rob's blog

Many people ask me what a virtual phone number is. Well, everyone knows what a phone number is. So the real question is “What is Virtual about a Virtual Phone Number?”

First, here is a dramatically oversimplified history lesson:

Historically, phone numbers were tied to physical locations. The phone company would provision a phone number to work over a single physical line, which would be “dropped” at the actual location the number would be tied to. Calls to that number could only be delivered to that physical location and businesses would have to receive the calls using expensive PBX systems which maintained routing smarts, voicemail applications, IVRs, etc.

With a virtual phone number, the physical limitation is removed, allowing a company to use a phone number in a more flexible manner with no reliance on physical presence of phone lines or phone systems. Calls to a virtual phone number are handled by a remote agent or proxy, which forwards on calls based on user defined rules. This allows a business to:

• Seamlessly connect multiple locations
• Eliminate on-premises telco equipment, telco space, phone lines, etc.
• Maintain phone service during incidents effecting physical offices.

Here is an example of how a business uses a virtual phone number from OnSIP:

Company X maintains a New York headquarters and a Los Angeles sales office. The company has local phone numbers and one toll free number, all virtual phone numbers. When a customer calls the toll free number, rather than having it answered by a phone system in either the Los Angeles or New York office, an IVR answers the call on the OnSIP Virtual PBX service. When prompted by the IVR, the caller selects option 2, for sales. Because there are sales associates in both offices, phones ring simultaneously in both offices until answered in Los Angeles. The call is from a key customer who needs to speak to the CEO who is working from his beach house in Cape Cod. The sales associate transfers the call to the CEO who is connected to OnSIP using his home office cable Internet connection. When the call is completed, the CEO uses 4-digit dialing to a make a free call to the sales associate in Los Angeles to congratulate her on a job well done for helping close a major sale.

The entire team is connected via OnSIP, which acts on behalf of the users, no matter where they are now or where they move. Users have the flexibility to make and receive calls and use the service as if they were in the office at all times.

OnSIP has phone numbers available throughout the country and are available for immediate activation.

I just read an article in the NY Times that purports to advise SMBs on how to take advantage of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). While the story’s gist is true -- that VoIP calling in and out of the PSTN may save the SMB money – it dismally fails to paint the full picture of business telephony options.

Start with their first SMB recommendation:

“First off, if you don't already have a private telephone exchange (PBX), you'll need to install one. A PBX is a piece of equipment that switches calls between enterprise users, allowing a group of people (at a company or campus, for example) to share a specific number of external phone lines, saving the added cost of having an external phone line for each user.”

When was this written? These days, an SMB has no business buying, installing and managing PBX hardware. Today a huge number of SMB options include no hardware, eliminating the need for technical staff or consultants (aka ridiculously expensive support contracts) for ongoing PBX management.

Here is the beauty of IP-based telephony: There are no differences between PBX applications that run in your office on purchased or leased PBX hardware and PBX applications that are hosted in a data center, accessed over the Internet.

Oh wait -- except for these:

Hosted PBX services usually feature:

24x7 network operations management by specialized staff
Power, network and IP redundancy for fault tolerance
Disaster recovery options
No capital cost
Free upgrades
No need for support contracts
Scaling on demand as your business telecom needs grow or shrink.

Hardware PBXs come with:

Few or no redundancy safeguards
High capital costs
Ongoing maintenance requirements and costs
Specialized technical staff for management
Costly upgrades

Hosted PBX services usually offer SMBs no-penalty, low or no-risk evaluation periods. Many, such as our onSIP hosted service, even offer free trials. When evaluating a hosted service, customers can simply plug free or inexpensive IP phones into the LAN. In minutes, they can configure the phones to take advantage of the full feature set of a PBX, without any PBX in sight. A far cry from the vendor selection process associated with a purchased, customer-premise PBX.

There is little to no management of a hosted service on an ongoing basis. Moves, adds and changes can be handled in minutes by anyone who knows how to use a computer. Upgrades are free and happen without notice, so your service is never outdated and remains current with the latest IP telephony features and capabilities.

While the PBX hardware resides safely off-premise, total management control remains in the hands of the hosted PBX service customer, if so desired. Powerful yet user-friendly, web-based administrative portals extend total control of the service as if it ran on an on-premise PBX. Services also can be configured to support road warriors who want calls forwarded to cell or home phones, to route calls based on time of day, to create groups, auto-attendants and more.

