Small business office setup for under $6,000

I had the opportunity recently to help my friends over at Richard Realty Group in Carlsbad move their corporate office. They went from a small 1,100 sq ft office to a 3,200 sq ft office with approximately 20+ employees. I was contacted by them to consult and install their data and voice systems. Right up my alley!

The first order of business was to research and purchase a phone system. Realtors are on the phone quite a bit and they needed a rock solid phone system to meet their needs and come in under budget. Management of the phone system for add/moves/changes was also something we took under consideration. Who wants to pay $50 every time an extension needs to be moved or a new employee comes on board? No thanks! We decided on the 3Com NBX V3000 VoIP platform. This system is feature rich, very easy to install and the management is done via a web GUI. Just connect each phone to a Cat5 jack and make sure the other end is terminated on a PoE switch and we’re done! This system has been discontinued by 3Com, however it is rock solid and fits within our budget. It also helped that I had previous successful experience with this system.

Criteria we used for selecting a phone system:

Support 20 phones immediately w/ room to grow
8 POT lines for starters with scalability to add more POTs or a PRI as needed
Simple management
Simple installation
Features such as auto attendant, hunt group, voicemail, call forwarding, conference calling, music on hold, etc.
Cost

AT&T is the voice provider for the office. I’ve bashed them before (PacBell days) but to my surprise they were really great during this transition. RRG was assigned a project coordinator for the telephone line moves and she was fairly quick to respond via email. As always there were some communication issues between the AT&T branch office and the workers sent out to do the actual work but in the end, everything is working as it should be and was done on time.

For the network we went with a used Cisco ASA 5505 with unlimited users. After my recent PIX experience, setting up the ASA was a cakewalk! The ASA would be our router, firewall and VPN server. Should the company ever need/want to have a remote office or have employees work from home, the 3Com phones can be easily connected over a VPN tunnel. A Cisco PIX 501 for the remote user can be connected to the ASA, then the 3Com NBX phone would simply plug into the PIX 501 and it would work just the same as if it was at the office.

I went with a new APC Smart-UPS 1500 for the battery backup system. This unit is a bit overkill and barely fits in the rack but we wanted to have a good amount of runtime and the unit could not take up more than 2U of rack space. In addition, we were a little concerned about the potential heat in the room where the equipment rack is installed so we added a temperature probe to the UPS to help monitor the environment.

Internet for the office is provided by AT&T business class DSL. There were no affordable options at the new office location. The service is actually pretty good. They are seeing around 6Mbps down, 1Mbps up which is “respectable” for business class DSL services.

To come in under the $6,000 budget, I turned to eBay for almost everything! Here is the full list of items purchased for the office setup:

Cisco ASA 5505, unlimited users (eBay – $414.30)
3Com NBX V3000, 26 group 2 license
3Com NBX V5000 expansion chasis
3Com NBX 4port analog line card
20 3102 business phones w/ cords
4 port 400hr voicemail (eBay – $4065)
NetGear GS724TP ProSafe 24PT Gigabit PoE switch (eBay – $360)
APC 13U wall mount rack unit (Used – $250))
APC Smart-UPS 1500VA RM UPS (New GHA Technologies – $517.92)
APC 9619 management card w/ temp probe (eBay – $50)
25x 25′, 25x 10′, 25x 3′, 10x 5′ Cat5e patch shielded cables (CablestoGo.com – $222.92)
TOTAL $5,880.14

The downside of buying the equipment via eBay is there is no warranty. We took this under consideration however the cost of used vs new far out weighed the lack of warranty and support. A few of the 3102 phones did not work but the eBay vendor I used was quick to exchange them for me. Knock on wood but I’ve bought many used Cisco items on eBay over the past 6+ years and have yet to have one of them fail on me.

After a week in the office, everything is running very smoothly. With the VPN in place, I am able to remote in and adjust any settings on the phone system as it gets some real use. This was a great project to work on and an easy client to work with. Everyone is happy!

If you would like to know the specific eBay vendors I used for the purchases I will be more than happy to post those for you. I’ve used many of these vendors before and they are great eBay sellers.