On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Joel Finlinson <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm looking for recommendations on good VOIP > products/companies/recommendations for a small business (less than 10 > phones/handsets). Currently using normal CenturyLink lines and standard > phones and thinking it's time to change to something better and less > expensive. Xmission has a $39/month option on their main page. Anyone > looked at www.yiptel.com ?
It really depends on what you're looking for. As far as I see it, here are your three main considerations: 1) SIP origination and termination / DIDs / TF / LD: Who are you going to get your dialtone from? What do they charge per minute for calls? Do you want to pay a flat fee and get unlimited usage? Would you rather pay a little more per minute and hope that it's cheaper over all? How much do they charge for long distance and toll free numbers? Do you feel like you trust them enough to port your existing and published DIDs to them? What codecs do they offer? Is your existing ISP good enough to use VoIP without issues (bufferbloat, uptime, network congestion, SLAs etc). How long of a contract are you willing to sign? 2) PBX like functionality: Do you want to provide your own PBX or use one provided to you? Do you need to integrate calls with your CRM or other systems? Do you need fine grained control over call flow? Do you need to be able to make changes to recordings or logic quickly (without waiting on a provider)? Would you rather off load all those issues to a 3rd party? Do you have sunk costs that you can't yet bring yourself to abandon? Do you need advanced features like calling queues, conference bridges, etc? 3) Handsets / phones: Do you already have SIP enabled phones? How many hard-phones do you want? How many soft-phones? How important is speaker phone quality? Does your font desk need to have shared lines? Do you want to buy phones or lease them? Would you like the ability to provide your own phones or would you rather get some that are tied to your service (and guaranteed to work)? I guess the point is that there are more options now than ever... that's fun and exciting. But what's right for you? If you want just plain SIP orig and term with lots of flexibility, I'd do Flowroute with FreeSWITCH. Lots of flexibility, but you have to know something about what you're doing. This is what I do for my business. If you want middle of the road service where you can bring your own hardware and a PBX is provided for you, you have tons of options. I'm sure AT&T, Qwest, XO, (I think Comcast is getting into this) all have something like this. If they don't have it *now*, they're all getting into as quickly as they can. If you want an end-to-end solution that provides a high level of customer support and charges on a per-handset basis, Jive (local) is a good way to go. Sorry that was so long and rambling... I better get back to work :) Best, Gabe /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
