Beginner VOIP Question

Real business benefit is large companies who can leverage internal network to route calls. AKA, instead of calling out your PBX to LA, it routes over your private WAN to LA where you have an office, branch, store, etc, and it goes out the local pbx there and saves long- distance. Also generally easier to provision and manage, but that isn't really hard savings, more soft. Although if you go with a voice over ip provider, it all comes down to monthly charges based on usage, which I'd assume they should be able to trend out. For 15 users, and a single entity company, it will probably all come down to the criteria in the last sentence...along with the obvious concerns of service, SLAs, quality, etc.

Analog phone (key) systems are awfully cheap and reliable... Look for a Norstar (MICS) package on eBay, and compare that to something like Switchvox.

The initial cost of VoIP is likely to be higher, but depending on call volume and where you're calling, and how you're connected to the Internet, a VoIP provider might be cheaper, but I haven't found a compelling business case for VoIP in small offices yet, unless you were willing to use almost all soft-phones.

VoIP does have some soft benefits--you can write some cool integrated telephony/computer applications fairly easily, and if you have telecommuters it can make their 'phone' work as though they're in the office.

Regards, Heath