PBX, business plus? 800 hunting

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 24, 2005 Posts: 3

Hi. I have a phone-sales biz. My employees don't make thousands of calls/day, but they probably each make around 20-40/day and receive the same quantity. Around 5-15 min/call
I was thinking of getting 10 lines, and hooking them up to a Bizfon or Talkswitch PBX. Would I have a problem if I get the small business plan? or would I have to get the business plus?

If I must get the business plus, what is the cheapest equipment that I could buy? Since I have the PBX already, I wouldn't need an IP-PBX like Epigy or something like that.

Also, If I set up a hunting round (phone #1, if busy go to #2, then #3, etc) Would I be able to give an 800 number to all my customers and have that 800 # configured in hunting?

Example> call 800 > that line is busy > hunt to get another line

Also, would you recomend Vonage for PBX's?

thx

Posts: 196

aai004 wrote:

Also, would you recomend Vonage for PBX's?

thx

I would probably not risk a phone sales business on a single Voip provider.

When you consider 10 lines of Voip, have you given consideration to the amount of bandwidth required if you put them all in one location? This would work for home workers on DSL but 10 in one place would eat up the majority of a T1 pipe.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 24, 2005 Posts: 3

i dont care what bandwith it uses. What I was thinking is using 10 small biz phones so I'd 10 converters, and I'd have 2 or 3 DSL lines instead of a single T1. The internet part is not a problem.

Posts: 482 · Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 2:15 pm Post subject:

Be prepared to deal with issues, then. I'm not knocking Vonage, but if my home phone goes down, it's merely annoying. I'd never risk my business on Vonage until their reliability becomes little more stable.

And by the way, two DSL lines and ten Vonage adapters is no way to run a business. Good luck.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 24, 2005 Posts: 3

dude... I don't know what is your problem.... I don't need opinions on how to run my biz. Which BTW, what is the problem w/ 2 1Mb DSL lines? that have 900kb of download each, that means 180kb/adapter. And I'd have 10 phone lines as any phone company phone line. If it goes down, then that would be MY problem.

My questions were

Quote:

"My employees don't make thousands of calls/day, but they probably each make around 20-40/day and receive the same quantity. Around 5-15 min/call
I was thinking of getting 10 lines, and hooking them up to a Bizfon or Talkswitch PBX. Would I have a problem if I get the small business plan? or would I have to get the business plus?

If I must get the business plus, what is the cheapest equipment that I could buy? Since I have the PBX already, I wouldn't need an IP-PBX like Epigy or something like that.

Also, If I set up a hunting round (phone #1, if busy go to #2, then #3, etc) Would I be able to give an 800 number to all my customers and have that 800 # configured in hunting? "

If someone can HELP w/ that I'd appreciate it.

Posts: 79 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Dec 28, 2004 Posts: 79

aai004-

You might want to look into an Audiocodes Mp-108 Gateway for you PBX. This product is Vonage certified and should work as long as you have the analog ports on the pbx. Otherwise you would need an Epygi T1 gateway for this type of interface.

and yes I would recommend Vonage for your Pbx and business...

As far as the 800 to hunt... I believe this can be done but would have to verify 100 percent with my engineers..

hope this helps,

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 19, 2005 Posts: 8

Hesitate to post as we just started last week with 2 TalkSwitch 48CVAs, coming off an old Toshiba Strata key system, so our experience with TalkSwitch PBX and Vonage is very limited thus far.

Have been a very satisfied Vonage residential customer since June 2003 (over Comcast cable), so thought we'd try it out with the business as the economics are *very* compelling.

Incoming we now have 5 Verizon lines (we were able to drop 2 due to switching to the TalkSwitch PBX). In addition to those 5 lines, we have 2 Vonage biz lines hooked up and 1 BroadVoice line hooked up (each TalkSwitch handles up to 4 incoming lines).

We signed up for 5 Vonage biz lines (1st is unlimited at $45, 2 thru 5 are $12.99 as we can upgrade the plan if we need more), so we could get sequential numbers if we need to use dedicated lines at any point and want to publish those numbers. (It's easier to cancel a line than to get sequential numbers.)

