Anyone ever work with voip
 

On the backend, we are looking into setting up a voip service and can use some help.

We've done a few systems, including one for Coca-Cola.

Well my friend has a 50k voip hardware credit and we are thinking about setting up a voip service. My biggest questions is how do you get the phone numbers to give to your customers?

We never set one up but we have been using Voip servers from 8x8.com for a few years now. I'm seriously considering dropping them and switching providers. Bad sound quality, hard to use admin panel, and expensive.

How many DIDs do you need? We buy them from the company we get termination from.

You can buy them from a lot of sources. Just do a search on the internet for Purchasing DIDs. Is there a specific location, city state etc that you are looking to target. Depending on where they are I can probably procure some for you.

How many users do you have, and what is your internet connection? I sell this service, but only to customers who use my bandwidth, this is the only real way to do QOS.

If you dont have a shit ton of users and a decent amount of bandwidth. I recommend Ring Central. I have recommended it to some of my friends and they are very happy with the service there. They have office DSL or Cable Modems and they have no issues.

Something that I would recommend trying, before anything, if you havent done it already, is get a firewall, like a Cisco ASA 5505 or a Layer 3 switch that can do VLANing and seperate your data traffic and phone traffic. If you have a decent internet link, this usually helps drastically. Unless there service just sucks.

Are you looking to setup a hosted solution for customer, or a system for your internal office.

What countries do you target? In some locations I can offer you $$$$ for receiving calls on regular mobile numbers...no need to buy or rent if you could get paid to use ours :-)

Just send that to me and I will send you some ready to use hardware :-P

The risk is not really with the hardware but with your software being poorly made...

Its very difficult to find qualified voip techs and easy to use software so research it extensively. !

I guess voip is the way to go because everything, including adult, is going international (more so now then before).

It would need to be scalable as we grow, we want to start a commercial viop service.

For commercial sale. We have a domain called zerophone we will use and hopefully be able to bundle it with hosting.

It really is, I think phone lines will be replaced with fiber over time or super high speed wireless. The world will be much more connected for it.

What we sell is an extremely customized Asterisk solution. Asterisk is the main open source voip system out there. Most voip companies and even voip appliances for office use are initially based off of this. I would start there before looking to purchase some out of the box product. Check out there switchvox product.

Get what you pay for
 

Several years ago, I worked for a small company that lived and died by their phones. Cable hadn't gotten into the phone market, but VOIP was the new hot thing.

We used AT&T hardwired phones, an answering service and one employee was the designated employee of the week who took home the on-call cellphone, even if they had a personal cellphone. We ran a 24-hour Winter business, but all went home to catch a few hours sleep each night. The answering serviced would take night calls and if deemed important enough enough, would call the on-call. The on-call would call the customer, tell them, trucks were on the way (truth was they were in bed also). Next morning, we'd scramble to get every night phone order and all overnight faxes going. Biggest item was, customers at 2 a.m. just need reassurance something was going to be done, not just a voice mail that might not be returned for days.

Our home office was a few blocks away. The idiot owner hated everybody in our office and was determined to replace us all. Part of it was, everybody in the home office was dumb. When I mentioned satellite Internet for one of our rural offices, the bookkeeper, said "how will they get wires to the satellite?"

Anyway, the owner wanted to get VOIP with the setup through Birch, a smaller phone company. The General Manager, went off. Especially when he found out a feature was the owner couldn't listen in on any conversation without us knowing. Worse, was our sporadic Internet service. If we couldn't get phones calls, we lost business. AT&T never was down. Then the stupid rep from Birch said we didn't need an answering service, as our voice mail system would keep trying extensions or cellphones until it got a live person. The general Manager finally told the Birch guy to get THE FUCK OUT, TAKE YOUR VOIP AND DON'T COME BACK. It was that crappy.
The G.M. was a very soft-spoken guy. Bought us pop several times a day and lunch at least once a week in the Summer and almost daily in the Winter. (Our work hours were few in the Summer) 7x as many hours as we could stay awake in the Winter. If he thought VOIP was crap, it was.

Granted there have been improvements, but if your power goes out, VOIP goes out. Power goes out, AT&T still works. So how dependent on your phones are you? Chat the breeze once in awhile, get VOIP. Delivering road salt to highway departments you are under contract to in a raging snowstorm, you better be damn sure your phone will work.
Or you won't need phones the next Winter.

You can setup a redundant solution. In any voip solution it is always recommended to have 1 regular POTS line at all times. I recommend this to customers. On the other hand. If you are a company who relies on equipment being on. There are things call Generators & UPS's. This is a solution for a hosted voip service like that.

If you have your own voip server. they all typically come with a port in the back for a regular POTS line for failover. You have a UPS to keep the system running and you just use the POTS line.

But if you think VOIP sucks and it is only for shooting the breeze. You are like 5-7 years behind on technology. Most companies from small-medium and enterprise, all use VOIP.

And here is one I just thought of.

If you live in a place where the power goes out a lot, you have to salt the roads all the time and you a scared of VOIP. You might be a redneck.

Salt
 

Actually we were in Kansas City, but sold salt in Chicago and Pittsburgh.

The power didn't go out, the Internet was down a lot. As I said we needed our customers to get through. When there's snow, the highway depts. want their salt then, not a week later. We were a small office in a large office building. No way to put generator and the owner would have never paid for it.

A lot had to do with the crappy VOIP setup. The phones had so many features, we couldn't keep them straight. But worst was the ability of the owner to silently hear us. The GM and salesman refused to use company phones or email. Once, when the salesman had a company phone, the owner had his staff go through the bill and call every number to find out who it was. They also read EVERY email generated and received through the company email system.

I now have cable phone, but it's been out a few times or had to replace the modem as I had no service. Never had a landline go out, except when a tree took down the line.

Typically is it cheaper to pay for better internet service then it is for POTS lines, but it seems you had some old school guys who dont understand technology, and a real shitty voip salesman. There are ways for people to listen on conversations and record without the other person knowing, there system just probably sucked. I guess access to good internet service in a big city is a big +. But if you were in a large office building, there had to be some decent internet there, just not in your office.

www.dialapornstar.com is powered by VoIP (www.myphonesite.co.uk):pimp

If you buy crap internet access you get a crappy VOIP service. Also it's not the fault of the VOIP system if you can't get the features straight, read the manuel. If the owner listens in it's a problem with the owner not the VOIP service. And what's the problem with the owner to listen in anyway ? It's not like your discussions while at work is personal is it ?

Having the owner call everyone do sound like he's a dick unless he had reasons for that which the story doesn't say anything about

I would also recommend, depending on how many users, get a dedicated voice line, such as a PRI, which you can get here for around 4-500 bucks a month, which handles 23 lines, which can do in and out calling, this is usually good for a company that has 50-100 users.