Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Discuss this article Flame the author     In this article Introduction GoBeam vPBX ICG Communications VoicePipe MCI Advantage Executive Summary & Web Links Don't Want Centrex? The Business Case Report Card

MCI (formerly Worldcom) showed us what kind of IP Centrex service a large carrier can provide, and frankly, we were disappointed. MCI sent us a Cisco 7940 IP phone for our testing, along with an account and phone number tied to one of the company's test groups, but not to the rest of the company. This left the phone on its lonesome, with no access to an employee list.

Although MCI touted its service's ability to operate over Internet connections not provided by MCI, its service couldn't handle our connection without a little intervention. The solution MCI provided required the telephone to know the public IP address of our router's WAN interface. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except that our public address is assigned by our service provider via DHCP. Inputting the IP address into the phone is a quick process, but if we had to do this every couple of days whenever the address changed--and we could no longer place or receive calls until we completed that task--it would be a major annoyance. Neither GoBeam nor ICG had this requirement.

MCI's Web interface was rather difficult to get to because it required us to log in and then click on a link to get to the area for managing the phone. In general, we had to go through more pages to get where we were going. Once there, we were given a choice of seven buttons. Most of your users will use four main selections: the change options for Find-Me, call forwarding, and voicemail and phone-book access. During our tests, access to this Web site was slow, with pages sometimes taking minutes to load. MCI acknowledged the problem and said it is moving the site to different servers soon.