Anyone using Voip for your business phone?

The most important issue with any VOIP provider is the fact that you are going to need a HSI high speed Internet connection.

Your calls will be low grade if you use a POTS line.

That said, if you have HSI, I would suggest utilizing Skype as an option.

That's what we use and we use it for the whole nine yards: conference calls, training VAs when were are connected to Team Viewer and customer service calls.

There are a ton of VOIP providers but essentially, all they are doing is providing the equipment that converts voice to data. They don't do anything different than Skype as long as you're not talking about PBX systems.

And your cost savings with Skype will be astounding!

Giles, the Crew Chief

HI Ronr
I am located in Ireland, and I use VOIP for both my personal and business landlines. The company that I use is Blueface.ie and the great thing about the service, is that you can set it up for as little as $5 (pay as you go)

The main difference about using such a company is that, you can do a whole pile of other things with the service incl. Fax, call divert etc,..
For example, I work as an engineer with my own business and I am out of the office for the most of my work time. I have the "office number" diverted to my mobile, and also with a backup option of diverting to another mobile of one of my workers. That way the customer ALWAYS gets to speak to someone.
I also find the best part of the service, is that for a small fee of about $10 per month, you could get a LOCAL number for a friend or relative that may be half way round the world, so that your calls are made as if they were next door to you.
You may say that SKYPE is free, but trust me, the extra few bucks for this VOIP service goes along way.
You will obviously need a VOIP handset as well. Readily available and cheap on Ebay etc....

I would like to stress that I DO NOT WORK FOR, or have any connection to Blueface but I think that their service is excellent and would recommend.
There are several other companies that offer similar and I'm sure a quick search will find these.

Hope this helps in some way.

Kind Regards
R Kiyosaki

I went to VOIP 3 1/2 years ago and never looked back. Right now my plan is $25/mo. for the US, Canada, and PR. But your post prompted me to do some checking. I came up with this deal. One that I will seriously consider getting:

BroadVoice Internet Phone Service - VoIP Phone Service, Broadband Telephone, WiFi Telephone, SIP and Softphone Service

Good luck.

I used to run 6 tsrs on a remote dialer, with Vonage phones. They work pretty good, Unlimited phone calls ANYWHERE in the world, and also faxing... for 24.00 per month.

I'm not so sure making the change would be so cost effective...especially with the need for high speed internet.

i guess magic call services are used as voip , you can try this service. they will cost less than main price and can call anywhere with option long distance .skyp is service for using voip , you can get own phone number and use voip telephone for calling long distance. both of them are excellent and useful.
voip services reduce your cost .

I am on clearwire. They are now charging 34 bucks a month for phone. I've kinda had it with it - my reception is pure crap and my calls cut in and out.

It's getting shut off at the end of the month. I'm done paying top dollar and I'm done with crap service.

Well high speed internet is quite the norm now even for residential plans. VoIP runs on at least 512kbps connection and everyone has at least minimum of 1mbps. Personally I use VoIP service from Onesuite and already dropped my landline and saving between $10 to $20 a month. I guess if its a business phone then you are going to save more.

Someone made an important business call to my cell phone the other day using Skype...

The person was a VA for a top marketer trying to confirm something with me.

The connection was so horrid that I could not hardly make out a word they said and had to end the call without the communication being completed.

I prefer to have several options for communication. VOIP has its benefits but I do a lot of international calling and the VOIP lines in our office provided by a local ISP that also provides our T1 does not offer a decent international calling plan... that is what I loved about my home office Land line... I had a great international calling plan and even if the power went out I could make calls :-)

Just like I would never recommend an iPhone for critical business calls (never have I been disconnected from more calls than when people call from their iPhone) I would not want to be caught with only a VOIP phone and not a second line as an alternate.

Another option if you are trying to cut costs is to just chop your land line service back to the very basics and local with no long distance plan and no voice mail and use google voice for your voice mail and use it to connect your long distance calls (it rings your phone and then connects you).

We use Naked ADSL here in Perth - a full Voip service includes all phone calls, high speed internet and 100Gb download all for $60 a month

i dun like using that .... more of a iphone4 facetime user..!

I use a VOIP phone. I've been happy with it.

