The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

Comprehensive business VOIP solutions are too complex

As I wrote about a few weeks ago (Is VOIP Ready for Small Businesses?), I've been testing out the Vbuzzer VOIP solution, using a Sipura Ethernet to phone interface box and a cheap old telephone I had in the closet. So far, it's working well and I'm impressed with it and quite pleased with VOIP overall.

But trying to figure out how to integrate it into my existing office setup is making my head spin, and it's really a great example of the cost and challenges of people who are early adopters or even mainstream adopters. Sure, I can sign up for Vonage and get a "free" box similar to the Sipura, but what I really want is to transfer my existing business line to a VOIP system, transfer my fax line to a VOIP system, and then have a two line hybrid telephone where line one was a standard phone line, and line two was the VOIP business line.

After spending hours and hours digging around on different Web sites, from Hello Direct to Cisco and Polycom, I'm simultaneously impressed with the wide range of phones and baffled by the many options, none of which seem to exactly meet my needs.

But to be a really good business solution, I also need a second device to go with this setup: a highly compact headset that I could easily pack with me so that when I am in a hotel room or visiting a facility with high-speed networking, I can reroute my VOIP business line to that location. I'm sure that there are compact USB headsets that are VOIP compatible (and both Mac and PC compatible too), but, again, finding one is darn difficult.

Another concern I have is based on the fact that in the last twenty years I've only experienced one outage of a traditional phone service, but network outages seem to affect my office on a monthly basis. What happens to a call that comes into a VOIP line if the business network is down? Does it automatically roll over to voicemail at the VOIP service provider's system (e.g., Vbuzzer or Vonage)?

Finally, there's the Skype factor: many of my colleagues have Skype and I'd like to be able to communicate with them using the Skype service when possible. How would a VOIP telephone system support a USB "soft phone" capability? Or would the headset end up being called into service for this particular task?

Today my desk is full of phone devices, from the soon-to-be-returned Hello Direct multimedia headset device, to a two line GE phone, a Lucent answering machine, the Sipura VIOP interface device and the second telephone. It's too darn much. I want a unit that offers me all these capabilities, and I believe it'd be the perfect office device for the next generation of telephony. Is it so hard to put all these pieces together and solve this problem?

And I have deliberate not mentioned one more issue: in my second office space, we only have wireless connectivity, yet all the VOIP to phone interface systems I've seen require a hard Ethernet connection.

Honestly, I think that there's one heck of an opportunity here for some mainstream telephone companies like Panasonic or General Electric to work in partnership with the various VOIP providers to create hybrid, multifunction telephone systems that offer plug-and-play replacement capabilities for businesses that want to migrate off their existing solution, but perhaps gradually, or one feature at a time...

VOIP telephony experts, talk to me. Tell me what kind of solutions I could use, what kind of hardware would serve all the needs outlined here and let me sweep my existing telephone gear into a box destined for eBay and move my telephony into the new era.

Posted by Dave Taylor at October 1, 2005 1:27 AM

Comments

Hi,

I think what you are looking for is box that sits outside the PBX and it can route your calls over IP. In case of n/w problems, it should be intelligent enough to fallback to PSTN. That way, you don't need to replace your internal telephone networking - you could pretty much use the same phone handsets that you have been using all these days. Would that help ?

Thanks,
Deepak

Posted by: deepak on October 8, 2005 5:51 AM

Sounds interesting, though, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. :-) I don't really have a PBX in my office...

Posted by: Dave Taylor on October 8, 2005 9:38 PM

Way late to this, but you may want to look at something like http://www.aptela.com/

They can integrate VoIP along traditional phones (like your cell) via a hosted PBX (so if your broadband is down, the calls are still answered). It can be mobile via a soft phone if need be.

All the tech is there for companies the question often is how they want to package and support it.
Of course, many VoIP providers are re-packaging Broadsoft or the like so they don't even own the tech. I know Atpela owns their own tech.

As for wireless, it isn't requried per se, but real questions exist whether it can support VoIP regularly. More of an issue with wireless rather than VoIP. YMMV.

I don't know of any that can integrate Skype though. That would be quite an interesting element.

I think the big consumer electronic firms are hanging back right now letting smaller players fight it out (while Ayava and Cisco try to lock up the biz market). They don't have to deal with the potential tarnishing of brand while the kinks are sorted.

Posted by: bp on February 22, 2006 10:29 AM

You want a never ending customer service nightmare? Then, go with Aptela. What does 5 million in just bagged venture capital mean? It means that they have ramped up their sales force without consideration to their support infrastructure. What does that mean to you, the customer?

Stay the hell away.

Posted by: Kevin Edwards on September 21, 2006 2:54 PM

I agree with Kevin's assessment of Aptella. We almost made the mistake of going with them, but thelack of and miscommunication and outright lying we encountered raised a red flag and we pulled out at the last minute. We had gotten far enough though that they had our credit card number. For the next several months they continued to charge our credit card random large amounts ($300-$2500). I was never able to get them to credit us or stop it. Each time I ended up having to go to our credit card company to get the charges reversed. Finally I had to cancel the card to stop the charges. We hadn't ported our numbers yet, thank goodness! Probably never would have gotten them back.

Posted by: Sharon Emerson on December 19, 2006 7:56 AM

This is for all ppl interested in voip services have tringotel bcoz they have partnered with Sunrocket and there are additional features available in this company and the voice quality is awesome. I am using this service for several months and there are no issues till now.

U GUYS ROCK!

Posted by: anonymous on March 15, 2007 5:08 AM

I looked at Aptella as well and chose not to go with them and went with a competitor (It was more money but you get what you pay for)that uses an enterprise Cisco CallManager with there own voice mail system they even hosted exchange email for us. It has been a GREAT solution for my company. check them out at www.calltower.com

Posted by: Jon Doe on May 15, 2007 4:19 PM

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Posted by: Bhavin Gandhi on August 6, 2010 10:31 PM

Wow, I would stay away from Aptella at all costs. I was with them for 2 lousy months and switched my office staff literally yelled at me to get back over tot he phone company. What a waste of resources!

Posted by: Michael on October 7, 2011 11:40 AM

Voip systems are almost here. There are too much information all around so people gets confused.
Whats clear now is that we can use Skype phone for calling anyone anywhere... as for voip... Let´s wait a year or so and we ll see.

Posted by: Laura S. on December 1, 2011 1:43 PM

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