What to do? Advice welcome!
jeannnnee:
Steve in WA and AZRobert, thank you so much.
You have both helped immensely!
In searching for information, yes, indeed, I posted also on DSLreports. I'm a N00b! So am researching!
--My original thought was GV, but I can't afford to have GV take us down, and am nervous for all the other reasons Steve mentions (though I too know of many people who have used GV for businesses with no trouble). so i went looking for ITSP reviews. In looking, I saw dslreports has active threads on this topic too.
--Though I have pretty much decided on Obihai in some form, in searching for an ITSP, I was interested to find that many people do not use Obihai, and I wanted to research that as well. People on DSLreports are not all Obihai users.
ITSP: there seem to be many opinions. do you or others have any thoughts about what's better:?
CallCentric, voip.ms and PhonePower were what Steve mentioned, and they all seem solid. I see also some people are excited about Anveon, and I see they and PhonePower both have an offer with Obitalk, which might suggest that they play well together:
https://www.obitalk.com/obinet/pg/services/home_options
What's important for us: outgoing calls more than incoming. We will have intermittently high usage (a couple weeks heavy, then maybe a month or two off) so paying a low monthly base rate and then a per-outgoing-call fee for those high-use periods would be good.
Also, others mention that they get spam robocalls on incoming lines. We use nomorobo at home to block that, and we are most happy with the results. In your experience, what's best to block spam on incoming ITSP lines? Does that capability vary a lot by provider, or are they all about the same?
Thanks for your help! We n00bs appreciate it!
azrobert:
I'm not the best to ask about a provider. Our main line is a PSTN. The wife uses the landline and I use GV. We use CircleNet for backup and international calls. CircleNet is a cheap pay-as-you-go provider, so you aren't charged anything if you're not using the phone. I believe they started some monthly plans. If you're not using GV and don't need all the features of OBiHai, you can get an ATA or IP phone for about half the price. DSLReports would be the place for a recommendation.
Most full feature providers provide black lists for robo calls. Callcentric has a feature requiring the caller to enter a digit to be connected, so robo calls are blocked. I don't know if you want to force your clients to do this. If your provider supports simul-ring you can use NoMoRobo with them. If they don't, the OBi202 can route calls to NoMoRobo. You can also create a black list in the OBi202.
Here is CirleNet. Use their simulator to get their rates to a destination.
http://www.circlenet.us/drupal7/
Here is a California number for less than a quarter cent per minute.
https://customer.circlenet.us/customer/rates.php?called=18189216586
SteveInWA:
When starting up a business, it certainly makes sense to try to be frugal. However, making "penny wise/pound foolish" decisions based on advice or recommendations from people who really don't have any business skills is one reason the majority of small businesses fail in the first two years.
DSLReports is essentially a chat room for hardcore hackers, techies and "stick it to the man", anti-corporate types who make a sport out of finding the absolutely cheapest or free way to make phone calls. There are a few one-man-show operations offering very low prices, and they're like honey to the folks who chat in that forum. That's fine for hobbyists but a fool's errand for business.
The providers I mentioned would all meet your needs, and have proven themselves over many years of providing business-class service. A few providers are taking the additional step to use Obihai's remote provisioning and device management platform, for "zero touch" service. They pay Obihai fees to use the platform and co-market their services. You'll see them on the main OBiTALK page, including Anveo, Nextiva, PhonePower and RingCentral. The other providers listed (when you click on the Next button at the bottom of the page) have provided known-working device configuration information to Obihai, and Obihai uses this information to simplify setup for their customers (no financial tie between Obihai and the provider). The co-branded, managed offerings are great, but better for an established business with more users.
If you want somebody to help make the decision for you, I use and recommend Callcentric, but I try to be neutral and offer suggestions for other providers we here on the forum have found to be equally high-quality. voip.ms, PhonePower and Callcentric are favorites here, because of high reliability and customer support, and relatively few problems. Anveo is a notch below in support. I suggest you spend some time browsing the providers' websites, and then come back and ask questions if necessary.
As for equipment, again, I strongly recommend against using WiFi. I've done extensive testing of the OBiWiFi adapter in my own home, and unless you have the WiFi router in the same or next room, having multiple phone calls on multiple OBi devices at the same time is going to be problematic. If you want to use two OBi 202s, run an Ethernet cable to the room, get an inexpensive 8-port Ethernet switch (Netgear and TP-Link are great) from Amazon or Newegg, (so you can also hook up the PCs), and have at it.
This is Obihai's own forum, so I'm not going to get into recommending another brand of ATA. I'll just mention that the only other company currently selling and supporting unlocked ATAs is Grandstream. Any discussion you may see on DSLReports about hacking/cracking locked Cisco/Linksys ATAs is out of scope for this forum.
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