[TriLUG] [OT] Recommendations for hosted VoIP

[Ryan Leathers]

My company used to have service from FeatureTel.  The service quality 
was excellent and the price was very attractive.  In order to gain 
certain technical features not offered by FeatureTel at the time, we 
purchased our own switch, leased a PRI and got a bigger Internet pipe to 
support lots of VoIP traffic.  That decision has proved to be a very 
expensive one. Not only are we paying more to do the work ourselves, the 
fancy features we wanted have turned out not to be all that important to 
our business. Unfortunately, we also locked ourselves into lengthy 
contracts in the process. As soon as they expire, I'll be looking to 
outsource again and FeatureTel will be on my very short list of 
providers. We'll definitely be dumping the unwanted commitments and 
expenses of the "do it yourself" model.




On 8/4/10 10:59 AM, Brian Henning wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> Our small company is evaluating options for moving from POTS to a hosted
> VoIP solution.
>
> I recall some time ago there was a fairly active TriLUG list member who
> worked for FeatureTel.  That led me to consider popping the question here,
> and looking for some folks to offer suggestions.
>
> I'd be very appreciative of any input, preferably off-list, from both
> vendors and consumers of hosted VoIP solutions in the Triangle area.  I'm
> looking for pros and cons, so that I can make some sort of rational choice.
>
> Here's some more about our company:
>
> + We are located off Triangle Drive (across US-70 from The Original Mattress
> Factory).
> + We have four full-time in-office employees, and two part-time
> mostly-from-home employees.
> + We currently have BellSouth DSL which, according to a dslreports.com speed
> test I just ran, gives us about 6Mbps down and 384 kbps up.
> + We make relatively routine use of Skype's voice and video features to talk
> to folks in our parent company office in Grove City, PA.
> + We also have a VPN setup to Grove City using SonicWall hardware endpoints.
> The VPN sees medium-to-low traffic.
>
> We are interested in evaluating solutions that either use our existing ISP
> or involve other public and/or private WAN technologies such as T1s, etc.
> (e.g. FeatureTel's FUSION service).
>
> I'll probably cross-post most of this to triangle internetworkers, so
> apologies to those who are on both lists and see this message twice. :-)
>
> Cheers!
> ~Brian
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
>            Brian Henning, Software Engineer
>
>      /\    Pine Research Instrumentation
>     //\\   5908 Triangle Drive
>    ///\\\  Raleigh, NC 27617
>   ////\\\\ USA
>      ||
>      ||    phone: 919.782.8320
>            fax:   919.782.8323
>            email: bhenning at pineinst.com
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>