Thus far, we have had and continue to have these problems:

1) no dial tone on outgoing calls on the Vonage line (which is set up as line 1 in the outgoing hunt). If there is no dial tone the TalkSwitch will not look for the 2nd line in the hunt but hangs up on line 1. This is usually after someone has previously used the same Vonage line for an outgoing call. After talking with Vonage and TalkSwitch tech support, the conclusion was that the "end call and hang up signal" (I'm not a telephone tech) needed to be adjusted. Yesterday evening, the TS tech gave us some suggested settings specific to our setup and we put those in (changed some advanced settings). The new TS settings seem to have solved this.

2) get dial tone on the outgoing Vonage line, but after dialing we hear nothing (no ring, no answer), although those we have called said they can hear us. They know it is us because of caller ID. Still no fix.

3) incoming calls on the Vonage lines ring; when we answer we can not hear the caller but they can hear us. The Vonage tech support rep made some adjustments to our Linksys adapters from the Vonage end and that seemed to clear up the problem.

4) ringbacks on the phones that have finished a call. The settings referred to in 1) seem to have mostly solved this.

5) calls don't always go through. Still no fix.

Although the combination of Vonage and TalkSwitch is not working perfectly yet, we didn't expect it to out of the box. But, thus far, Vonage and TalkSwitch tech support have been responsive, patient and courteous.

The Verizon and TalkSwitch seem to be playing very well together, so even if we end up having to continue using Verizon lines and dropping Vonage we'll still save money as we're able to have fewer lines because of switching from a key system (Toshiba Strata) to a pbx (TalkSwitch). The BroadVoice line seems to be working well with the TalkSwitch, too.

The plan is to drop all but one Verizon line and use the rest Vonage and BroadVoice lines.

For the 5 Vonage lines, Vonage shipped us 5 Linksys adapters in 5 separate boxes. (We also got 5 hats....) BroadVoice came in a much smaller box. We're using the BroadVoice as an extra outgoing line and the first outgoing line for international calls as the countries we call most frequently are included with BroadVoice's 35 country plan.

We also plan to use remote Voip extensions with the TalkSwitch (which is why we got the TalkSwitch 48CVA) but have not done that yet.

According to TalkSwitch, they are in discussions with several Voip companies (Vonage, BroadVoice and others) so that their Voip lines do not need to use one of the incoming ports on the TalkSwitch and the TalkSwitch will act as the ATA. (TalkSwitch told us when / if this happens it would be a downloadable upgrade and not require new hardware.) The TalkSwitch is easy to work with and to configure.

For fax, we use a Verizon RCF number that is forwarded to another Verizon line that we also use for our SpeakEasy DSL.

We have a Vonage fax number and all of our test faxes on the Vonage fax line have come through fine, but for our business we'd rather lose voice than fax so we're going to leave our fax lines all-Verizon for now.

We're interested in hearing from other TalkSwitch users about their experiences and any solutions to their problems.

Posts: 4 · Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:25 pm Post subject: TalkSwitch and Vonage

There are currently many TalkSwitch customers using Vonage service by connecting the ATA shipped by Vonage to TalkSwitch. We have had few problems with the ATAs interoperating with TalkSwitch via our FXO ports.

There may be settings in the ATA that can help with clearing lines. TalkSwitch looks for disconnect clear signals on the FXO ports.

We are currently working on interop with Vonage service which will eliminate the need to use an ATA with the TalkSwitch 48CVA. The TalkSwitch 48CVA will support 4 simultaneous calls with Vonage service. This interop should be available via firmware download in Q4, 2005.

Regards,
Eric

Posts: 5 · New Forum Member Joined: Aug 06, 2005 Posts: 5

I'm trying to use Talkswitch exclusively with Vonage.

I have 3 lines coming in from Vonage. No matter what hunt configuration I set up with Vonage it doesn't seem to work. The first call gets through, but the second goes directly to voice mail.

Is there a known bug between Vonage and talkswitch on this issue? Or is there a way to set up the ATA device or Talkswitch so this works? I've gotten then runaround from Vonage support without much luck.

thanks,

Peter

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 19, 2005 Posts: 8

Peter,
We never got any of our 5 Vonage biz lines to work consistently with our TalkSwitch 48CVA, so we disconnected all of them and stayed with Verizon and 2 BroadVoice lines.

The two BroadVoice lines work just fine - once you get used to the relatively long wait between dialing and the called number ringing. Great for overseas calls. Now if BV could just get the LNP stuff straightened out... we'd transfer the Verizon numbers.

btw - still a very satisfied Vonage residential customer with 2 lines in 2 locations.

Chug