Blue Flavor

Tunnels by Jeff Croft

Small Business Telephone System Frustrations

August 24th, 2006 at 7:48 a.m.

As we approach our year anniversary of being in business we commemorate the event by switching our phone number… again… for the third time. In under than a year we’ve replaced our phone system… count it: four times.

First there was VoIP, but bad quality forced us to get a land line. But then after 5 unsuccessful visits to our suite, the phone company couldn’t figure out how to install it. So then we canceled the order and went with another VoIP provider, this time with a Quality of Service guarantee. But we needed to add more lines and had some bandwidth cap issues, so then we switched back to the local telco which brings us up to date.

Our phone system has become my greatest frustration of being a small business owner. Legal, business, employment issues, these dwarf in comparison of dealing with outdated, low quality or complicated telecommunications systems.

The fact that you must rely on providers that don’t really seem to care too much about customer service or quality of service make me want to turn it all off and just use mobile phones (which I’ll explain more later).

As a small business it seems like you must choose between a limited system or a complex system. There doesn’t seem to be anything in between. On the small side is basically no more than a simple home land line. On the complex side is a PBX system which is how most bigger offices work, but they are very expensive and complicated to install.

Voice over IP or VoIP tries to make the promise of being the land in between, but you must deal with poor quality and the upgrade path looks more complicated than a PBX. And since VoIP relies on your data pipeline, you need to have a large and very stable pipe to serve a growing businesses voice and data needs.

What Every Small Business Needs

We have some specific demands of our telephone system, but for the most part we need at the very minimum these features, which I think are pretty common among any small business:

1. A Main Number

A phone number that cannot change as you will advertise it as your primary number.

2. Additional Lines

A least one additional outgoing line so more than one person can be on the phone at the same time.

3. Hunting Groups

A method to forward an incoming call from your main number to the next available line in your group. Otherwise go to voicemail.

4. Voicemail

At least one voicemail box for the business. Preferably everyone has their voicemail.

5. Receive Fax

A specific phone number dedicated to receiving faxes. While it may seem that the modern business doesn’t need a Fax Machine anymore, I’d beg to differ. This is a must.

These five features are provided by just about any provider.

The cost differential is pretty negligible. We paid about $50/mo for all of the above (2-lines) with a VoIP provider. We are paying about $80/mo currently (2-lines plus fax line) to our local telco Qwest.

The Drawbacks

But each of these features have some pretty big drawbacks. Here are the most important ones we’ve encountered.

Land Lines & VoIP: Direct Dials & Sequential Numbers

If you want to grow larger, you want to offer direct dials (or DIDs) to all your employees. While it isn’t crucial it is nice to have direct dials but sequential numbers, especially as these are almost always serve as internal extensions as well. No provider will reserve a block of numbers for you for later.

While it really doesn’t seem like it would be any skin off the providers teeth and not that complicated to do, both VoIP and the telcos have told me that our order (I asked for 15–20 sequential numbers) isn’t big enough.

VoIP: Cap on number of lines

Unless you have a T-1 installed (which start at about $400/mo for 1.5Mb/Sec) the maximum number of lines you can have over DSL or Cable is two. There are some ways to get around this, but for the most part if you every need more than two lines coming into your office, VoIP is not for you. DSL and Cable provide speeds up to 6 and 8Mb/Sec respectively for about $40–60/mo. Even though they have greater speeds than a T-1, they are not stable enough connections to support so much dedicated data that voice demands.

Land Lines: Voicemail to Email

A great feature of VoIP is that new Voicemails and Faxes can be sent via email as an attachment. I set up a distribution list so if a new voicemail came it, it was sent to everyone in the office. We never once dialed in to check voicemail. For a business like ours that prefers to be very flexible with how we work, often working remotely, on the road, from home or the nearby cafe this feature was critical. It allowed us the flexibility to work wherever we wanted and not be tethered to the office or a checking a voicemail box.

When you go land line you lose this feature. We’ve tried the services that claim to solve this problem and… well to avoid getting cease and desists from these companies… lets just say that we have yet to find one that we like.

VoIP: Can’t Fax over VoIP

All the VoIP provider sites tell you that you can send and receive faxes over a VoIP line, which we have learned is totally bogus. Our success rate for sending faxes over VoIP was about 40%. Important faxes we had to walk up to Kinkos to send. If you are considering putting a fax machine on a VoIP, just save yourself the hassle and call your local telco instead.

The Solutions

Each solutions that are available for the small business have big pros and huge cons. There is no clear cut winner as it really depends on how you want to run your business. But here are some of our observations to date:

Traditional Land Lines… good, but not great

Traditional Land Lines do the job, but they lack many, if not all of the features of VoIP to allow you flexibility in how you receive and manage your calls, and at a much greater price. The benefit is that the quality and reliability is 100,000% more better than VoIP.

Voice over IP (VoIP)… good, but terrible for business

VoIP spoils us with great features to make up for terrible quality of service. I’ve worked in large companies that used dedicated T-1’s for VoIP and I can tell you the quality and reliability isn’t much better than what you get over DSL or Cable as it scales up. Unless you are willing to pay for a T-1 at six times the cost of DSL or Cable, VoIP is a bad idea for business if you have more than two or three people.

PBX… perfect, but expensive and way too complicated

A PBX can do all of the things listed above, either over VoIP or over a traditional line. But it is a large, costly and complicated piece of hardware. You must purchase the PBX itself, the Voicemail system, plus you need to buy compatible phones, often for over $100 a piece, you are looking at a starting cost of over $5,000 for a modest system. PBX‘s are very flexible and can easily grow with your business, but you must make a pretty big investment right from the start. There are many VoIP and virtual PBX solutions out there, a lot of them free or open-source projects. But there you are back with VoIP.

Shared Mobile Phones… sounds like a good idea, but now you have two phones

I wish I could take credit for this idea as the resident mobile geek, but all the credit goes to my wife who had this brilliant idea: Why not just use mobile phones?

Most carriers offer business plans of shared minutes, for example Cingular offers 3000 shared minutes for $300/mo. This is considerably more than a couple of traditional land lines, but far cheaper than getting a T-1.

How would it work? I’m glad you asked!

  • Everyone would have their own mobile phone, provided for free or deep discount from the carrier. This could be a Blackberry phone instead of a feature phone so you aren’t duplicating the phones you own.
  • We would share from the same pool of minutes, have free nights and weekends and free person to person calling.
  • Everyone would have their own voicemail and direct dial. You could optionally take your phone home with you or on the road, providing maximum flexibility.
  • You port your main phone number to a VoIP service like Vonage. One VoIP line has a minimal impact on your network speeds, especially as it would hardly ever be in use.
  • The VoIP line is forwarded to ring all the mobiles we define. The first person to pickup would take the call on their mobile phone.
  • For conference calls, you buy mobile phone docks that amplify the speaker and microphone. Or you use the single VoIP line. If the VoIP line is busy it will continue to ring the mobile phones.

This is actually very flexible, it scales well and I believe it to be the most affordable option for small business of 5–25 people.

The biggest drawback to this idea and ultimately why we didn’t choose it, was no one wanted two phones. Also if you spend a lot of time on the phone (which we don’t) or add a lot of people that all use their phones moderately it can get costly for all that airtime.

While this is my favorite option, it alas was not preferred by the Blue Flavor family. But if our frustrations continue, I might have to make a executive decision and head down to our local Cingular store to buy up all the Blackberry’s they have.

Brian Fling

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