Anyone here a VOIP / telephone service expert?

[dukegrad98]

Does anyone here make a living working with VOIP and telephone systems? It's time for me to upgrade my legacy small business phone system, and I just thought I'd see if there was anyone here whose brain I could pick or that I might do business with. I've got a 15-year-old seven-line system coming into an office with a live receptionist and about 20 phones, with 10-15 daily users in the office on a typical day. I don't need a ton of features, really just reliable voice service and voicemail. (Maybe even just a VOIP bridge to the existing phone system to get us off the POTS lines.)

20+ years ago I made a living working in IT, but that was a long time ago. The idea of trying to configure something like a FreePBX / Asterisk server is just a project that I don't have the time or skills to tackle on my own anymore. Please feel free to PM or respond here -- thanks!

Cheers, John

[Skuzzy]

In Texas (it may be true other places), the quality of service is not guaranteed by the Public Utilities Commission for VOIP. In other words, it could be down for a week and all you can do is wait. Whereas, if a land line goes down, the phone company is required to start service within the first 24 hours of it being down. Now, to be fair, I have been retired for four years, so it all could have changed. I would ask a lot of questions before even considering using VOIP for a business.

The last job I had, the boss accidentally bought into a VOIP system and the quality of the calls and connections plummeted. The worse thing is, you may not know someone is trying to reach and there is a router outage impacting them. After we got back to the landlines we got flooded with complaints. It costs us some business.