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Ask HN: What phone system or hosted phone system does your co. use?

2 points by brianmcconnell ↗ HN
I thought it would be interesting to crowd source the answers to this question since there's a good variety of companies represented here.

What phone system or hosted phone/communication system are you using at your company? Plus answer the questions below:

* How many users are on the system? * Do you have a call center or virtual call center? * Is it on premise equipment or a hosted solution? * Does it work with other VoIP/video networks, e.g. Skype? * In general, your likes and dislikes

Thanks!

4 comments

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nlh
I know I'm not using the "new hotness" of PaaS startups, but my company runs entirely on a plain-vanilla Asterisk system that I first put together in 2004.

And I know I sound like a techno-hipster here, but it's been so easy to deal with that I didn't even upgrade past 1.4 until a year or so ago (and that was because of a bug -- I'm now on 1.8 and quite happy)

No GUI, no fancy FreePBX or Asterisk@Home, etc. Just a very very simple basic Asterisk box with the IVR/extension logic all hand-coded into .conf files.

The biggest change I made was moving the whole thing from a server sitting in the office to a VPS on Linode (that was pretty cool).

I use Aastra 57i handsets in the office - there may be better ones these days, but I've found Aastra to have the best compatibility with Asterisk (ps - open to suggestions if there are better ones!). I tried to get people to use SIP software on their iPhones but everyone loves having a desk phone and I haven't found any good SIP clients that work reliably.

It works flawlessly and people still wonder how we have such a flexible and easily changeable phone system that only costs me the price of the Linode + the handsets (and my time tinkering, of course). My favorite part is the infinite flexibility that having a programmable system gives us -- if someone in the office wants a feature, I just code it up, record some new prompts if necessary, and it's done.

For actual phone service, I used a very old-school hard POTS line into the server for a while, and fairly recently ported all the #s over to a SIP provider (FlowRoute). They've been fantastic, super cheap, super reliable, and super flexible. It's a service clearly designed for telephony nerds.

We have about 12 people who use this setup and here's some info on our volume (from FlowRoute):

Past 30 days:

6154 calls

14087 minutes

$253.34631000

(Much of that volume is from an 800#, hence the slightly higher cost)

mattkrea
Given your experiences with Asterisk.. would you think a larger call center could utilize it? Our ancient AltiGen system is starting to become a problem and IT won't budge. I looked into Asterisk but since it's not much department I can't really push without facts.

One of our departments will receive around 13,000 calls in a month. The others not so much but thats the type of volume we see.

Thoughts?

nlh
I definitely think it can handle the volume, but what I don't know about is how large call centers work and what the software needs are. The thing about Asterisk is that it's more a framework than a final implementation - it can handle a lot, but you need to actually build the application you want it to be.
brianmcconnell
I remember Altigen well. My first company, PhoneZone, sold PC based and VoIP phone systems. Altigen is pretty old now, but at the time (late 90s) it was way better and cheaper than the crap Nortel etc sold. We sold those things like pancakes, once to a customer in Mongolia.

Asterisk has been around for a while. Your call volume is not that huge so my guess is that it will handle it. In rough numbers, I'd guestimate 650 calls/day (20 days/month), so depending on average call duration, a medium size system should work. Do you know how many trunks you have into the system?