Some prospects or clients are so freaky, old-fashioned, and
paranoid, that they think you have to have a land line to
be honest. These people are also too ignorant to understand
a VOIP is not a cel-phone.

They are also not worth having as clients due to the PITA
factor, but such people are out there and will decline to
do business with you because you're not using a regular
landline.

I use VoIP with my every day activities. At the moment i use uVOIPit, you can find them on google. They are cheap and reliable.

I have used both Vonage and MagicJack. Both work well.

I used Vonage in the USA along with a high speed cable internet connection from Cox Communications.

I am currently using the MagicJack in the Philippines for both outgoing and incoming calls from the USA. It can be a bit ragged on day when the internet is being flaky, but most days the quality is quite good.

Just make sure you have band width and you (or preferably an IT dude) setup your router to set priority to the voice protocol. I've used Vonage and Packet 8 in the past, and they can get choppy if you are doing something that consumes bandwidth.

Example, I was loading a site via FTP and I had a business call come in. Super choppy and could have lost that customer.

Anyway, if you're business relies on telephones to make money, I personally use land lines.

Nick

Have been using VoIP Business Phone Service | 8x8, Inc. for over 6 years now and love em.

I have been using magic jack for 3 years now and I love it. The only problem I have is when I use a lot of my bandwith sometimes the calls can get choppy and hard to hear. But other than that I suggest magic jack.

I just removed 2 copper lines yesterday and now we route the extensions to skype. It's easy and cheap even with the online number.

I use skype online number. I pay something like 30 bucks for 3 months. You can take voice mails, you can forward it to your cell phone, whatever you wish. It's very affordable and great solution.

I don't use it for my primary line, but I've used MagicJack with great results in the past. I also have friends and associates who have nothing but high praise for Vonage (which is especially great if you make a lot of overseas calls, as their $25 plan includes unlimited calls to over 60 countries).

I've been using Skype for a couple of years now. Their packages are cheap and in the most part the quality of call is good. We have two main numbers and both are Skype.

What follows are the highlight/lowlights of Skype but please be aware I have not checked certain references (like packages etc) since buying... as I haven't needed to (which I guess is a good thing in its own right!)... So here goes...

SkypeIn number: This is great! Being able to choose a number from a list (so it has that easy to remember run of numbers) and place that number in a city of your choice... Wowzer! I do most of my work from home and I live in the countryside, so being able to have an Edinburgh number (nearest main city) which is easy to remember for customers was a major plus.

SkypeIn is best bought as part of a monthly package rather than stand-alone... It works out a lot more cost effective and comes with voicemail etc.

(Quick tip: When choosing your number Skype will give you a couple of possible numbers ...but there is also a "next" button... keep clicking that until you find a good number. You'll be surprised how good they can be)

Skype service: Oh dear...... Without warning or explanation one month BOTH of our lines were effectively switched off as they had accidentally terminated our monthly packages when THEY updated their systems. This meant we risked losing our SkypeIn numbers (as they are part of the package) not to mention the public perception of seemingly disconnected lines. We were unaware until I received a customer email saying "lines were down".

This also shows another risk with SkypeIn numbers... there is a grace period, but if for whatever reason you lose them, they're gone... also they are non-transferable.

Just to finish the service story... No real explanation or apology was offered by Skype and the compensation given was ridiculous... 2Euros! (I'm not kidding!) ...after kicking them harder they raised that to a massive 10Euros! (I know... such a massive amount I was almost able to go to Starbucks with it... :p )

Call quality: It can vary, but mainly it is good. In fact I often use it for conducting interviews with business and JV partners as the quality is BETTER than recording a traditional phone call. Perfect for product creation. Also the Skype AddOn of Pamela offers an easy way to record the call. But it has to be said that sometimes it can be bad... but this in my experience has been a rare occurence ...and often due to:

Bandwidth: This is of course the downside to Skype. If, as is sometimes the case for myself, you need to upload something big to the web... then Skype will suffer as the bandwidth gets eaten up by the upload. This also means there is a touch of 'Russion roulette' to the bandwidth issue if you use local email software (e.g. Outlook) as a big email download can do the same thing... so if you have your email set on "automatic update" for the inbox... you could suddenly lose call quality mid-way through a call.

Of course you can avoid this by using GoogleMail or simply switching off Outlook.

