Business VOIP

Kevin!

A small company I'm working for is currently looking at the possibility of transitioning to VOIP from the fixed line services that are currently installed.

We need to be able to migrate the two telephone numbers already in operation and also have 4 handsets and an automatic menu when these numbers are called to direct calls to the specific department appropriately. Calls out will mainly be to Irish landlines and numbers, but occasionally the UK also.

The most important aspect is reliability, this service cannot go down as that results in potential loss/dissatisfied customers - what sort of provider should I contact? I've been reading about Goldfish and Blueface, but what would be the most reliable?

cheers,

Kev

Mr. G

Hi Kevin,

There is a list of providers here:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2676368&postcount=1

You have two options:
1) Move your phone system to the cloud
Or 2) Set up an IP phone system using something like FreePBX.

Do you require call recording and custom Music on Hold?

Do you have a current phone system? If so, what make/model is it?

Are you comfortable to install a PBX, such as FreePBX?

What are your broadband connection speeds and pings like? Could you post a speedtest.net result?

If you choose the former, than you rely on a service provider like Goldfish to host your phone system. If they go down, well they go down and so do your phone lines.

If you choose the latter and it blows up you can phone your provider to divert your lines to an emergency mobile. If the phone system blows up, you will have to get it fixed/fix it yourself. The likelihood of a phone system blowing up these days is unusual.

The main SIP trunk providers here are Blueface, Digiweb and Goldfish.

Goldfish are an Irish company, with support etc based in a sister company in the UK. They use Digiweb.

Digiweb have several failover locations.

Blueface are an Irish firm but at the moment do not have any failovers in other locations. They have not gone down for a few years now and I think now they realise the importance continuity. Be careful not to purchase ip phones from Blueface since they are locked to them and cannot be used with any of provider. Also be aware that Blueface have 12 months contracts and neither of the two others have contracts.

Out of all of them, the only provider I can recommend is Digiweb. If your broadband goes down any time of the day or night, you can call their NOC who will divert your lines to another number. I find them the best to deal with. They do not charge any monthly fees, they just charge per minute on calls made.

Disclaimer: I do not work for any of these providers.

Shout if you have any other questions.

Mr. G

We've received this from someone that works in Blueface. Hopefully this might clear some of the details up.

Blueface wrote: »

Hi there,

Blueface now has two Points of Presence (PoPs) in two data centres (Telecity). The only other Irish carriers that have this level of network resilience to my knowledge are Eircom and BT. All Blueface traffic is terminated within the State with Tier 1 carriers and is well peered in INEX.

Reliability is six nines 99.9999% over the past two years. I realise this information hasnt been published before but I guess it should be!

There's also an automatic failover option with Blueface. If your broadband ever went down it could route to your mobile so you never lose a call.

Options of increased redundancy would be having a second Bb connection (diverse routes ideally) but usually only considered by larger businesses.

Thanks

Disclaimer: I work for Blueface.

0lddog

Blueface offer mobile which, I understand, integrates into their original VOIP offering.

Has anyone here tried it ?

Kevin!, would such functionality be of interest in your situation ?

Kevin!

Mr. G wrote: »

Hi Kevin,

There is a list of providers here:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2676368&postcount=1

You have two options:
1) Move your phone system to the cloud
Or 2) Set up an IP phone system using something like FreePBX.

Do you require call recording and custom Music on Hold?

Do you have a current phone system? If so, what make/model is it?

Are you comfortable to install a PBX, such as FreePBX?

What are your broadband connection speeds and pings like? Could you post a speedtest.net result?

If you choose the former, than you rely on a service provider like Goldfish to host your phone system. If they go down, well they go down and so do your phone lines.

If you choose the latter and it blows up you can phone your provider to divert your lines to an emergency mobile. If the phone system blows up, you will have to get it fixed/fix it yourself. The likelihood of a phone system blowing up these days is unusual.

