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Jul

24

Moving Into The 21st Century: VoIP

Filed Under business, life, music, recommendations, technology |

When we first moved into our offices on Milvia street, we tried to keep costs low and used our cell phones insetad of buying into a couple of land lines w/ conventional phone service. This worked fine in the beginning, our needs were humble. For the most part, the cell was great, except reception in our building was definitely not consistent, nor reliable.

As we began to do more work with clients and move into new areas of work, we started to rely on our phones a bit more. We also had run into the need to send and receive faxes more than I think we should (anyone heard of e-mail? :)). Basically, it became clear to us that we needed to figure out some sort of phone solution.

At first, I was hesitant to buy into the whole concept of VoIP, even though countless people had recommended it for startups. We don’t have the fastest internet, and our stupid router didn’t support QoS until very recently, so that was another big deterrent to the idea for me. Altough, I was not able to find a conventional phone service that I thought made decent fiscal sense…AT&T wants a pretty hefty commitment for even the simplest plans, I just wasn’t happy with the idea of it. And also, what about PBX type features? Extensions would be nice, how about voicemail? $$$

So, this was becoming a mess for me, once I decided to bite the bullet and find a VoIP provider, which ones are legit? Packet8? Vonage? (short answer, no). I happened to stumble upon a company named Aptela, and started looking into their features. Call trees, extensions, digital faxing (what a concept!), unified messaging, the whole gamut basically. For a very affordable price! We dove in and decided to give them a shot, its something like $60 bucks a month for everything mentioned above.

The system only works with IP phones, so we purchased a couple of $100 Polycom handsets, plugged them in, and suddenly…the stars had aligned and we had a working phone system! To be honest, I was completely amazed with how easy it was to setup, and how great it sounds, even while dowloading large files! (thank you, QoS). Aptela is a fantastic service, so far I have had absolutely no complaints. Everything is 100% web-based and works just fine on my mac, as it should.

So long story short, If you are looking for an affordable, solid VoIP solution, I recommend Aptela!


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4 Comments so far

  1. Nick Kwiatkowski on July 25, 2008 5:25 am

    My only issue with dealing with these small VoIP providers is that many of them, including Aptela are not phone companies. Since they are not licensed phone companies (ILECS or CLECS), they need to rely on their connection to the phone company to make sure everything is working. While this usually isn’t an issue, if they have a dispute, or disruption of service, they will be down like any other business, and will have to wait to have service restored.

    Glad its working for you!

  2. Ryan Stille on July 25, 2008 7:19 am

    We’ve been using VOIP at work, pretty much since the beginning. At first it was a residential plan from Vonage with a couple cordless phones (uh!).

    Then we switched to hosted PBX service like you have, but eventually decided to move it in-house.

    Now we have our own in house Asterisk server, and we buy “trunks” from two different providers and automatically route calls down the second one if the first one ever has problems. Its been working great, and I love the flexibility of it. For example instead of having to give out the company cell phone number for after hours support (clients don’t always have that when they need to get a hold of us), we setup menu “9″ in the phone system as emergency support. When that menu option is selected, Asterisk will try to contact the company support cell phone, and if no one answers that it will try someone else’s cell phone, etc. If it can’t reach anyone it asks the caller to leave a message, and then it sends out a TXT message to various staff letting them know there is an emergency support message that needs to be checked.

  3. mark on July 25, 2008 9:23 am

    I love their easy call forwarding / dummy extensions that only forward. Those are features I would only expect from anything digital. Aptela brings it!

  4. Minifortunes on August 9, 2008 10:24 pm

    VoIP was the only way to go for my overseas office (Cebu, Philippines). Infrastructure isn’t like it is in the US, so hosted makes it much easier to maintain since there is no equipment on-site. We went with Vongage and RingCentral, and it’s working out great, but if call volume increases significantly, we’ll need something more scalable. I’ll look into Aptela. Thanks for sharing that find!