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Small office, 5 employees. Right now we have 2 lines from Verizon with caller ID and voicemail. However, we have everything piped through a Phone Valet server - http://www.parliant.com/ that handles emailing of voicemail, displaying caller id's on any network connected computer, etc. Nice features overall.
One feature that we seem to be lacking is the ability to transfer calls to voicemail. So, if someone calls for another person and wants to be transferred to someone's voicemail, we have to hang up and have them call back and let the call go to Voicemail. Kind of a pain.
It's that voicemail quirk and also the cost of the lines from Verizon that has me thinking about a switch to VOIP for the office. I have a VOIP line at home, but haven't done a ton of research into seeing what options are out there for VOIP in a multi-line, multi-phone, multi-user environment. I know a tiny little bit about PBX/Asterisk systems, but what little I know also tells me that such installations can be expensive, and if cost is one of the motivating factors of this move, then I don't want to try and justify a huge up-front expense unless it'll save us a ton of money down the road.
Are there any good options that I should be looking into?
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I really like PBXInAFlash. I've used TrixBox as well, but I don't like the way that the company that owns it is managing it.
Are your 2 lines from verizon just standard POTS lines?
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ztirffritz wrote:
Are your 2 lines from verizon just standard POTS lines?
Yes.
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If you go the Asterisk route, then you need to purchase some interface cards from Digium for about $300, but you can use any cheap PC that you find for the most part. After that, PBXInAFlash is free. It has a Flash based web interface that you can use to drag and drop calls from extension to extension. It's pretty slick once it is set up. If you decide to go with a VoIP solution you can lose the 2 POTS lines, but I'd recommend against that for a business. VoIP still isn't as stable in my opinion.
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If you do choose to go the VoIP route, I use TelaSIP and I've been very pleased with the service. It hasn't gone down once in the time that I've been using them. I know that I just said above that I don't think that it is as stable yet, so I guess what I'm really saying is it hasn't stood the same test of time. Maybe it is stable enough, but I still wouldn't trust it as the only way to get a call into my business.
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We're using Vonage at our small 5-person office over "pro" ADSL.
It seems to work OK, except when there's a huge spike in upstream DSL traffic, like a file upload or such.
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I use Vonage at home, and just switched to RingCentral for business use (about 2 months ago). I think RingCentral has most of the 'features' you mentioned, without the issues of setting up your own box.
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The other downside to switching to VOIP for a business is the loss of a listing in the Phone Book. That is a pretty big downside for businesses that rely on phone book for new business leads. Our business doesn't get a ton of call-in leads that way, but they do occasionally come, and losing that might be a bad move.
I wonder if there's a hybrid of the two--keep the main number as a POTS line from Verizon, then add some VOIP as secondary numbers. That may not save us much in the long run.
Not trying to make a move for the sake of changing, but not wanting to keep throwing gobs of money at Verizon every month for what is becoming a commodity service with plenty of less expensive options out there.
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John B. wrote:
I use Vonage at home, and just switched to RingCentral for business use (about 2 months ago). I think RingCentral has most of the 'features' you mentioned, without the issues of setting up your own box.
That looks like a good solution for a business like ours. There may not be much in the way of cost savings vs. our current plan, but feature-wise, it looks like it would match what we currently have between the Verizon and PhoneValet and would add features like call forwarding, etc.
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