The main SIP trunk providers here are Blueface, Digiweb and Goldfish.

Goldfish are an Irish company, with support etc based in a sister company in the UK. They use Digiweb.

Digiweb have several failover locations.

Blueface are an Irish firm but at the moment do not have any failovers in other locations. They have not gone down for a few years now and I think now they realise the importance continuity. Be careful not to purchase ip phones from Blueface since they are locked to them and cannot be used with any of provider. Also be aware that Blueface have 12 months contracts and neither of the two others have contracts.

Out of all of them, the only provider I can recommend is Digiweb. If your broadband goes down any time of the day or night, you can call their NOC who will divert your lines to another number. I find them the best to deal with. They do not charge any monthly fees, they just charge per minute on calls made.

Disclaimer: I do not work for any of these providers.

Shout if you have any other questions.

I've been in contact with the two VOIP providers, thanks for the recommendations.

Whilst I am comfortable with computing, I'm only on location one day a week so if something happened to the telephone system it would be a bit of a nightmare so reducing user interaction/error is probably the best way forward in this case.

I'm not on site at the moment but will run a speedtest once I'm in again, I think we're getting about 12 mb/s down on a standard dsl connection at the moment.

The current setup is with Eircom, there is also a unit on the premises which directs call traffic based on a menu

0lddog wrote: »

Blueface offer mobile which, I understand, integrates into their original VOIP offering.

Has anyone here tried it ?

Kevin!, would such functionality be of interest in your situation ?

Functionality wise we need two lines, a menu to direct calls and cheap Ireland landline/mobile calls - it seems that mobile is still quite expensive with the VOIP providers and not many minutes are included within the bundles (expensive to the betamax setup I have at home, costing 1c per minute for Irish mobiles) although I'd never trust a setup like that in a work environment,


thanks all

Mr. G

Kevin! wrote: »

I've been in contact with the two VOIP providers, thanks for the recommendations.

Whilst I am comfortable with computing, I'm only on location one day a week so if something happened to the telephone system it would be a bit of a nightmare so reducing user interaction/error is probably the best way forward in this case.

I'm not on site at the moment but will run a speedtest once I'm in again, I think we're getting about 12 mb/s down on a standard dsl connection at the moment.

The current setup is with Eircom, there is also a unit on the premises which directs call traffic based on a menu



Functionality wise we need two lines, a menu to direct calls and cheap Ireland landline/mobile calls - it seems that mobile is still quite expensive with the VOIP providers and not many minutes are included within the bundles (expensive to the betamax setup I have at home, costing 1c per minute for Irish mobiles) although I'd never trust a setup like that in a work environment,


thanks all

What is broadband like though in the office? Perhaps you could post a speedtest.net result?

Definitely Betamax providers is a no no for businesses, call routes can be bad quality and just isn't suited to a business environment.

Apart from cost, there are several advantages to choosing VoIP over fixed line.

Kevin!

Mr. G wrote: »

What is broadband like though in the office? Perhaps you could post a speedtest.net result?

Definitely Betamax providers is a no no for businesses, call routes can be bad quality and just isn't suited to a business environment.

Apart from cost, there are several advantages to choosing VoIP over fixed line.

Just ran a speedtest.net test, for some reason the upload speeds seem to be diabolical in comparison to the upload: UP: 15.64 DOWN: .67.

It seems that e-fibre are coming to the area in the near future so it might be worth the wait for call reliability?

We are currently paying for PSTN line rental, but I presume with VOIP the lines have the ability to accept multiple calls without requiring a special line?



Another feature that is important to us is the ability to transfer calls. With the current setup we have, there are 6 lights on the phones - when a line is occupied that light is lit up on all phones, solid on the phone that the call is taking place on and flashing on all the other units to let people know that line is occupied.

Is it possible to send the calls to all lines with VOIP? and transfer a call if it needs to go to another department etc.

thanks for all your help once again

SpaceTime

I'd wait until you get E-fibre if your uploads speed is that bad. It looks like you're on a fairly marginal ADSL line which is unlikely to give satisfactory results with VoIP.

