I've toyed around with the idea of moving to Voice Over IP (VOIP) for a few years but never had the time to get serious about it. That is...until now. After doing a cost analysis and finding we can generate immediate savings of approximately $2,000 a month and having seen first hand how the technology has improved --I'm ready to take the leap.
In all fairness, I've already started the process --so my decision to blog about the transition stemmed more from my need to create some newsletter content. That said, blogging about the transition seemed like a great way to involve our customers in a project we're undertaking and also provide some tips to help them realize the same savings should they do it themselves.
Rather than jumping right in let me first lay some groundwork about my VOIP background and our current situation.
The first part is easy as my VOIP background was simply that of an end user. I tried Vonage about 2 years ago, experienced the WOW factor, thought about what a service might mean for our business and then canceled the Vonage account after I discontinued a side project I was using it with. Then last year, being tired of paying Comcast so much for cable service at home, I called to complain about the high price and slow consumer Internet speed. They have a good sales team because they ended up talking me into the Comcast Triple Play subscription, got me to cancel my Verizon phone service and add Comcast VOIP. Now in defense of Comcast, they did increase my Internet service to Blast (and I actually get about 16Mbps + download on a good night), reduce my cable bill, and add VOIP for less than what I was paying at the time. And ditching my Verizon land line saved me another $50 a month.
It was shortly after that I began doing research on Open Source VOIP systems, started downloading VOIP ISO installation files and began installing test VOIP systems on servers in our test lab.
In my next blog...I'll detail our current phone configuration and what I learned while testing VOIP systems.
Want to be notified when I add a new entry to this blog? Simply click the orange RSS syndication link on this page.