Hosted VOIP providers

rsutton

I've worked with a lot of VOIP providers over the past few years and have had more bad experiences than good with all but one. I'm wondering if anyone has at least a few data points and can recommend a good VOIP provider. I'm not worried about specific features, I just want to add a couple more providers to my white list.

If you are going to recommend Megapath, Telekenex or Simple Signal, just don't.

shodown

MEGA path is horrible. I wouldn't recommend Icore either. The best ones are usually the regional ones where they actually care about your business and have the relationships to offer service to your other locations. I'm not sure who is popular on the west coast, but I would start there.

JaneDoe

I've been working with Pingtone for 3 years now, and they've been wonderful. I highly recommend them. In 3 years we haven't had any service interruptions from their side, and they've been amazing helping us with troubleshooting when needed.

ccnxjr

**Disclaimer: I work for a hosted VoIP company**

What specifically are you looking for?
-Hosted PBX (just want to set up phones and extensions)
-SIP Trunking (just need them to take care of your SIP traffic and send it off to where it needs to go? )
-Specific Features? (PSTN failover ? Voice & IM ? API s? )

What sucked with the last providers?

rsutton

I'm looking for hosted pbx. I'm not looking for any specific features - I have a few vendors I like so when one of my clients need a phone system I have a white list of vendors I can safely look at to see if they have features that my clients need.

My problem with most VOIP providers is service. When I have a phone outage, that is a *crisis* for my client. The bad VOIP providers don't get this. I have many data points and go off on a tangent; but service is the problem.

shodown

If its a crisis for your client when the phones go down. Then Hosted VoIP maynot be for them. Most hosted providers have reouting services available and other features to keep you operational when there is a problem. However you may neeed to look at the needs of the business to make sure hosted VoIP is a good fit for them. I have plenty of examples of when hosted voip is not a good fit for the company and they should look into a on prem solution.

Lizano

shodown wrote: »

If its a crisis for your client when the phones go down. Then Hosted VoIP maynot be for them.

I've been working for a Hosted VoIP provider for a while now. I used to have Hosted PBX, but working with it and getting to learn it I really don't see why the Hosted VoIP has such a bad reputation. I mean, yes, if your phones go down that is a complete emergency. I would expect any Hosted provider to have redundant servers, redundant links, redundant routes, etc. Isn't that more reliable than having a PBX sitting in your building with Trunk lines coming in? I would expect that any Hosted PBX provider would have more redundancy measures than any particular customer will have. Therefore to me, Hosted PBX works fine for you if uptime is what you are looking for.

I beleive the key to Hosted VoIP (or any hosted service) is that the service will only be as good as the internet connection is rides over. If you have a good internet connection and still have problems with your service, then yes, you may need to change your services provider.

it_consultant

Our Cisco UCCX platform has had so much downtime that we are seriously considering going to a hosted call center solution, does anyone have any experience with a hosted call center?

shodown

it_consultant wrote: »

Our Cisco UCCX platform has had so much downtime that we are seriously considering going to a hosted call center solution, does anyone have any experience with a hosted call center?

How large is your call center? Also what version UCCX are you running and how is it deployed? UCCX is very very stable so if its going down there are some underlying problems in how its deployed that need to be looked at.


As for hosted call center they fall into the same category as I said above. If you make money of having your phones being up, outsourcing it to another provider is not a good move unless your very small. I've worked hosted and non hosted and both can be great options, but you have to look at your companies business needs first before making that decision.

shodown

Lizano wrote: »

I've been working for a Hosted VoIP provider for a while now. I used to have Hosted PBX, but working with it and getting to learn it I really don't see why the Hosted VoIP has such a bad reputation. I mean, yes, if your phones go down that is a complete emergency. I would expect any Hosted provider to have redundant servers, redundant links, redundant routes, etc. Isn't that more reliable than having a PBX sitting in your building with Trunk lines coming in? I would expect that any Hosted PBX provider would have more redundancy measures than any particular customer will have. Therefore to me, Hosted PBX works fine for you if uptime is what you are looking for.

