VoIP phone system for very small business?

I've been delegated to come up with a better phone system for our small three-employee business that I just began working with yesterday. Lucky me. Anyway, I know very, very little about VoIP phones and would like to know what others recommend as far as a carrier goes.

What we are looking for:

-VoIP phone system with three phones; all the same type and possibly wireless.
-Said phones should be able to communicate with each other, i.e. my boss can pick up calls on my line, etc.
-There would be one main line but each user would get their own extension.

As I'm told, we have Vonage but it just isn't cutting it. It seems to go out an awful lot and when it dies it's dead for far too long. I am very PC-savvy but this type of technology has eluded me thus far. I'm still reading up on everything but it would be great to get some advice from someone who knows what they're talking about. Conversely, we're thinking about just getting 3 or 4 VoIP phones, sticking with Vonage and seeing what we can do with it. Our office is in New York City and our budget is somewhere in the $500-$700 range. Thank you in advance.

I would advise you to spend some time looking into the internet connection used for the phone to see if that is adequate for the three lines plus whatever else it is used for. when the vonage goes down what else is going on internet wise? are you using a consumer oriented DSL/Cable connection or a business oriented T1 type connection?

The internet connection seems to usually stay up when the phones go out but not always. I think it may be a bandwidth issue though, as you said. I just found out we're on a residential Earthlink high-speed cable account, which seems to be an 8mb downstream and 3mb upstream. We have 3 phone lines, a fax line, and 3 PCs running off of this connection.

But either way, is the whole idea of having one main telephone line and having a few extensions (a voice recording when you dial said number, you press 1 to speak to person x, press 2 to speak to person y, etc.) a feasible feature?

3x users is very small system that would fit the hosted market this of course is all dependent on your internet connection.

I would look at a small pbx, Toshiba here in the Uk have a small system CIX 40. You could start off with basic's and add as you require. The system can be installed with a VOIP card that supports IP Trunks, Sip Devices, and IPT (Toshiba IP Handset Ext).

The cix 40 comes with some onboard analogue trunks so would be possible to connect your vonage service as well. Very reliable system.
http://www.telecom.toshiba.com/products ... index.cfm#

You can always try the NCH Software virtual PBX (for your size you can configure the free version) and a softphone with call transfer, recording, on-hold etc. It's all Windows based.

You may however want to try a different VoIP gateway provider (other than Vonage). Apparently it's hard to get configuration information that you need unless you get a softphone account with them.

Not sure if you've found a solution, but if you're in NYC and on a budget look into Optimum for your Internet service. They can also provide up to 8 phone lines. I've had Optimum in my home for years upstate (Poughkeepsie area) and we just started using it in our office recently. It could easily replace your Vonage.

As far as the phone system itself, you could roll your own or purchase a turn-key. Rolling your own is cheaper for sure, but could be very time consuming unless you are very familiar with how it all works together and have the time to play with getting it working.

Look into an Allworx system. The Allworx is relatively inexpensive and has more features than you would probably ever need for a small office.