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.
MCI's Find-Me options rival those found with GoBeam's service but are harder to configure and use. Routing can be set up to locate you at as many as five different numbers, though unlike GoBeam's service, Find-Me can't be set based on who's calling you. MCI's documentation does mention a call-acceptance setting, but we didn't have access to it during our tests. Turning on Find-Me was a time-consuming process, problematic if you're trying to leave the office quickly. Calls also can be forwarded to a preset number or voicemail, though having this feature and Find-Me as separate entities seems strange.
Voicemail is managed and sorted similarly to ICG's setup, letting the user sort messages by phone number, caller, date, status and length. You can't see a log of incoming and missed calls, though. Also missing from the Web interface is a conference-call setup feature.
MCI's Web interface seems designed more for traveling users to listen to their voicemail and change preferences than as a desktop utility to enhance the IP telephone.
MCI Advantage, business-grade service starts at $35 per simultaneous call/line with QoS and $1,100 for a T1 of dedicated Internet access. MCI, (800) 465-7187, (703) 886-5600. www.mci.com
Darrin Woods is a Network Computing contributing editor. He has worked as a WAN engineer for a telecom carrier. Write to him at dwoods@nwc.com.
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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.
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