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Ask HN: What is wrong with the VoIP industry?

24 points by shytey ↗ HN
I run a small business. We have four different locations and four numbers that customers can call or text. We employ a remote operations team that handles the calls and texts.

I have spent hours searching for a simple service that can offer an online dashboard for texting and calling, and a phone app to receive calls on.

We are currently using Google Voice which is terrible (I cannot tell which number/location is being called when I receive a call among other quirks).

I have trialed Grasshopper and Dialpad, both terrible online dashboards for texting. Horrible UI and the call quality is poor. Grasshopper doesn't allow someone from abroad log in to the dashboard.

How has this problem not been fixed yet? What is so difficult about calling and texting on the internet?

22 comments

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PaulHoule
I have struggled to find a VoIP client that works with Twillio. There is a huge opportunity for open communications systems but it seems that industry wants to force people to use Skype, WhatsApp, Discord, ...
notyourday
> How has this problem not been fixed yet? What is so difficult about calling and texting on the internet?

The amount of money the customers are willing to pay for this service is lower than the cost of running this service. It is because the service sits between "Free" and "Mid-tier"

toomuchtodo
I recommend https://www.openphone.co/

Disclosure: No affiliation other than as a satisfied customer.

EDIT: @tapvt: They support IVR, if you have questions, their team is responsive and top notch if you reach out to them. I use them to replace a Google Voice personal number and for several business ventures.

https://help.openphone.co/en/articles/4034271-how-to-set-up-...

https://www.openphone.co/blog/how-to-get-an-auto-attendant-f...

tapvt
Do you know if they have support for IVR features? It would be amazing if I could retire an old FreePBX/Asterisk server that a client relies on.

I could find any mention on their site.

qwerty456127
Almost everybody seems using hardware phones (which are slightly harder to crack than softphones) to speak and Asterisk to implement any logic they need.

You will have to configure these yourself or pay somebody to do this for you.

100% hosted and supported services are way better because your are never gonna stop being attacked.

the_only_law
Random, but is there much money in Asterisk. I looked at it briefly for something, turns out it didn't fit my needs, but nearly all production grade telephony interfaces seem to be biased towards it (try getting help with DAHDI if you aren't using it). I'm just curious if it's and product worth learning how to hack on.
wolrah
> (try getting help with DAHDI if you aren't using it).

I mean, is it shocking that the Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface is primarily supported with Asterisk?

> I'm just curious if it's and product worth learning how to hack on.

Asterisk, Freeswitch, and Kamailio are the main open source telephony projects and are all also widely used as the "open core" of proprietary solutions so yeah there's plenty of room to make money selling support or addons for these projects.

That said, as someone who has been supporting Asterisk and Freeswitch for years now, I can't say I've ever had a situation where a DAHDI interface made sense over just using a standalone PSTN<>SIP gateway. Letting an Adtran TA9xx take care of integration with the PSTN and having the PBX side be pure VoIP makes things so much easier and more flexible IMO. The PSTN line is just one more SIP trunk, and any analog extensions we may have hooked up to FXS ports are just SIP extensions as far as the server is concerned.

If you want to dip your toes in I'd recommend setting up a FreePBX (Asterisk) or FusionPBX (FreeSwitch) instance. That gets you a nice web interface that you can point and click your way through to a usable setup while still being able to poke around at a low level as you learn how the system works.

qwerty456127
> Random, but is there much money in Asterisk.

I don't know what do you imagine as much money but there apparently is enough to make fairly good living in Europe.

icedchai
You may also want to take a look at Freeswitch, another open source PBX.
Vixel
You're trying consumer services. Try commercial services such as Star2Star, Nextiva, Mitel, Ring Central. I believe all of them have voice, SMS and desktop/mobile apps.
gomox
Ring Central seems appallingly expensive to me with their per-seat pricing (we are a software company, I need people to receive calls with a professional sounding IVR, route them to the right individual, local numbers for customers to call on, that's it).