Stability and ping (the length of time it takes for a packet of data to get from your computer/phone to the server) is what tends to count more than anything, but sometimes on very marginal ADSL lines you can also have issues with upload speeds being too low.

We're using Blueface with e-fibre for quite a while now and it's providing to be absolutely rock solid.

Mr. G

Kevin! wrote: »

Just ran a speedtest.net test, for some reason the upload speeds seem to be diabolical in comparison to the upload: UP: 15.64 DOWN: .67.

It seems that e-fibre are coming to the area in the near future so it might be worth the wait for call reliability?

We are currently paying for PSTN line rental, but I presume with VOIP the lines have the ability to accept multiple calls without requiring a special line?



Another feature that is important to us is the ability to transfer calls. With the current setup we have, there are 6 lights on the phones - when a line is occupied that light is lit up on all phones, solid on the phone that the call is taking place on and flashing on all the other units to let people know that line is occupied.

Is it possible to send the calls to all lines with VOIP? and transfer a call if it needs to go to another department etc.

thanks for all your help once again

That is diabolical. How do you live with that in a business?

For web browsing and VoIP at those speeds, it would not be reliable. You should allow 100kbps per concurrent call, and with 6 concurrent calls the internet connection would be unusuable.

VDSL/Efibre works brilliantly with VoIP. In comparison to a landline you should notice a difference in terms of call quality. IP phones are generally better quality also.

Regarding call transferring, if you wish to have status lights, you may need a phone system. I don't know if you will get them working without that.

For transferring calls, you can do that.

With VoIP, the lines run over the broadband connection. So if you have ADSL, you can run multiple lines over that simultaneously, just like you can have several Skype video sessions simultaneously (on a good connection). Skype is VoIP.

With VoIP, each phone has it's own line so you would not need to worry about someone being on the PSTN line. You can hunt calls etc.

Kevin!

Mr. G wrote: »

That is diabolical. How do you live with that in a business?

For web browsing and VoIP at those speeds, it would not be reliable. You should allow 100kbps per concurrent call, and with 6 concurrent calls the internet connection would be unusuable.

VDSL/Efibre works brilliantly with VoIP. In comparison to a landline you should notice a difference in terms of call quality. IP phones are generally better quality also.

Regarding call transferring, if you wish to have status lights, you may need a phone system. I don't know if you will get them working without that.

For transferring calls, you can do that.

With VoIP, the lines run over the broadband connection. So if you have ADSL, you can run multiple lines over that simultaneously, just like you can have several Skype video sessions simultaneously (on a good connection). Skype is VoIP.

With VoIP, each phone has it's own line so you would not need to worry about someone being on the PSTN line. You can hunt calls etc.

Thanks for the reply, in regards to not needing a PSTN line - say if I had one number for incoming calls would it be possible for that number to be used for multiple calls simultaneously (to different handsets)? Is that the concept of call hunting?

We've been scraping by with our internet speeds as alot of the programs we use are localised, but we are soon moving to a cloud based solution and hopefully VOIP so a strong internet connection will be essential.

Mr. G

Kevin! wrote: »

Thanks for the reply, in regards to not needing a PSTN line - say if I had one number for incoming calls would it be possible for that number to be used for multiple calls simultaneously (to different handsets)? Is that the concept of call hunting?

We've been scraping by with our internet speeds as alot of the programs we use are localised, but we are soon moving to a cloud based solution and hopefully VOIP so a strong internet connection will be essential.

Yep. If your only broadband connection is one the same line as your main line, when you port that line away the broad and will get cancelled with the line.

Essentially the line is "in the cloud". Once you have a decent internet connection you can have multiple simultaneous calls at once. By hunt groups I mean you can have all the phones (or specified extensions) ring at the same time.

Again, 100kbps per concurrent call is what you need.