Anyone know anything about hosted PBX phone systems?

[cfulback32]

I'm trying to pick a hosted PBX phone system for small business use and am pretty overwhelmed by all the companies that offer this.

For anyone that doesn't know what this is, it is basically voice over IP (think magic jack) with alot of things like voicemail to email, automated menus for callers, automated transferring to extensions, during business hours versus after hours routing of calls, and a very professional appearance for a small business but with no on site equipment.

The main reason outside of the features above is cost. With an initial investment of about $150 per IP phone, we're looking at about 60-70% less in monthly costs, which would be a big savings for us in addition to the added functionality.

My problem is that there seem to be TONS of companies offering this and I'm having a lot of trouble sorting out which ones are established and which are fly by night.

Anyone have any experience with this? Any companies they recommend? Forums with info on this? Who to avoid? Any help would be appreciated!! Thanks!


Some companies that are the current front runners in my search so far:
www.fonangle.com
www.getjive.com
www.vocalocity.com

[Littlelebowski]

See if they have recommendations from local businesses that you can talk to. Phones can get expensive in labor/configuration real quick and are a pain in the ass.

[aquajon]

DON'T use ISN Telecom.
Worst experience I've ever had with them. Customer support is in Argentina or something, no one speaks English and no one has a clue what they are doing. We had to hack into their PBX, fix the things they broke and lock them out afterward. We are migrating this month to a non hosted solution based on an open source product from SIPfoundry and have been very impressed with it thus far.

For commercial PBX's, I really like the BroadSoft products. Lots of people sell hosted PBX that use that software as the underlying layer, or I think the company offers hosted PBX directly as well.

[Fyrhazzrd]

Non Hosted is the way to go. If you are a large enough company to actually have some form of an IT department that is. Once you get past the initial cost of the install, the only overhead you would have is future feature upgrades. Plus additional phones as needed. Most good IT guys can handle managing a phone system. They really are not that hard to manage.

We have 3 guys in our IT department including myself that works on our phone system. Although I'm not a proponent of IP phones in a corporate environment. Before you ask, it is due to bandwidth problems that we intermittently experience. We have a mixed environment of IP and standard digital phones in our environment. Even though we have the IP phones on a separate subnet, we are still experiencing network crashes when a lot of people are on the IP phones at the same time. I would love to be able to just separate the IP Phones completely from our Network, but that would entail a whole bunch of new cable runs, along with new fiber runs, which the company is not willing to spend.

When I took this job I did have prior phone experience so I trained a couple of the other guys so I could have backup for when I'm on vacation. Now we just alternate months to take care of the phone system, just so we don't get rusty.

[dcollect]

NOTHING but good things to say about these (http://www.speakeasy.net) guys! Been with them for well over 10 years for internet, and for the last 4 years, phone service. I never hesitate to recommend them to my customers who provide my living and I esteem my reputation.

You will not find better support anywhere, and with things like this you want a good operation standing behind it. This is out of Seattle and is no fly-by-night by any stretch.

Not the cheapest, but certainly the best.

http://www.speakeasy.net/service/phone/hosted/

I should get paid for the hype, but I just love the company.

[RIDE]

We use RingCentral... It's been really great... And super cheap (we just pretty much use the ability to forward calls to our cell phones from our 800#).