Voice
Phone systems, sold and installed by the same shop
ESI systems, cloud based PBX and SIP trunking, and overhead paging for floors big enough to need zoning. We still work on Nortel and Norstar M&S equipment other shops have stopped carrying.
Chapter 01
What replaces a phone closet
A traditional system is hard wired. Lines come into the building, land on equipment in a closet, and a dedicated cable runs from there to every handset. The system knows extension 204 as a particular pair of wires going to a particular spot on a wall, which is why moving a desk has always meant calling somebody out.
A cloud system runs over your network instead. The handset plugs into a network outlet the same way a computer would, and the extension lives in software rather than in copper. That single change is where the practical benefit comes from: moving a handset stops being a service call, adding a desk is a matter of having an outlet there, and somebody can take their extension with them and work somewhere else.
The trade is that the network becomes the phone system. If it drops, the phones drop. That is not a reason to avoid it, it is a reason to have the cabling looked at as part of the same job rather than discovered afterwards.
A desk telephone on a plain office desk with a data outlet on the wall behind
Overhead paging, where it actually earns its keep
Paging is a bigger part of this work than people expect. Car dealerships and grocery stores run it constantly, for announcements to staff and for background music when nobody is paging.
A large floor almost always needs to be split into zones, because the areas are not the same. A shop floor with compressors and an open door needs real volume to be heard at all. A showroom has a customer sitting across a desk from a salesperson, and a page at shop-floor volume lands in the middle of that conversation. Without zoning you pick one level for the whole building and it is wrong nearly everywhere.
Clarity is not the same as volume either. In a big room with hard surfaces, a few loud speakers produce reflections that turn speech to mush, and turning it up produces louder mush. More speakers doing less each is usually the fix.
Chapter 03
The gear we stand behind
We use quality products from brands such as ESI, and phone systems are both sold and installed by 5E Communications. That is not a paperwork detail. It decides who you call when something goes wrong, and the answer is the same number you called to have it put in.
It also means we can still service Nortel and Norstar M&S equipment. A shop that only sells new systems has exactly one recommendation available to it. Being able to keep an older system running is what makes it possible to tell you honestly when replacing it is not yet worth the money.
Cutover day
The questions worth settling before anything is ordered are simple ones: what happens to the numbers you already publish, how long moving them takes, what stays working while the change happens, and which day it lands on.
Handsets get provisioned before they go out, so the work in your building is shorter than people expect. If part of what you have is fine, we will tell you it is fine and leave it alone.
5E Communications, Locally owned. Serving the Texas Panhandle since 2006. Call (806) 674-6900.