[Lab] Familiar with virtual office telephony options?

[Justin Hornosty]

roman at cncwings.com writes:

> I use voip.ms for business as well as for my home phone.
> <https://www.voip.ms/>
> They have all features that you are looking for, but they do not provide
> any hardware and you have to configure everything yourself.
> They provide a ticket based support and their guys are fairly
> knowledgeable and helpful.

While I'm not directly a customer of voip.ms, I know at least one person
who uses only their web interface stuff to manage everything (no
physical PBX, their handsets register directly to voip.ms) and they
seem happy.

www.ringcentral.ca seems fairly high priced for what you need. From what
I see it's $25 _PER USER_
http://www.ringcentral.ca/office/plansandpricing.html


> With one DID you can have unlimited extensions, they have a voice mail
> and virtual receptionist so your configuring options are almost endless.
> You can forward extension to your cell phone (or any number or
> extension) you can create ring groups o when your extension is called it
> rings on multiple numbers...etc.
>

I can't vouch for voip.ms here as I have no experience using these
features (only trunking from asterisk) but if they all work well that
sounds like the better option for your needs. You also have the
advantage of being able to easily migrate to asterisk if you want/need.

> We are a small company (3 people - 4 locations), every one of us just
> picked up used Cisco IP phone on eBay (they can be as cheap as $35, I
> managed to pick up the IP7970G with colour touch screen and 8 line
> capability for $35) and uses that as their phone. calling between
> extensions is free, so when I travel, I just configure an extension on
> my cell phone VoIP client (or tablet, or laptop) and call for free from
> anywhere in the world

+1 - ebay for handsets is certainly the way to go.

I believe android (maybe it's just cyanogenmod?) now has a built in sip
client in the dialer. There are also plenty of sip apps in the google
play store.

Lots of softphones for windows/osx/linux.

For text communication there are probably hosted xmpp services.

Good luck and let me/the list know what service you choose.