers that stand out that I should be looking to?

I look foward to your suggestions and comments.

Answer : VOIP for our office

Probably worth noting that the 'special cabling' for that Nortel system is usually done with standard network cable.  Historically CAT-3 would have been used for the phonesets but for many years CAT-5, 5e or 6 has been used since the cost difference was quite small.  Most suppliers don't even carry CAT-3 anymore.

So you can go ahead and run wires for the existing system and switch to network phones anytime you want.  Usually would just mean removing the wire from the old PBX patch and putting it into the network patch.  It never hurts to have a dedicated network connection for voip phones anyway.

Your existing wires may actually be CAT-5.  Even 10 years ago they may have used CAT5 for the phones.

You already have some good points on the voip side of things but a bit more on that topic.  When comparing hosted vs owned you probably want to look at costs for a 3 to 5 year period at minimum.  Further because of your current size you may find that you will grow out of hosted services fairly quickly.  Even by Fonality's own site the hosted offering is topping out for 20 users,

http://pbxtra.fonality.com/products/professional/

The 'dell' branded stuff looks to be a subset of Fonality's main packages.  You might want to look over the main Fonality site if you have not.

As for the DID's,  this is probably something that is in favor of working something out with your existing phone company,  even if it is to reserve the numbers.  Having them attached to the least cost trunk you can get for them might a route to take if they will not actually reserve them without a line/trunk.

If you need something to cost compare for higher ups go price some Cisco or Avaya gear with comparable features.  Even a turnkey Fonality system will look inexpensive let alone a DIY TrixBox CE setup.