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thinking of going all voip

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ZenMasta

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We're getting ready to move our office and we wont be able to bring our numbers with us. Presently using FXO gateway.

I know that I can port my numbers to a voip provider and that's tempting. Just wondering some things

1) is the latency going to be very noticeable

2) need a list of some good voip providers so maybe I can test on a line or two before making a decision.

Also, we have 4 pots lines
We and have a toll free number for customers to call in which always rings line 1 but all lines have hunting.

Do I understand correctly if we were to switch to voip we wouldn't really have any need for multiple DID? Personally I don't care about having more than 1 local number for people to call.
 
Latency will be dependent on your network, who you are using, how many concurrent calls you will have, available bandwidth, and network equipment.

Not to be biased here...but I am...Vitelity is a good choice, they have been my primary SIP provider for 7 years and I have put lots of customers on them. Because I have been so happy with them, I now work there.
 
Are you no longer with 888 voip?

We'll be using residential Cable minimum 10 mbps down 3mbps up.
Typically 2 concurrent calls, RARELY 4 but that's usually the max.
 
I moved to Vitelity about two weeks ago. You will have enough bandwidth for sure, just make sure you have a router that can do QoS on the voice packets.
 
We have a pfsense fw/router that can handle QoS that and I'm planning to setup a pptp vpn between that and my home router, which is using ddwrt, for a remote extension.

I slightly modified my first post just before you responded. Will I only need 1 DID now if we switch to all voip? The only reason we had 4 lines previously wasn't because we needed extra phone numbers but the capacity to make up to 4 concurrent calls.
 
One more thing.

We only advertise our toll free number. But if thats pointing to a DID and the voip provider network is down for whatever reason then we're effectively shutdown too. If I have pots lines in my office I could make calls which is fine but I don't care about making calls I could use my cell phone in an emergency or if I need to contact a customer. What's important is customers contacting us.

So how does a small business handle this situation where they rely on a single inbound number.
You guys don't offer an up time guarantee, is that common in the voip industry?

Do we instead have our toll free number ring a pots line and then have the pots line forward to the voip number? Maybe we're not really ready to go all voip?

What happens when the line is down, does it ring busy or does it have the disconnected tone?
 
I like to use Broadvox, service is great and pricing is good. They do have an uptime in their SLA of 99.99% which is as good as you are going to get with any carrier. You can also keep a POTS line or 2 for backup/fax if you data goes down and simply have your carrier forward those calls to that POTS, a cell or any youd like, physically plug those lines into a VoIP gateway. You did say you already have one correct? As far as latency, voice, quality, as kerry said it depends on your network but 10x3mbps of bandwidth is more than enough needed to support your voice traffic with just 4 sip trunks. And make sure your QoS is enabled, if you have a smart switch they can even auto setup voice vlans and give priority to the VoIP traffic at the switch level as well. I use all VoIP for my voice services with the exception of fax, and i suggest that for all my clients (though some use VoIP for the fax solutions as well. Cbeyond, 8x8 are the other two VoIP providers I use regularly, I've tried many more, MS VoIP, Call Cantric, etc... You will hear 5 people that like 5 providers for 50 different reasons, You will have to just find out which works best for your needs.
 
Nexvortex has been a great provider for our company. if their service goes down (which it hasn't) it automatically forwards the calls to whichever number you specify. recommend using POTS for faxes as T.38 is not so great. also, from my experience, cable is terrible for VoIP especially if you are using a residential service with no SLA's or guarantees. We had Time Warner Cable internet and it was 6 moths of h3ll and all they could ever say was "that's the problem with cable, very latent". Not great for VoIP. I would look into another service if you can. Sometimes less bandwidth less latency is better. We switched to T1's and haven't had a problem since.
 
Vitelity provides a fail-over number for each DID. My calls fail to my cell phone, wife's calls fail to her cell phone. Fortunately it never happens and our house is on Time Warner Cable and has been pretty reliable, not perfect, but not bad.
 
Kerry, I called sales yesterday and I asked them about fail over a couple of times and they (atleast the one person I spoke to) said there was no such feature so if it was down its down and they explained thats one of the risks you have to take with voip. Paraphrased of course but that's effectively what was explained.

Maybe need to send out a company memo or something to sales.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys.
 
When you configure a DID, you can EASILY setup a failover number. I will address this with sales immediately, it has been a feature for ages.
 
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