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What IP telephony systems are good for small business use?
Many people have recommended that I look into a hosted phone system, but I haven’t heard very good reviews about them. Do you recommend a hosted or on-premise telephony system for a small business (15 phones)? Why?
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8 Answers
I'll be up front, I'm not a fan of Hosted Service any more than I was a fan of Centrex Service when I worked for a Teleco.
Think about it, your service is off premise, that can be okay, but what is your single point of failure - that single Internet line that most companies decide to go with. And, what type of QOS do you have between the softswitch and your premise phone - Unless your hosted provider is providing the circuit and the QOS between their switch and your office, there are no guarantees, only a best effort delivery of service.
By having a system on premise, like companies have done for decades, with great quality components, you provide yourself business class service.
To promote that hosted costs less than an on premise system is suspect. When you look at the greatest cost being the telephones, which you will by with either case, what you have left is the cost of the system once, versus the cost of montlhly service for your hosted system. Lease it out for 2-4 years, your cost will most likely be lower than that hosted service, and it goes away at the end of the lease. Simple economics.
So, what system? There are many. For example, for less than $2000 - $3000 you can have a system that supports your needs, for what $60 - $85 a month over 4 years. if you are signing a multi-year hosted plan, is there a difference.
What you gain with the onsite system is diversity. IP trunks and Analog mixed in will give you route diversity, which mean a higher availability of service. When you lose that internet connection, you will still have dialing within your office, access to voicemail, and with a good design, access to non-IP based trunks.
I'm biased, I don't hide that fact. There are a few names that come to mind for small phone systems. Sutus and Epygi are two that I promote for small business. I'm sure the following comments will give you other systems for consideration.
I would focus on ease of configuration - can you pick it up and maintain it after it is installed. Is there good support - telephone, and online. Do you need a technician for every little change you need made, or can you do most of it yourself.
Personally, I enjoy empowering companies to be in a position to do most of their ongoing adds, moves and changes themselves and we have chosen systems that allow for that. There are many to chose from on the market today.
I see on Craigslist phones for sell all the time - a dozen phones, two dozen phones, used for 12 months only. One doesn't have to guess for long to see where those phones came from when it is only the phones.
Selecting a voip provider depends on a few important elements. 1. Quality of provider. 2. Quality of network connection 3. The amount of knowledge and technical understanding you have. Some providers simply provide you the hardware and will only work with you to configure it and other providers will provide hardware, install and manage it. With VOIP, I recommend the latter and in most cases these days customers prefer packaging everything (Phones, System, trunks/DID's, Internet, Calling) into one low monthly price. Let me know if you have any questions.
hosted providers make you buy the phones anyway and charge monthly for the telecom services. So, go ahead and buy or rent it to start with.
Adtran and 3com/hp have great products for 15 users. The Adtran has the 7100 which is router firewall network switch and phone system for 100 users. Currently about $3200 + hansets.
From the UK perspective we have supplied an installed many of these. There are two main things to look out for 1) What platform is the hosted provider using - ideally you should use someone with a proprietary brand like Broadsoft or Nortel CS2K or Comverse. 2) Connectivity - voice stands or falls by the quality of the ADSL or other product used. We will always insist in most cases for a separate circuit to carry the voice. If your potential supplier aren't talking to you about these or unwilling to answer I would suggest the support you will get will not be good. Hope this helps. Jon Pentel
This is a pretty common question, Todd. For that number of phones, there are both hosted and on-prem offerings worth considering. Hosted will cost less, but you have to be comfortable outsourcing the service. That's probably not a big deal for you, but you do have to trust that a hosted provider can be just as reliable and good quality as TDM. If not, it may be worth it to keep paying TDM prices - but these days, IP quality is quite good, and you shouldn't have to do that.
One other thing to say at this point. Hosted comes in a few different flavors, with some being entirely clould-based, which means you can provision everything off the Web. Again, this isn't for everyone, but if you're comfortable with this world, it offers a lot of flexiblity and innovative features you just can't get with TDM.
If all you want is cheaper phone service, you should probaby stay on-prem, and just get basic IP phones. That's perfectly workable, but it really limits you in terms of what's available now - not to mention all the good things that are coming.
In terms of which offerings to use, I'm not going to recommend any - I'm analyst, not an end user. However, Focus does publish buyers guides, and that's where I'd be looking in addition to the commentary you can pick up from these types of conversations.
Phonebooth.com you can try our hosted VOIP service for free.
I'd say the top 2 hosted players are 8x8 and Vocalocity, for small businesses anyway. Good luck!
If you don't have any staff that has the knowledge and expertise to support your own telephony applications, I would not recommended any on prem systems where you own the equipment. If you outsource your phone systems to the a provider, does the cost really justify? You could get IP centrex services for quite reasonable these days. If your goal is just to get a phone services and the advance features that comes with VoIP are not a requirement, I would just get centrex service from your local provider. Centrex offers features like hunt groups, call transfers, call waiting, voice mail, rudimentary conferencing and so forth which makes it worthwhile.
If you really want to experience VoIP, you can try open source PBX solutions without breaking your budget, just get a SIP trunk from your provider and pick up some SIP phones from eBay .
Overall, I would say that with your requirement of only about 15 lines, I would do IP centrex services from a service provider.
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