How to raise a local telephone line?

Question

Telephony

At work, I was puzzled to get away from corporate cellular phones, transfer everyone to local office phones, where to start digging? never encountered this at all. Any infa will be useful. And links to stores that need to be bought, the company's budget will be allocated up to 300 thousand for 18 offices.

Answer 1

Is the local network stretched across the office? Are the servers available?
Buy IP phones. With such a budget, CISCO 7911 will do well.
Allocate resources on the server for installing ASTERISK / FreePBX.
Be puzzled by the purchase of a SIP trunk from a provider.

Answer 2

where to start digging?

From the operator's choice. Even if you can raise your own PBX (software on Asterisk or whatever, or buy and set up a hardware PBX), you still need access to the outside world through some operator. In our time, it is logical to immediately take the service of IP-telephony. But services may vary. There may be a trunk to your PBX, and inside you already resolve all calls on your own, as you like. Or maybe a virtual PBX from the operator, then there will be a minimum of problems for you.
Google the operators, contact them, talk about the task (just don’t name the budget; your budget is for equipment, not services), ask for a commercial offer. From it the subscription fee will be clear. (It is possible that at this stage your superiors will change their mind, you never know).

what to buy

Only after that you start to select IP-phones. Panasonic's are more expensive, Yealink's are cheaper, but quite decent, well, there are still a lot of options.

300 thousand will be allocated for 18 offices

Hmm... usually the number of phones is approximately equal to the number of employees, and does not really depend on the number of offices (maybe you have 1 person per office, or maybe 50 people).

Answer 3

The first question arises - why?
Since you have never encountered this, if I were you, I would look towards the least involvement in the process - you can rent a virtual PBX with telephones and shift all programming work, etc. to a company providing such a service - at any time without loss, you can refuse and switch to another service. We did this for one subsidiary, then it was transformed and all this became unnecessary.
There are a lot of options, but the strategy is not very clear from the description above))