Can you recommend any specific provider?

notyourday
> Ring Central seems appallingly expensive to me with their per-seat pricing

This is exactly the attitude of the customers for this service. They want equivalent of enterprise features for pennies on a dollar.

gomox
I'm not sure what exactly is "enterprise" about having an IVR with 3 options and "bring your own number".

RingCentral wants ~15K a year for this service, and they think "video" is a worthwhile value add (whoever their customer segment is, it's certainly not me).

I can obtain the feature set I desire with a 1 week investment into setting up Asterisk on AWS, and running costs of $100/mo, plus a ton of headaches. It seems to me like there is room for a more reasonably priced vendor to exist in the market. I would happily pay, say, $300-500/mo for the convenience of a SaaS solution, but ~20K/yr is what I pay for things that actually serve a meaningful purpose for the business.

notyourday
> RingCentral wants ~15K a year for this service, and they think "video" is a worthwhile value add (whoever their customer segment is, it's certainly not me).

Exactly. $1.5k/mo if sounds like a good price for what it needs to do with a decent margin. A company could probably get a few hundred customers the first year and tap out at a few thousand within 5-6 years.

> I would happily pay, say, $300-500/mo for the convenience of a SaaS solution, but ~20K/yr is what I pay for things that actually serve a meaningful purpose for the business.

At this price point it would require too many customers. All of these customers will think that the cost of dealing with their headache is only worth ~$400 - $100/mo. These are terrible customers to base a business on.

gomox
Based on my experience with Asterisk this should be as close to a set and forget service as I can think of. Meaning I literally will not even reach out to support on any normal year. For that, $400/mo should be plenty of margin. But I might be missing some unknown technical hurdle I have never bumped into.
notyourday
In order for a company to get $100k/mo of revenue it needs to get 250 customers each at $400/mo. Each of these customers is likely to compare it against running their own Asterisk in a cloud for $100/mo and headaches. It is a horrible pool of clients to have because members of this pool think $1.5k/mo for what supposedly is a critical service for a company ( voice + text ) to interact with its "old school" clients is too much money and every two days they are looking at integrating with voip.ms so they can build dropbox using FTP.
gomox
My experience validates this. Here's what I need:

* have a few incoming, simple IVRs in different languages (with local numbers via FlyNumber) a la "press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, or wait for an operator".

* route these calls to the appropriate people (either with a ring group or any other workable option that allows people to get a call on their phone)

What's the correct service for this? RingCentral wants to bill me for named seats, which seems absurd to me when we get ~20 calls a week.

msh
amazon connect is more or less pay as you go (you need to pay a fixed price for the reserved inbound number)
maximemanseau
What about Aircall? Have you look at it? I believe it s cheaper than Ringcentral
getcrunk
I disagree with other commenters saying it's anything but price gouging. When I worked for a msp (i.t. tech) we had trunk lines and asterisk. Managing it was dead simple, way faster than Vonage. We also had softphones with all the features u needed (call shadowing, recording). But yea if your not paying someone you will need to invest the time to set it up but it's relatively smooth sailing from there
msh
amazon connect is a turn key solution for this.

I dont know where your from, but in my EU country all the mobile phone companies also provides services like this, maybe not with a web interface but direct to phones/apps.

taf2
You could try out CallTrackingMetrics https://www.calltrackingmetrics.com/ my company - not sure whether you would find us ideal or not but we also incorporate features for conversation tracking and online chat widgets... we incorporate our online chat and sms feature into a widget that can handle both inbound web chats and inbound sms... the activities are routed through a queue which has rules for how to hand out the incoming activities to each agent. The agents will hear a n incoming ring similar to a phone call as they receive new texts or web chats... the communication space is definitely growing and evolving, I’ve been hacking in it now for 12 years and enjoy the problem space but not sure if you are looking for more of a Apple like solution or Salesforce style solution... we are more similar to a salesforce solution in that you can customize CTM to do pretty much anything with our Javascript powered workflows and webhooks