I'm 69 and was brought into Hosted VOIP kicking and screaming by a customer who had 35 real estate agents and only needed three lines.

He looked at Hosted VOIP and the carrier wanted money for the lines (fine), money for each set (what for) and $3 a month for each extra mailbox. I started searching and found a company that had MONTHLY contracts, sold the phones at a very low markup (I got a whopping 10% but that was because I could have marked them up and didn't), charged only for the lines, no set fees, and the extra mailboxes were free.

Six months later, this is better than sliced bread. The phones use about 160K per call so you have to know how much bandwidth you have but that is cheap these days.

If you use POE switches (I found very inexpensive ones that work perfectly) you don't need any dangling power supplies, plug the phone in the data wall jack that has POE from the switch and if you have a computer, plug it into the phone.

Hosted is the wave of the future, I fought it until I found a good company and their tech support is thrilling, that was more important than anything.

I'm semi-retired, the commission checks help, and the market for real key systems is going away, if you don't get on the wagon, you will lose to people who lay it all out and close the deal.

You can still make money cabling, you can mark up and get extra money on phones but I don't and their tech support will take care of anything they need that doesn't require on-site wiring.

I get an IP address from the phone, log in on a mac or pc and I can set things up.

So, I'm old, I've come into this kicking and screaming and now I'm smiling on the way to the bank. I used to be one of the top posters here but the faster younger guys knew more about computers than I did and I backed off.

I enjoy helping people, I enjoy teaching and I would be glad to find time to share my knowledge. My first install was two phones the customer put in themselves and I get that commission every month.

To the naysayers, You will start selling this or the other guys will take your customers. Best to you all, Bracha

PS, You are welcome to PM me or send and email to phones at dock.net (collapse and use @ instead of at) Keeps the spammers bots from collecting my email.

I've come to do the same thing when it is right for my customers. Just sold a 6 station one today. Monthly rev builds up every month. This is easy and no running around doing service calls

In major cities like LA. and NY, I can see where you would want to get involved in VOIP sales. Not much of a demand from any of my customers here in the boonies.
If you can build a relationship with ANY reputable company and make money, more power to ya!

Old blond, what is your hosted provider? Like to check them out.

Thanks

I can not even start. So all I will say is good luck to you.

But Jim, VOIP is flee it's flee!

Sum Ting Wong?

Rcaman

Gotta say I am seriously looking into hosted as a customer for my start up. As many know here I am a hardware guy but the initial cost is much easier for me to manage and I can use the money else where for now. I don't know if I would want to sell it as I am still waiting on the infrastructure we were promised years ago. Who knows if the experience is good from the customer side it might be worth looking into selling voip/hardware services in the near future. Look at how many home users have bundled there services with the cable companies.

I have refrained from commenting regarding this issue because many will take my comments as "sour grapes" of an old "hardware technician" and not a new, more "enlightened" IT professional.

What is GREAT for "The Bunny" will work for all of us. This is true, for now. Two words should be examined carefully and some research done for those of us in it for the long haul: "Net Neutrality." Think of the amount of bandwidth that is required to support all the file exchanges as well as the server overhead on each VOIP system. Let's be honest and do some math. Yes, one can get intelligible voice data at 64 Kbs. A few words may be hard to understand, but, all in all, it is doable. At 128 Kbs. the conversation is much more fluid and is acceptable, however, nuances in speech may be partially lost or not fully appreciated. At 256 Kbs. the conversation is extremely close to analog phone to phone communication.

OK, some may argue that most conversation do not need all the "gingerbread" nuances for basic conversation, and I agree. But, if someone is trying to get the "feel" of a conversation and the other party's "mood" 64 Kbs. isn't going to cut it.

Some may even argue that the phone companies only sample the data at 64 Kbs, so why require more bandwidth? The difference is that each sample is 64 Kbs. PER direction with a sum of 128 Kbs. duplex. In some of the more sophisticated central office equipment, voice enhancement is added to improve voice quality.

So, the bottom line here is how does a telephone sales person sell "Cloud" based solutions when the availability of bandwidth is questionable? When the FCC decides to "allocate" bandwidth (and they will) who do you think will ultimately pay for the ability to have higher bandwidth? The "Cloud" companies will pass on the cost to the user.

Then there is the whole spectre of the dot com bust of the 90s. I look at these cloud providers as "get rich quick" hucksters that will fill their bags with all the green they can and then split, leaving all those who drank from the "Kool Aid" with nothing. May I remind us of NorVergence?

Rcaman

NorVergence WOW blast from the past! I still go to a client site that has an ESI and Channel bank hanging on their wall with NorVergence stickers on it that they owner will not remove from the wall as reminder to him! Right beside their current ESI commserver that we re-used all the phones on and I'm not sure if their court stuff ever got settled with NorVergence.

My Opinion on the topic differs between the different flavors of "Cloud" Service. There are some major differences between your run of the meal CLOUD service providers and the Manufactures that are providing Cloud services.

Rcaman is pretty close to the possible future of voip and the quality issues that currently plague that portion of the industry. Net Neutrality is a big issue going forward and will affect our entire industry. So many newer feature's are demanding bandwidth usage. In 5 years I would hate to be the guy with the business model who has 10,000 work from home employees using IP phones if the current regulation review goes the wrong way. With the throttle hold on the neck of the country by the few big boy providers they have managed to stave off infrastructure improvements on a large scale leaving most of America with sub par data connections as compared with many other industrialized countries while still charging a higher rate. Honestly I thought wireless would surpass voip before they could upgrade the entire countries infrastructure.

On top of all that, by what I've been reading, It's not to easy to integrate loudspeaker paging to one of these things.

Something that should be easy, made complicated

There are devices that will integrate the paging, although I have never done it on anything but Cisco.

Rcaman

I did paging once by using a Linksys/Cisco PAP2T ATA going to a Viking Electronics CPA-7B amp. Needed a few tweaks to the standard config of the PAP2T, but it worked good. It was stupid loud even at the lowest volume setting on the Viking. I forget what the client had for existing loud speakers, located in a metal/welding shop.