[Asterisk-biz] Who uses only VOIP for their business? We do!

[The VoIP Connection]

I guess we must be lucky...

We have been pure VoIP from Day #1 and plan to stay that way. The only
reason the phone company knows we exist is because we have a yellow pages
ad. It was fun explaining to the salesman why we didn't have a white pages
listing!  Our VoIP phone system was, in fact, the inspiraton for our current
business.

It hasn't always been smooth sailing, but we've learned a lot of lessons and
solved a lot of problems because we had to. It's been worth it for us
because it is what we do. As an old boss of mine used to say, "Eat your own
dogfood". We have tried many providers and settled on a few. It's very easy
to blame providers for all the problems and (gasp!) they do have them - but
often the problem is much closer to home because a lot of things have to
work right. 

We have used Voicepulse for at least two years and after factoring out all
the issues that were not their fault, I would say their service has been at
least 99.999% reliable. Nufone is even better. The quality degrades
occasionally late in the afternoon, but we are still not sure where to lay
the blame for that. We have many, many customers who love Vonage Business
Plus. No, they aren't perfect, but they are pretty damn good. No, they
aren't the cheapest either. You get what you pay for (usually). Let's face
it, you can't pay .005 cents per minute and expect your provider to have
great quality, 24/7 customer service, telco reliability AND stay in
business.

PSTN service is not exactly trouble free (with Asterisk anyway!). I could be
wrong, but my gut feeling based on our customers and on the number of
asterisk-users newsgroup postings is that the Asterisk community has just as
much trouble making T1 and FXO setups work correctly (echo, dropped calls,
clicks, pops, etc.)  Sure, the service is (generally) more reliable but
that's not the only piece of the puzzle when it comes to Asterisk, and that
is what we are supposed to be discussing here.
 
Our phone system is critical to our business.  So is our power, and our
shipper, and our ISP, and our dozen or so trusted suppliers. They all let us
down on occasion, so we try to build as much redundancy and fault tolerance
as we can into every aspect of our business (when you are based in Florida
catastrophes are another day at the office). Even so, there is no substitute
for having primary business systems that work the way they should.

A T1 PRI is still the gold standard for voice service and there are
certainly good reasons to advise against VoIP.  We generally recommend that
our customers keep at least one line of PSTN. Like all decisions of
consequence, you have to weigh the risks and benefits. The single greatest
thing about Asterisk is its ability to support all of the options. I do feel
that the VoIP industry will never progress unless some of us commit to it,
hold our providers to the standards that businesses expect, and are willing
to pay a fair rate for what they offer.

In response to the OP, you can put us in the "WIN" column.

Michael Crown
Managing Partner
www.thevoipconnection.com
321.989.6728 ext. 611
sip:611 at voiceserver.thevoipconnection.com