

Ask HN: Virtual PBX for startup? - wvenable

Can anyone recommend a good virtual PBX service for a startup?  We don't have an office, everyone works from home or satellite offices.  Our current 1-800 number just rings up one of our staff at their location.<p>I'm looking into services like:<p><pre><code>    Phone.com
    RingCentral
    Grasshopper
    My1Voice
    VirtualPBX
    eVoice Receptionist
    Onebox
</code></pre>
I've heard bad reviews of RingCentral and I'm looking seriously at Phone.com.  Anyone here make any recommendations?  Also wondering what other small companies are doing for phone services?<p>(If it matters, we're a Canadian company but the vast majority of our customers are American.)<p>Thanks!
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Shooter
Toktumi.com is another service. I had much better luck with them than
Grasshopper, FWIW. We eventually moved on to our own platform (based on
Asterisk initially, then FreeSwitch) for more flexibility and control.
RingCentral _should_ be avoided.

[We also frequently hire FreeSwitch and Asterisk consultants, if anyone on HN
wants to be added to our vendor list.]

~~~
vomjom
Please elaborate on why RingCentral should be avoided. I've never had any
serious problems, although I'm wondering if I'm missing something.

~~~
Shooter
Sure. Several features didn't work as advertised, or only worked
intermittently. They always fixed the issues eventually (and apologized), but
we were losing customer calls and faxes in the meantime. Sometimes the service
didn't work at all...outages and transfer issues led me to their customer
service, which sucked. It was infuriating to be paying for advertisements that
featured the 800#, only to have the incoming calls/faxes be lost or
misdirected. When you have offers for a home lost in the ether, you want
decent customer service. Unfortunately, their entire customer service staff
seemed to be on their forum - monitoring and rapidly deleting any complaints
or negative comments. At one point, they banned one of my employees from their
forum because she was trying to resolve an issue. It drew too much attention
to the problem.

I believe they've taken in additional funding since I used them (?), so they
may have improved. I've not had problems with any of the (dozens of) other
800# or virtual PBX providers I've ever used though, so I was left with a
fairly bad opinion of RingCentral.

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dawie
I use kall8(<http://www.kall8.com/index.php>), because they are cheap. $2
setup fee and $2 per month plus $0.06 per minute.

37 Signals is using grashopper
([http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1973-announcing-ceo-office-
ho...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1973-announcing-ceo-office-hours))

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vomjom
I've used Kall8 and RingCentral. While I'd generally recommend RingCentral
(especially if you use a lot of minutes), it depends on your requirements.

Kall8's advantages over RingCentral:

\- Recorded calls

\- Can get the name of the caller through caller ID (RingCentral only offers
the phone number)

RingCentral's advantages:

\- Much, much cheaper. RingCentral Office gives you unlimited minutes (well,
realistically it's about $20 for 5000 minutes because they have "fair usage
limits", so you have to buy more lines if you use more)

\- Allows for simultaneous dialing. This is critical if you want your 800
number to be answered immediately.

I've never used Kall8 or RingCentral for digital lines, by the way, so I'm not
sure how well they work in that case.

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jec31moto
Use Virtual PBX. They've been around the longest (1997) and started the hosted
phone service craze. They use their own service as well. I haven't found
another hosted phone service that actually uses their own stuff. That's
telling.

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oomkiller
I setup my own PBX with Freeswitch, and we use Flowroute for Origination and
Termination. Works great and I just host it on a small Rackspace cloud
instance for $10 a month.

