We are getting ready to try out VOIP as a alternative to our current TELCO. I found a company that provides an interesting package: vocieeclipse.com

The other technology we are looking at is SKYPE. RapidBox makes an adapter that you can make internet calls using your existing telephones.

If it works we project we will save 40% on our current TELCO budget.

If anyone has any experience in this I would love to hear about it.

yes you will love it but make sure u have a technician come in an allocate a certain amout of bandwith just for the phones other wise u will have problems

This stuff simply rocks.

I have been with vonage almost since they got started.

You can have a technician come in and setup your bandwidth, but there are actually several routers you can pick up just about anywhere that are VOIP *aware* and can be easily setup to give your VOIP traffic priority.

Many of these routers will also be called "Gamers" routers, since the same technology that lets them give priority to VOIP is also used by gamers to give their game playing priority.

The flexability of the features has made managing my calls a breeze - in addition to the huge cost savings.

A really neat aspect to this is that while I have been on sabbatical in London, I have been able to still get all the calls made to my local California phone number. I have my VOIP box connected to my internet connection here - so you can dial my california phone number and my phone in London rings... very cool.

The box I have is just for one line. Standard ethernet connection to your network, standard phone plug to your phone.

Your have plenty of options tho in how you implement it in a larger office scenario.

R

Thanks for your reply.

We have decided on VoiceEclipse because they give 2 lines, for $20 a month, unlimited local and long distance calls. We are also going to use skype for our out of state numbers and have them forward to our voip main number. Having the 2 lines and the find-me feature duplicates the Telco's rollover or hunting feature well.

But I agree you can do a lot with these units and for a considerable savings. Not to mention getting Ma Bell out of my life.

I am looking into this as well. I think it would be good for recruiting to offer a VOIP line for agents. Let us know how it goes.

Greg:

You might want to look at Skype also. I am getting ready to test out an adapter by RapidBox (Actiontec also makes one) that will allow hooking up your existing phones to use skype. I wont go into all the features here but the big ones are the virtual numbers ($40 a year, and being able to forward to a landline or cell)

So here is our plan:

Our three out of state skypein numbers will forward from the pc to our second VOIP Number.
The main VOIP line will use 'findme service' to roll over to second line if no one answers or is busy.

Here is where it gets a little crazy....
We had purchased a software called faxtalk about a year ago. It allows for multiple mailboxes and call transfering.

On our second voip line or the rollover line we are going to run that through a pc and then to the phone. This will allow the pc to answer the phone giving the caller the option to press a number and they will be transfered to the persons cell phone or leave a message.

Well anyway thats the plan, I am looking forward to testing. I will post our results here.

We got the stuff from VoiceEclipse yestarday and got it installed. No install issues, took about 30 min to rearrange cables and get a dial tone. Couldnt be happier about the install.

The voice quality is not as good as a traditional landline, but is acceptable. The best thing about this service is that I can use either number for faxes and that the faxes get emailed to me in PDF. But the real neat thing about the faxes is that it is handled at the server, so I can be using both of my lines for voice and still be recieving mutiple faxes. Good Stuff

The voice mail is great, again the really cool thing is that you can set up the voice mail with different messages (busy, no answer, etc.) and that you can have you messages emailed to you and you will get a sound file attachment in the email. I really like this.

We are still testing over the next few days and I will keep everyone posted on our progress. So far for the $20 a month I can live with the quality and take the savings.

I don't use voip but have some friends that do. I *hate* the voice quality and when they call I tend to cut conversations short. I can only imagine that any savings you might have on telco bills will be more then offset by reduced revenue.

This is a huge issue.

Most of it hinges on getting the latest equipment and having clean, no latency bandwidth available to you.

If your using a VOIP "modem" that is older than 1 year, you gotta get a new one. Or at least make sure your running the latest bios on the one you have (You can usually download the latest BIOS update from either your VOIP provider or the maker of your VOIP hardware). In my case, even with the latest bios, I still had to upgrade to a newer VOIP box to take care of all the issues.

However, with most providers you can minimize this problem by tweaking the quality settings. The lowest quality setting at vonage is about normal phone quality. It defaulted to highest quality. Once I set it to lowest, I got good performance - even with the old equipment.

I finally updated the hardware because I was getting an intermittent clicking sound. Since doing that, I have really noticed an overall improvement in all aspects of VOIP.

It's a constantly evolving technology. I have some friends at cisco that focus on VOIP issues. As time goes on, it gets more and more viable on a larger scale. Even inside cisco, where they implemented VOIP phones, they had HUGE problems with it to begin with.

(Note: Watch for those VOIP Cisco Phones on the show 24... they get product placements on there all the time)

R

Well I thought I would post an update. We have decided to change our Internet provider as well and get a bundled package. No real cost savings but getting a bigger bang for our buck.

Lessons learned:

1. symetrical vs asmyetrical connections - good upload speeds imperative. We will be getting a true 786K up and down. Most providers advertise their download speeds only.. be careful here. Good site for checking your connection speeds as well as jitter, QoS and Packet Loss: http://myvoipspeed.visualware.com/

2. Get a good router that supports QoS (Quality of Service). This allows the router to prioritize the voice packets over the data packets to eliminate dropped audio.

3. Find out about hops to the pstn. How many hops does it take for the voip provider to get to the pstn. you must ask about this from the provider, Less is always better.

So here is what we got, and why we opted for this provider who is Simply Bits: http://Simplybits.com, a local provider in Tucson AZ. If you are in Tucson, consider them and talk to Troy.

1. 2 incomming lines, 2 DID numbers, Fax to email number and 5 interal extensions.

2. Hosted PBX with room for expansion

3. Symetrical internet speeds.

4. Knowledgable staff and tech support.

Much of our decision was wraped around the included hosted pbx which will provide our company a more professional apperance to inbound callers. I also prefer to do business with other local SB owners when ever I can. So now I can say adios to Qwest!

As a side note I am using the orginal service (voiceeclipse) at home and after I configured the QoS on my Linksys WRT54G router I couldnt be happier with the quality.

I have a client that uses VOIP, I hated calling him. Nothing but problems. For a business, steer clear. Home use, you may eventually tweek it out. Personally, I would wait until the kinks are worked out.

I use voip as well for my home office. I signed up on www.vontastic.us to get the asia plan as I do business with people from Taiwan. The only problem I have faced with voip service is faxing. I cannot get a full REPC to send. Everything else works great.

We use Packet8 and it has been very good.