Point Me in the Right Direction Please -- adding business use
dabluebery:
Many thanks for bringing me more up to speed. My lack of understanding has led to months of inertia, because I've been fearful of making a misstep. I already have a ringcentral account for an efax - I will probably just expand my account to include a virtual phone system.
I'd port over my GV #'s first, to get familiar before I mess with my inbound phone calls for the business.
I guess the last question I have for now is, assuming that I use ringcentral to grab all of my phone lines and set up a virtual phone system for my office using an IP phone, would I be able to still configure an OBI to bridge to the analog phone lines in my house so my wife can keep her landline, currently obi202/GV?
OzarkEdge:
>>I'd lean towards the customer friendly interfaces especially because my partners and sales rep will have less ability than I do.
VoIP.ms' account management portal is friendly enough. The primary DIY challenges:
o discovering the available resources and how to use them for your solution;
o Configuring devices/firmware... provider's offer supporting documentation and there is online help as is evident here;
o Commissioning VoIP at each location. It's often plug and play, but some lessor/older routers can be troublesome. You would likely prepare and prove operation on your LAN, and then visit remote sites (if necessary) for deployment and to work out any site network issues such as upgrading to decent Internet service, disabling any SIP ALG/Pass-Through setting in the router, upgrading to a decent router, and/or setting up router QoS to preserve some minimum bandwidth for VoIP traffic (VoIP requires about 80Kbps per SIP channel/call, so QoS is usually not a problem unless your LAN is busy). The remote user just needs to know how to use their devices and perform typical phone system call management... not maintain the system;
o Being prepared to troubleshoot equipment/service yourself instead of calling someone to do this for you... I doubt any ITSP offers onsite service, so you'll be on call. Not a big deal, if you are the system builder already managing your own computing resources.
>>Our call volume is reasonably low - inbound calls from our website are only a few per day, and we spent probably around 3000 minutes a month on the phone with clients handling business - around 2 hours a day...
VoIP.ms rates https://www.voip.ms/en/rates/united-states
Your costs will include the flat outbound rate, and the per minute or flat inbound rate, plus any DID and e911 fees. Note that VoIP.ms counts minutes in 6 second increments. Also, VoIP.ms offers free toll-free outbound over value routes... likely plenty good enough.
>>So I would partner up with an SIP provider to grab all these phone lines, set it up in the cloud, and then grab IP phones. Right now I'm using the OBI 202 as a bridge to POTS phone lines, I guess anywhere I still wanted to use that, I could?
Use any SIP endpoint device you want. ATAs work fine and adapt analog devices to digital VoIP.
You may discover that you don't need as many phone numbers. One DID can be routed to many VoIP destinations.
>>But the IP phones would go directly to the Internet to handle my desk phone?
An IP phone connects directly to the LAN... no analog bits required.
>>I guess the last question I have for now is, assuming that I use ringcentral to grab all of my phone lines and set up a virtual phone system for my office using an IP phone, would I be able to still configure an OBI to bridge to the analog phone lines in my house so my wife can keep her landline, currently obi202/GV?
I'm not familiar with RC, but you can continue to use your GV-OBi analog house phones... the OBi is just another device on your LAN.
This is to help illustrate what can be done, not what you should do.
OE
SteveInWA:
Quote from: OzarkEdge on February 07, 2018, 04:27:13 pm
>>I'd lean towards the customer friendly interfaces especially because my partners and sales rep will have less ability than I do.
VoIP.ms' account management portal is friendly enough. The primary DIY challenges:
o discovering the available resources and how to use them for your solution;
o Configuring devices/firmware... provider's offer supporting documentation and there is online help as is evident here;
o Commissioning VoIP at each location. It's often plug and play, but some lessor/older routers can be troublesome. You would likely prepare and prove operation on your LAN, and then visit remote sites (if necessary) for deployment and to work out any site network issues such as upgrading to decent Internet service, disabling any SIP ALG/Pass-Through setting in the router, upgrading to a decent router, and/or setting up router QoS to preserve some minimum bandwidth for VoIP traffic (VoIP requires about 80Kbps per SIP channel/call, so QoS is usually not a problem unless your LAN is busy). The remote user just needs to know how to use their devices and perform typical phone system call management... not maintain the system;
o Being prepared to troubleshoot equipment/service yourself instead of calling someone to do this for you... I doubt any ITSP offers onsite service, so you'll be on call. Not a big deal, if you are the system builder already managing your own computing resources.
>>Our call volume is reasonably low - inbound calls from our website are only a few per day, and we spent probably around 3000 minutes a month on the phone with clients handling business - around 2 hours a day...
VoIP.ms rates https://www.voip.ms/en/rates/united-states
Your costs will include the flat outbound rate, and the per minute or flat inbound rate, plus any DID and e911 fees. Note that VoIP.ms counts minutes in 6 second increments. Also, VoIP.ms offers free toll-free outbound over value routes... likely plenty good enough.
>>So I would partner up with an SIP provider to grab all these phone lines, set it up in the cloud, and then grab IP phones. Right now I'm using the OBI 202 as a bridge to POTS phone lines, I guess anywhere I still wanted to use that, I could?
Use any SIP endpoint device you want. ATAs work fine and adapt analog devices to digital VoIP.
You may discover that you don't need as many phone numbers. One DID can be routed to many VoIP destinations.
>>But the IP phones would go directly to the Internet to handle my desk phone?
An IP phone connects directly to the LAN... no analog bits required.
This is to help illustrate what can be done, not what you should do.
OE
You have gone completely astray from the concept of consultative selling -- understanding the user's business needs, level of technical expertise, bandwith to spend time on futzing with settings, and other activities that are not the core competency of their business. For example, a customer could build their own desks, plumb their own sinks, stripe their own parking spaces, install their own signage, and wire up power and network cabling, but it would waste precious time that is better devoted to building and running the actual business they are selling. The large majority of small and medium-businesses that fail to focus on their actual mission and core competency fail within a couple of years for this very reason.
I would never, ever recommend that a SMB environment use a barebones DIY provider like voip.ms. Sure, they have capabilities, but their web site and wiki are abysmal, their live tech support is almost nil, and the user is left to their own to spend time on forums like this figuring out how to build a business telephone system. That paradigm is obsolete for business.
Even on the large enterprise business side, corporations are abandoning their own data centers, and moving most of their work to cloud-based solutions from Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google, VMWare, etc, and dumping their old PBX equipment for cloud based solutions that integrate audio and video conferencing, softphones, mobile phones and desk phones.
On the consumer side, you'll notice that there are very few pure-play SIP ITSPs left that market to the general consumer public. Vonage and 8x8 were two of the first, and their market share is tiny today. The large majority of residential and small office users now get their telephone service from Comcast or whatever other "triple play bundler" sells cable-based service in their area.
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