Business vs. Residential service

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 03, 2005 Posts: 4

Hello, I'm a new Vonage customer and have a couple of quick questions. I'm the network administrator for a small/medium business that has eleven locations in three states. Each location has three phone lines and a fax line that also provides DSL access. Since Vonage doesn't have most of our area codes (We're a midwest company that focuses on cities of 30,000 - 150,000 people), we just want to use Vonage for outgoing calls and for intra-office calling. It could save us a bunch on long distance.

We have a one line business account with Vonage that we are testing in our main office. We want to add about eight additional lines with 500 minutes each. Will Vonage us lend us separate adaptors for each line? We would need that since each line is in a separate building.

We also have a couple of locations that have phone numbers available from Vonage. We would like to get three Vonage lines in each location. I am considering either three 1500 minute small business lines ($110), or three unlimited residential plans ($75). Would there be any disadvantages to going with the residential plans? Are the residential adaptors only one line each? I have no problem with having three adaptors in each location.

Thanks.

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Feb 07, 2005 Posts: 66

I would give vonage a call.. There are multi Line adapters for businesses. They will do almost exactly what you are looking for!

Also, You may want to talk with your Phone System provider about system cards for VOIP. Depending on your phone system there may be a VOIP card that is built for it!

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 03, 2005 Posts: 4

Well that's a nice thought about the cards for the phone system, but there really isn't a phone system. Our offices are small and we just use a cheap Panasonic multi-handset unit. The only place that is going to have a real phone system is our main office which will be an Asterisk system. I was just going to put a 4 port FXO card and hook it up to an ATA. Can I talk to Vonage via SIP?

Anyway, is Vonage shipping RT31Ps to everyone now? Because if they are, that solves most of my issues.

But my real question is, what is different between a business and residential account? If it is just a fax line, I can do without it since we do all of our faxing via the same landline we use for DSL.

Thanks.

Posts: 249 · Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 12:25 pm Post subject:

ArisBoch wrote:

But my real question is, what is different between a business and residential account? If it is just a fax line, I can do without it since we do all of our faxing via the same landline we use for DSL.

If you read the Vonage TOS it is pretty clear that a residential line cannot be used for any business purpose including profit or non-profit. In theory if you so much as call a friend on a residential line and ask him to purchase a girl scout cookie from your kiddo you have violated the Terms Of Service.

Then there is the real world. Would the Secretary of a bowling league be in violation of the TOS if they called a bowler to ask for a substitute. "Well Technically Yes!!"

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 03, 2005 Posts: 4

So it's a TOS thing. Grr... Not much I can do about that. I suppose Vonage is entitled to turing a profit, and my business probably does more calling than the average residence.

That answers my questions. Thank you.