My Dad had work done on the roof at his business and the roofer left a seam open before a big storm. Rain completely destroyed his office, down to the drywall, including his phone system. He had an older wired phone system from Avaya. He needs to replace it, and I think this is an opportunity to upgrade to new commercial VOIP system.

He has three lines: two voice and one fax, and uses about 10 extensions spread through three attached buildings.

I am not familiar with commercial VOIP, but it seems if he gets the right system, he will have more options than he has now. Can anyone here recommend a specific commercial VOIP system? He needs something reliable and user friendly which doesn't need an IT department to keep it running.

Thank you for your help with this.

First you need to se what’s on net. Local providers. Figure out the local telco that is in foot print. Then find the local cable company is on net with coax. Compare prices with each, and decide.

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
First you need to se what’s on net. Local providers. Figure out the local telco that is in foot print. Then find the local cable company is on net with coax. Compare prices with each, and decide.

He has Verizon FIOS. I do not believe Comcast services his area. OOMA is an option. They use Cisco phones.

IronVoice.

http://ironvoice.com

Basic monthly fee, and he can add as many extensions as he desires.

Using someothing like Polycom IP phones and once the MAC address of the phone is registered to the extension, it can be taken anywhere anc connected to the internet and still use the same Direct In Dial line and extension, so any other extension can dial it, no matter where in the world it is connected.

He can get as many lines as he needs with dial in numbers. He can change things as he chooses pretty much on the fly.

Voice Mail, Call Following (from a direct line, to an extension to a cell phone, all set automatically)

Several other features.

If you want more info, email me, and I'll answer any questions I can, and or put you in touch with the folks at Iron Voice.

We have been using them for about 10 years and have offices in several cities in 4 states and manage it all via the Internet, support is very good and cost is most reasonable.

Likely he can use the single line with his Internet (if offered as a bundle, and most ISPs do) for the fax line.

I have managed many premise telco systems, multiplex, various NORTEL, Avaya, CICS and KICS as well as Polycom and CISCO premise IP systems and hosted IP systems for the past 25 years. It is an ever changing world and is much easier to self manage than before.

You can get a wide variety of cloud pbx options. There lots of them. Stay away from Fusion, I’ll say that. You don’t say, I’m guessing the Avaya had a dedicated circuit of some type feeding it? No general purpose ISP is providing any guarantees, so there’s no dedicated bandwidth for signaling and voice. Call quality can suffer. Cheaper to do it that way, you just take chances. Or acquire a small dedicated circuit. For his limited handset needs, I feel like I’d roll the dice.

I hear good things about Masergy and RingCentral, we have Five9 and do well enough.

I exited that space when my last gig was acquired and I was surplus to requirements. One of the better things to happen to me, really.

I set a small company I was consulting for up with Ooma Office. They love it.

Cloud works well, if you have the bandwidth and a good internal network, lots of options out there. The actual system is in a server farm somewhere, you get sets for your desk. They connect across the internet so if you have good solid internet usually you are good to go.

quote:

Originally posted by zoom6zoom:
I set a small company I was consulting for up with Ooma Office. They love it.

Which brand of phones did they use?

I'll put in a word for voip.ms. Amazingly low priced, and you get everything Nextiva, etc. give you, at the expense of having to be a little more knowledgeable about configuring your system.

Almost all VoIP providers I know of use a "virtual PBX in the cloud" model, not unlike traditional Telcos, just with the tip and ring lines replaced by SIP TCP/IP "connections." There are also premises-located VoIP PBXs available that use "SIP trunks" for calls outside the organization with intra-company "extension" calls handled by the VoIP PBX. I have not found this model particularly superior to provider-hosted technologies. Perhaps more desirable if intra-company calls are much more common than calls to the world.

For desksets, I have been very impressed by the price/performance ratio of the Grandstream line of phones. However, one of the big attractions of VoIP is that you can use any vendors SIP phone with any provider so an investment in desksets isn't lost when you switch to another provider.