I beleive the key to Hosted VoIP (or any hosted service) is that the service will only be as good as the internet connection is rides over. If you have a good internet connection and still have problems with your service, then yes, you may need to change your services provider.

Most providers do have pretty decent systems and I have only seen the core go down like 2-3 times in my entire time I did hosted voip. However the skill of the engineers you work with can vary, there relationship with upstream providers vary, services they offer vary. Right now in the enterprise world we offer way more services than our hosted solution can provide. Our hosted solution works well for small to medium sized business who just need the phones to work and have a reliable connection. However some of our small businesses have needs with there custom apps, security, and trunking that our hosted solution just can't meet at a reasonable price and we offer those people on site VoIP services. It call comes down to the business as its not a 1 size fits all.

it_consultant

shodown wrote: »

How large is your call center? Also what version UCCX are you running and how is it deployed? UCCX is very very stable so if its going down there are some underlying problems in how its deployed that need to be looked at.


As for hosted call center they fall into the same category as I said above. If you make money of having your phones being up, outsourcing it to another provider is not a good move unless your very small. I've worked hosted and non hosted and both can be great options, but you have to look at your companies business needs first before making that decision.

We have 29-40 agents on call at any given moment and 96 trunks from the outside world. Not large by any measure. We are on UCCX 8 SU4 in a cluster. Almost every part of this phone system has had issues from WFM to voicemail to the call center. We have had 2 revenue impacting outages over the last year with 4-6 hour phone calls to TAC (via our "support" vendor) and that is only since I have been here. They originally installed the system in 2009 and found the hardware was not powerful enough, so they ended up buying another set of servers which had more power 1 year into the deployment. The shoretel it replaced had more features and was more stable - we had a guy that worked here that insisted that Cisco was the way to go and we have been paying for it in real money and reputation ever since.

4 years is way too soon to talk a full phone system replacement (I would bring in Avaya) and we simply don't have the confidence that UCCX 9.X will deliver much better than v8 and/or that the implementation services we will get will even be competent. Hence the idea of a hosted call center.

shodown

UCCX8 is not a good line of code and it should upgraded to UCCX 8.5. With WFM you need to ensure you LAN is setup correctly for it with the switches and in CUCM. If your support Vendor can't get through those problems its time to choose another partner. UCCX 9 is not the way to go at this time as its a big leap. UCCX 8.5 with a version of CUCM 8.6 is the way to go. I would bet that you hardware would need to be looked at closely before making this move. From what you have told me it sounds like the right people haven't been involved in helping you guys get to where you need to be. I do think some of the hardware is at fault, but most people have moved beyond 8.0 for uccx and call manager.





I like shortel system and I would highly recommend them. They are pretty durable.

it_consultant

It was bad times when it was put in originally. The company doing the install was bought out mid-project and they failed to complete. We had someone come in and finish it only to find a lot of the features we needed were additional licenses (which, oddly enough, would have put the bid closer to the Avaya bid) that we had not purchased. Rather than biting the bullet and buying the licenses we bought third party products and custom wrote some code (like our pay by phone IVR) and it has been a long downward spiral since then.

We actually had a board member argue with this particular admin (our board is made up of local elected officials) who had a similar experience with Cisco (our board members are normally not interested in our IT projects) and warned him to take the Avaya bid even though it was a couple of hundred thousand dollars more expensive.

This isn't necessarily about how bad Cisco is, but how a decent product can go bad quick. I realize a lot of people use Cisco phones without hiccup; it just seems like they need to be babysat more than the Shoretel, Nortel, and Avaya systems I have worked on in the past.

shodown

Yeah I had this kinda figured out before you even said all above. Adding 3rd party products and custom writing code can be a pain in the a55 if not documented and tested properly. You even had someone go with Avaya based upon your experience which was kinda a mixutre of things. Hosted VoiP maybe the way for you guys to go if they can meet your requirements which I think you guys actually may not even know.




BTW even though I'm cisco certified up the yazhoo, I work with shoretel and m$ based voip systems and even hosted system so I wanted to make sure I didn't sound too cisco biased.