RECOMMENDATIONS Trunk provider for business use

[Josh North]

I am helping a friend open a new site for his business, in the process, he wants to dump his current phone provider and switch to a VOIP solution.

The day to day requirements for each site will be about 8-10 extensions, with concurrency of at least 5 calls (in and out), obviously all appearing as a single phone number. An unlimited national plan would probably be best as they use a lot of time.

For now, we will spin up a cloud server to host PIAF on to allow routing calls to other sites in the event a site is offline (for network reasons or whatever).

I see some people recommending voip.ms - how is experience with them from a business perspective - and does anyone have other recommendations? I haven't used SIP trunks for anything more than small startups whereas this solution needs to be pretty robust.

Feel free to say I am completely doing it all wrong as well.

 

[jerrm]

A lot depends on the call patterns.

Primarily inbound or outbound? Any idea of inbound vs outbound minutes?

What kind of trunks does he have now - how many channels. PRI, POTS, etc?

 

[Josh North]

CDR on the current system is severely lacking. It's about 50/50 in and out. Average concurrency is only 1.2 lines through the day, but "seat of the pants" days 5 simultaneous calls should be handled. Current system is a Delta company PRI with an Adtran and 10 extensions, the provider is telling me 10 channels also but they don't seem to be so sure. I'm working on getting minutes estimates.

 

[jerrm]

Hard to say without more data.

The nice thing about VOIP is switching providers is relatively painless and inexpensive.

If your comfortable with voip.ms it won't hurt to start there. Decent rates, number ports are free and no worries about channel exhaustion on the per minute plan. Leave it there a few weeks to see what the usage really is and adjust as needed. I'd probably go ahead and setup outbound through Anveo Direct, so far we haven't had any problems(only use the "prime" routing or whatever they call it), but there are reports from some here with routing issues.

Vitelity's Unlimited Inbound option is a good deal. It is short of your spec with only four inbound channels, but remember outbound calls won't count against the inbound channels.

 

[Josh North]

Appreciate the input! My client requested unlimited after talking this morning and is open to trying Vitelity - one less channel isn't a deal breaker for him to try. Thanks for reminding me about the outbound not affecting the channel count, that is good news. Trying to get this in testing over the next 2 weeks so we shall see soon enough. Ans as you mentioned, it's not that big of a deal to change!

 

[atsak]

I'm surprised how often people think unlimited trunking is important. I've yet to see where it's less expensive than paying metered. I guess it's hard to get out of the mentality of what you're used to.
voip.ms has gotten much better in the last year or so reliability wise.

I've had almost no problems with Anveo Direct.

I hear good things about Flowroute but do not use them.

So far my preferred carrier is still voip innovations but you have to hit a minimum spend with them.

 

[Josh North]

See, the funny thing is you are exactly right. As soon as the word "minutes" came from my mouth they interrupted and said no, we want unlimited. Further discussion was pointless.

 

[jerrm]

Folks are afraid of unknown expenses. Once there is some real data it will easy enough to do some meaningful number crunching and comparison.

The Vitelity inbound/Anveo Direct outbound is a hard combo to beat though - IF 4 channels inbound is a proper fit.

 

[rchalk]

I have a customer with about 30 phones, using voip.ms per-minute plan for both inbound and outbound calls other than toll-free. This allows unlimited channels. We are using vitelity for toll-free. The cost from Jan 1 through Sept 30 this year for minutes is about $540.00, or about $60.00 per month. DID, CNAM etc. are additional They use a LOT of time. The total for the last 3 months alone was 180 hours, or 10,800 minutes, so about 3,000 minutes per month. The cost for Anveo Direct is lower, but I had more trouble with outbound calls not completing correctly.

YMMV