[TriLUG] [OT] Recommendations for hosted VoIP

Chris Merrill chris at webperformance.com
Wed Aug 4 11:48:39 EDT 2010


I'm responding on-list, since at least one person has already expressed
interest in your topic.

You are probably referring to John Carnes, an active TriLUG member working
for FeatureTel.

We've been using FeatureTel for 5 years and have been very happy.  It is
much cheaper than BellSouth and the customer service is fantastic.  We
purchased Cisco IP phones - mostly used off eBay.  We are running over
TWC/RR service.  Bandwidth problems do cause phone degradation and occasional
dropped calls. As such, we avoid large file uploads during business hours
(such as uploading a new release of our installers up to our website).
Note that latency is as much of an issue as bandwidth.  Oh yeah, we also have
some firewall rules to prioritize voice traffic.

Our biggest problem was the ATA converter for our fax machine. We eventually
gave up on getting that to work and switched to eFax.com - and in hindsight
that was a better choice, anyway.

Overall, we give it a thumbs-up.

Chris


On 8/4/2010 10:59 AM, Brian Henning wrote:
> 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. :-)


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Chris Merrill                           |  Web Performance, Inc.
chris at webperformance.com                |  http://webperformance.com
919-433-1762                            |  919-845-7601

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