[asterisk-biz] Anyone recommend a good VOIP provider?

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 05:35 -0500, Mark Phillips wrote:
> In your opinion, would the migration to a VOIP provider save him money? 
> Could his 3 office phone numbers (one's an 800) be ported to the 
> provider? Which provider should I look at? I'd rather one that can do IAX2.
> 

asterlink.com can port tollfrees, I *think* their rate for porting is
$45 but I may be wrong.  They are 2 cents a minute and very reliable in
my experience.

As for the other numbers, it depends on whom you port to.  If he is the
actual customer from the lec that is providing the phone service then he
should be able to port them if he is in the US.  

Many providers charge for inbound calls and/or a monthly fee for
service.  Selecting one that can port the numbers and not incur this
problem may be an issue.  

You also dont have to get service from one provider, instead you can get
one for tollfree, one for outbound and one for local inbound.  You may
find that the total bill may be less, although its a bit more work to
setup and potentially more work to keep track of which bill is for what
service.

One thing I have found recently looking at a few customers phone bills
to determine where they are spending money is that several of them are
spending $50-60 a month of '411' calls.  A recent customer of mine I
mapped '411' to 800-free-411 to save them this cost.  I additionally
mapped them to use my outbound tollfree service so they dont take up
channels from their outbound provider (even if the calls are at no cost
you may have a maxchannels that you can use at any time).

Sometimes its the little things that adds to the bill.


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
UK +44 870 340 4605   Germany +49 801 777 555 3402
US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200
FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.sacaug.org/ Sacramento Asterisk Users Group
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