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Ask HN: Virtual PBX for startup?

6 points by wvenable ↗ HN
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.

I'm looking into services like:

    Phone.com
    RingCentral
    Grasshopper
    My1Voice
    VirtualPBX
    eVoice Receptionist
    Onebox
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?

(If it matters, we're a Canadian company but the vast majority of our customers are American.)

Thanks!

7 comments

[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 32.0 ms ] thread
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.

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.
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.

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.