The Times story takes pains to point out that the PSTN maintains “five 9s” of reliability, bettering a VoIP service. But does this consider real-world conditions? Does it take into account, for example, the excellent
chances of someone tripping over wires coming out of PBX hardware sitting under someone’s desk?

Today, hosted PBX services have more to do with rescuing SMBs from disaster than causing them. If a small business is struck by fire, flood, earthquake or just a crippling snowstorm, its hosted PBX platform can go on merrily receiving its business calls and forward them to employees sitting at any other spot on earth.

The same circumstances will crush, melt, or fill up the voice mail boxes of the PBX sitting in the telecom closet, VoIP or otherwise. For all these and other reasons,
SMBs these days should strongly consider the savings and benefits of hosted solutions before buying and installing their own PBX hardware.

While I wish I were considered as relevant as Bill Gates, at least at this point in time, we share a common vision of the end of the PBX. Microsoft recently unveiled their unified communications offering. At the launch in San Francisco, Gates stated "The transformation to software-based communications is going to be as profound as the shift from the typewriter to word-processing software." Hey, we feel the same way.

Wikipedia defines a PBX or Private Branch Exchange, as " a telephone exchange that serves a particular business or office, as opposed to one that a common carrier or telephone company operates for many businesses or for the general public."

We agree that large hunks of hardware, sitting in telco closets, serving individual silos or organizations are a thing of the past. We also agree that the future of unified communications is software based. We are headed in different directions though on our implementation of the PBX replacement.

Microsoft's unified communications services are embedded in existing Microsoft products that generally need to be managed in silos on a company by company basis. For some, this model makes sense. Junction Networks, on the other hand, delivers unified communications services as a service, with no managed software on the client side.

The funny thing about delivering unified communications services as a service is we are still calling it "Hosted PBX" for marketing purposes because that's what customers understand. The fact of the matter is the Junction Networks hosted infrastructure is so far from anything that acts or looks like a PBX, it is almost painful for us to call it a PBX. If anything, it is much like any web infrastructure, with routers, switches, web servers and db servers.

This model is far more scalable, redundant, reliable and cheaper than any per customer or per server model that was typically the model of the traditional PBX. Much like web or email hosting, the future of unified communications holds two options for a business:

DO IT YOURSELF:
Buy, install, manage and deploy software, such as Microsoft's products, with your own staff and resources.

COMMUNICATIONS AS A SERVICE:
Engage a service provider, such as Junction Networks, for a pay-as-you go service with little or no upfront investment or internal resource needs.

Both are valid models and which way a business goes depends on a particular organization's appetite for control, skill set of technology folks, and capital availability to name a few factors.

Happy to be on the same (or similar) page as Bill!

It seems Digium is no longer interested in taking a back seat to the some of the IP PBX vendors it helped spawn with the development of Asterisk, the open source pbx. In the last week, Digium first announced the purchase of Switchvox, the makers of an Asterisk based PBX. Only a few days later, Digium inked a deal with 3Com, who will distribute the Asterisk Appliance under the 3Com name. Both deals signal a strong move by Digium to take the lead in the SMB IP PBX race.

Digium says it reviewed a number of competing IP PBX vendors before selecting Switchvox. Speaking from experience, they made the right move. Junction Networks has partnered with Switchvox to provide easy-to-configure SIP and IAX Trunking since 2005. Our shared customers report the product is reliable, easy to manage and supported by a great team. It’s nice to see a great group of people and a great product get the recognition they deserve. It has been a pleasure for our team to work with Swithvox.

The acquisition pairs the Asterisk code makers with a superior GUI and high quality management team in Switchvox. Right now, the Asterisk based IP PBX race comes down to Asterisk vs. Fonality. If I had to make my bet, I would go with the guys who control the Asterisk code!

And because Digium controls the Asterisk code, big deals such as the partnership with 3com are obviously now within their reach. It will be tough for Fonality and others to make such moves to compete with the gorilla that is now Digium.

All previous inbound call quality issues have been resolved. All other routes / services continue to remain unaffected. We are continuing to monitor our primary inbound carrier and will provide any further information in this forum.

