atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Hosted VoIP PBX Services

This seems like a very knowledgeable board. I was surprised to find my search of "hosted" to only find 5 links none of which referred to hosted voip services. My question is this.

Several market studies indicate this service will replace VoIP CPE (premised) equipment in the next year or so. That said, what have you found the advantages and disadvantages are and how many installations have you seen.

This is an important question to me because our business has made the leap start moving in this direction. Your thoughts and comment are genuinely appreciated. Thanks.


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www.itel-ip.com

VoIP, Features Galore"

My personal feeling is that in most cases this architecture is not the future, although I'm sure there is a niche market where it makes sense. I realize there are lots of advertising dollars being spent that hype this up but I've yet to see a real world installation that could stand up beside a PBX or even a key system for that matter. Why would you send in house traffic offsite? Plus the feature set lacks. Get a feature set matrix & stack it up agaist a any PBX that's out there.

[This message has been edited by aweaver (edited June 22, 2005).]

Thanks for your response, much appreciated!

"Why would you send in house traffic offsite?"

I think the main reason is cost savings.

"Plus the feature set lacks. Get a feature set matrix & stack it up agaist a any PBX that's out there."

OK

Unified Messaging
Call Recording
Faxing in and out
Presence (see what status everyone is in)
Dialtone
Microsoft Outlook with 100 megs of space
Basic ACD
DID
find me/follow me
Remote use (its a gui so you can use it anywhere you have internet with any phone)
text to speech (read your e-mails to you and forward faxes to other fax machines by dialing into the TUI)
Listen (to VM while its being left)
AA, hold, transfer, page, etc. and all "PBX Features" (except park which bugs me)

I don’t know many key systems (or PBX’s for that matter) that can do all that. If you do, I am seriously interested.

Basicly we are looking at setting up all end users with that for about $45-50/month. LD is $.03/min. Shoot even regular dialtone is like $60/month then you still have to buy a PBX. Something with those kind of features and IP is gonna be at least $1000-$1500 per phone. Right?

Don’t get me wrong they still need to buy/lease a SIP phone (Polycom's cheapest speaker phone will sell to end users for around $200) but I am thinking that for most 5-50 person companies it would be a cost/features advantage. We’ve tried to crunch the numbers pretty hard. If I am missing something I could really use some help because we are going to be prospecting dealers sometime soon and I want to make sure we have our ducks in a row because most of our prospects will be phone guys like you. (Not computer guys like Cisco goes for).

Thanks aweaver. Please let me know what you think, I hold your opinion with high regard.




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[URL=https://www.itel-ip.com

]www.itel-ip.com

VoIP, with Features Galore

Avaya, Comdial, Panasonic, Toshiba, Nortel. I can't think of a system that doesn't offer those features quite frankly. Dialtone is a feature?

The cheap phone you refer to does not give you the "presence" as you call it feature. So I think once you add up the price of IP phones compared to Hybrid IP phone system, I think you will find Hybrid to be cheaper. More reliable.

If I could sell someone a $1500 phone, WOW, I would be able to retire early!



[This message has been edited by OhioTelecom (edited June 22, 2005).]

Hosted IP centric companies pedalling "old school" centrex apps are a joke at this point. All are startups(less than 5 years in service). Would you trust your company's telephony to a company without a track record? Alot of the old timers are struggling. NT,AV, etc. These industry leaders are barely making it let alone someone unknown with a soft switch in a rented colocated space. The jury is still out. I have lost 1 deal in the last 12 months to a rent-a-voip phone outfit. A 4 phone realty office startup that I couldn't write a lease on because it was a new biz with no credit. I like my odds.

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Business Phone Systems

Since when has Polycom been considered a "cheap phone"? I am willing to bet you have installed plenty of Polycom manufactured phones.

Sure all the "regular" manufacturers you mention CAN do these things. If you attach a bunch of DIFFERENT systems to them. Then you are looking at a much more expensive system.

I will do a cost comparison vs your "hybrid" or "converged" PBX's any day and win 9 out of 10 times and you still would'nt offer all of those features.

My mention of $1000-$1500 per phone considers ALL costs considered but I assumed you would be savvy enough to realize that.

Presence is included in the GUI. I would like to see you take a TDM phone and move it without charging the customer. Let alone let them take it and use it from home.

Clearly you are offended by my post and in no way was I trying to attack. Not sure where your aggression resides from. I was just trying to get some insight from what I considered to be decent, knowledgeable industry veterans.

My apologies if you considered my post a threat.

Lastly, we are about to sign someone up in Columbus, OH so perhaps we will be running into each other.

Good Luck to you.


[This message has been edited by bbarnes (edited June 22, 2005).]

while I'am sure you mean well, but those of us who have to install and make something work because a customer was told it would work and it doesn't or because a company sales a system that will do a bunch of features and then they need patchs, upgrades, so on and so forth. then you can understand why some people get tired of hearing the same sort of song and dance. I have been hearing that voip is the way go, in truth it has a long way to go. all my customers want proven working system that will last and grown with them. voip will be the way to go someday, but intil they all are using the same standards, as far as my customers are concerned they are not willimg to make that gamble.

sorry about the post

[This message has been edited by yzark40 (edited June 22, 2005).]

Apology not neccessarry but well taken. I can actually relate. I have sold systems before that were "supposed" to do things promised by manufacturers and in the real world they just didnt go as planned. When that happens guess who takes the call.

Oh how I dred those days. This is one of the main reasons I decided to join forces with where I am at today. I did quite a bit of reasearch beofre taking the leap because of the reasons you listed above. They mirror both of our past experiences. Our motto is "a lot of people blow hot air but we actully do what we say we can." Sometimes our installs can get labor intensive but at the end of the day everything works as promised. The nice thing about a hosted solution is that all of that work has already been achived so its just a matter of expaning our exisiting install. So far this has been very nice. Since its not a perfect world, I know tougher days are ahead but as long as I stay in the 5-50 per site space things should go smoohtly.

Thanks for your note!

So I assume the consensus here is that hosted is the enemy?

All I ask is that you be open minded about this becuase statistics show that it will be a very big part of our dailey lives in days to come.

Any other thoughts?

Are you using a point to point t-1 between your equipment and the customer to link to their phones? I can't imagine trying to get decent voice quality on a link I didn't have direct control over the QOS in the routers. Btw, I can see some of the points the other installers are making. This type of solution currently doesn't appear to scale well with many businesses due to the need for so many managed switches to keep network segments from killing the voice quality. Remember this is just how it appears to me from the problems I've had installing hybrid pbx/ip and pure ip systems.

Actually most major markets have seen IP telephony service providers come and go. We have 2 disappear overnight. Not a great comfort to the enduser. Promises of the great future of hosted services is a guess at best. Good luck anyway.

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Business Phone Systems