Business VOIP

My company is looking at a voip system, particularly the NEC aspire system. I understand what that means inside the building. How do calls route outside the building? Do we still need the 14 analog phone lines we have now? Most of our customers have normal phones. What happens when we call them? Do they go thru a provider or our phone company?
This system is a NEC Aspire system. The vendor said because we have a regular phone infrastructure in place, we would use the 1 paired wire and non-ip phones for now although the phones
could be turned into IP phones with a add-on. We would still have all the
features the phone system has but wouldnt have to worry about our local
network traffice for now. They mentioned a prime line to replace our phone lines. Our vendor said that we could just buy some IP phones for our other locations, plug them in, and make free calls to them. I dont know if that would go thru the
prime line or our internet connection. I told him that our current internet
connection is likely not good for VOIP and he said we could throw in a cable
modem with a minimum connection for these calls to our other locations. I
am not sure how that would all work though. So it sounded like we would
have 2 connections to the net but i dont know how our internal network would be affected by that.

I've pursued this course for the small business I'm at as well, and I think I can help add some incite.

VOIP depends on a broadband connection, not your standard phone line. That's not to say that it won't work by going through a phone line (you could use DSL for instance), but you need to run that VOIP through your internet server for it to be effective. Once it goes out into the external internet, it will be routed through normal phone lines to reach whomever you are trying to contact. In this way, those you are contacting do not need anything more than a normal phone and a phone line.

As for a provider, you usually have to subscribe to a VOIP service to make external calls. You might check into Vonage to start since they are one of the premier VOIP service providers out there. Some standard phone companies are starting to buy into the VOIP idea, but this is happening slowly, and you are more likely to find someone through an independant company like Vonage.

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