We are currently experiencing intermittent call quality on inbound calls only. Outbound calls, on-network calls and all other services are operating normally. Our primary inbound carrier is aware of the issue and working on it.

Inbound calling was restored at approximately 3:50pm and all residual call quality issues are now resolved. Outbound calls were never affected. We are continuing to monitor any issues with our inbound carrier.

This afternoon's interruption in inbound calls via telephone numbers has been corrected. As we receive more information from the upstream provider who had the network issue, we will update the blog. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

We were happy to see the announcement by AT&T of its release of IP Flexible Reach, to ‘IP enable’ existing key systems for SMBs. Since lots of effort, resources and money probably went into this decision by AT&T to enter the SMB VoIP space, it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside that we are already here and well ahead of the game. It’s gratifying to see that AT&T believes there is a need for what we already sell!

It appears its new service is targeted at small businesses who are taking half steps into the world of VoIP while retaining their existing key systems. The service promises greater leverage of existing or newly provisioned data pipes from AT&T by incorporating voice. This is hardly a new concept. We have been providing this service for a few years now and have thousands of business customers to show for it.

While AT&T wants customers to take baby steps, Junction Networks is pushing the envelope, offering ALL the benefits of VoIP today. We have seen that once customers dip their toes into the VoIP pool, they tend to realize that the true benefits (remote and nomadic users, access to advance applications and more) are available only when using a completely VoIP-centric service. The proof will be in the pudding, but we believe that with IP Flexible Reach, these new VoIP converts will realize that the PBX in the dusty closet now is nothing more than a potential point of failure with limited value.

The next logical step is to find a service provider that not only handles basic call traffic (gatewaying), but also offers the key system smarts (auto-attendant, extensions, voicemail, etc.) without the key system itself. By eliminating the CPE altogether, the small business unlocks total cost of ownership savings, reliability gains and flexibility options.

Enter Junction Networks’ Hosted PBX. Good-bye key system.

Thanks AT&T for getting the message out!

If a prepaid annual plan didn’t clue you in to the fact that SunRocket was in “we need lots of money, and fast” mode, you are probably looking for answers to why SunRocket is more train wreck than high flier.

You are not alone. In fact, as the founder of Junction Networks, for four years now, I have constantly been asked by prospects, customers, friends and family members- “Why isn’t your service like the ‘other’ residential providers? Can’t I get a cheap unlimited plan and free hardware, etc. from Junction Networks?”

My answer to them is a resounding “NO" and my explanation may shed some light on why SunRocket has run out of jet fuel.

Our business-oriented service has three key differences, which should clue you in as to why our model is sustainable and delivers what business customers of all sizes need.

1. We don’t sell UNLIMITED PLANS. We charge per minute.
Now many people don’t like this because of it’s inherent lack of predictability. But, we generally find our customers save money by only paying for what they use. We don’t make any attempt to figure out what you are going to use and set prices based on excel models. It’s too unpredictable and is a recipe for disaster.

We figure with unlimited plans, customers are either going to figure out ways to abuse the plans or are going to make so few calls, they will perceive the Unlimited Plan as a waste of their money. In one case we would not like you as a customer, in the other, you would not like us as a provider. Not good for customer retention nor profitability!

2. We don’t require any specific hardware and won’t sell you any hardware.
If you are old enough to remember (like I am), the telephone companies used to have stores where you would buy one of their phones in order to use their service. Seems crazy right? You should use the hardware you want to use and a quality VoIP provider should be able to support it as long as it is SIP capable. You may be staring at your “FREE” ATA from SunRocket right now and wondering what it is good for now and how you are supposed to configure it. Good luck.

3. We charge for SERVICES, not SEATS.
This one is most important for businesses. The typical provider today will sell you services based on the number of phones or users. But what if you have some phones that will simply be used for internal calling or extension dialing? Other than the phone itself, these calls cost your provider close to nothing and you should not pay for them.

Junction Networks sells services such as voice mailboxes, auto-attendants, dial-by-name directories, etc. as standalone features. If you think about it, your company has an auto-attendant and how much you pay for it should have nothing to do with the number of people in your company.

My point is, if your telephone provider's deals seem too good to be true, it's time to find a new telephone provider.