Overall: Happy to work with the few issues and enjoy the HUGE saving on telecoms bills! Besides, the recording of calls is something which is invaluable.

Hope that helps,

Michael

Never use Skype for important calls such as with clients or partners as call quality is sometimes too poor for professional use, and unreliable. I"m based in the UK and use Soho66, though I can't see why you couldn't use them from anywhere. Charges v reasonable and support is great. They also handle fax, conferencing, etc

Given what I said above... I was given pause for thought by this:

BBC News - Skype global blackout continues after network fault

Genuinely we have never had any real issues even when relying upon skype for 'important calls', however this article makes you think.

until very recently I was making at least a 50-60 calls a day from Pakistan to US using skype. sometimes went as high as 150 calls a day...
There were only a few times skype gave me any trouble... whenever I had a choppy line, after troubleshooting it almost always traced back to my DSL provider.
Skype is very cost effective and quality is also very good.
Ive had as much as 3 cellphones on conference while I hosted the call from my skype. Plus, one of those cellphones was in Canada while the other 2 in US.

Plus, skype also has good business packages and what not in their business manager.
you can also get a number with your local areacode. which shows up on caller id when you call from skype as opposed to may voip providers which would only show "unknown number" you can also take incoming calls on that number. Call forwarding can also be setup. I highly recommend it.

Asim

VoIP is not really that mature for use for business as a phone system. I suggest you search online to find the best virtual PBX by using this keywords: "virtual pbx compare"

just went with Magicjack about a month ago for my office, working fine so far. I have had Vonage for my home phone for at least 6 years.

We stopped using magic jack and now we are starting to use a SIP provider. We get more phone numbers in other countries using this.

I've been using MagicJack for a couple years now. Sound quality is great, but perhaps not quite as many features as Skype or SIP providers. MagicJack Plus can be plugged in to either a USB port on a computer, or directly into an ethernet port on your router. I like it because it allows me to answer calls from any of 4 cordless phones around my house without an expensive ATA device.

Add one more vote to magic jack, I have been using it for about 3 years and it is really good, although I must say call quality depends on many factors in my experience it varies depending on the phone you plug it into ( I recommend any dect 6.0 or better) and your Internet speed, the higher the better.

Really depends on the quality you need. If it's used with high frequency you need to find a quality carrier. DeltaComm has multiple programs but it's really not for a home based business.

I used to use Vonage. Real good and easy to setup. Now i use cell phones.

One thing you need to look at is quality of service. Traditional VoIP cuts out, and even drops off because you need to share the voice line with all of the people uploading and downloading on the internet. Where I work they found a company called Comvoice Communications. They explained how they use the internet just to the first switch box and uses traditional phone lines for the rest of the way. They let us use their phones next to ours and hear the difference. It sounded just like a crystal clear land line. Also, they aren't charging for the added features that we take for granted either. This isn't a sales pitch. Check out their website at comvoice. com and see if they would work for you.

getcelerity - will provide a free phone with hosted call center platform, very inexpensive phone service with unlimited calling to the US Canada and Puerto Rico. 1-866-766-4000 ext 1068...Good luck

I have used Voip foryears. Used to use Vonage, but now I use voip.ms and my costs are less than $10 per month. Best move I ever made phone wise.

I use comcast bundle server with VOIP. The whole package after 6 months passing is quite expensive. I want to drop the service, but I haven't found a better way for my broadband internet.

As a taxi company you can imagine the importance of our telephone lines, voip is an active solution and it does work depending on the company you use.

For online based business, VoIP is way better than paying for telecom services you seldom use.

Im in the UK and calling the USA used to be costly til I started using VOIP. Ive been with Vonage and have not has a single problem with them.

Ron, I am about saving money. I have been using Magicjack and MAgicjack plus for some time now. I have two lines that I use. I am very pleased with them. Very cheap and I have had no problems.

I am presently using Google voice. These Voip can be annoying especially when you don't have a high speed internet

I have some killer info for anyone interested... There are company's out there that are willing to give you the phone for free as long as you come on board with them. there is no reason to stay with the big boys when you get so much more from smaller companies. Also, the customer service is much better. My Warrior Forum peeps get the special treatment...No doubt...PM