VOIP phone suggestion please

[enjoylife]

Hi,
We are now using BT landline in our office. There are 5 handsets for 6 staff to share in the office.
Our staff works in three offices. From time to time one person need bring the phone and then walk to the other office to pass on.
Now we want to upgrade our telephone to VOIP, any suggestions please. The following features are important to us.
1, A good tariff.
2, Intercom calls with coworkers
3,Auto call attendant
4,use the current number we are using.
Thanks.

 

[pcourtney]

for new voip phones - check out the Yealink DECT handsets - they are terrific

that answers your Q2 and Q3

https://www.yealink.com/products_list_23.html

for hosted voip players in the market, there are hundreds, all the good ones do number porting which answers your Q4 - amongst the voip players you should be able to ascertain the answer to Q1 - many of them doing good deals at the moment - so now is a good time to negotiate !

 

[enjoylife]

Thanks for your quick reply. We will go through of it.
Do we expect a IT advisor to help us to setup the system? Or we can do it by ourselves with the instructions

 

[pcourtney]

it depends on the VoIP Hosted platform provider you go with, some of them are much better than others, you need to shop around, speak to 10 different suppliers for a start - its an important decision to make - where roughly are you located ?

 

[KM-Tiger]

Do we expect a IT advisor to help us to setup the system?

I'd get initial advice from your chosen VOIP provider. It will depend on the nature of your internet connection, your office network and how many simultaneous calls you need to sustain.

On providers do choose one that is a member of ITSPA. They have a code of conduct in how they deal with you, and provisions for continuity of service in the event of your provider going out of business.

 

[DavidWH]

We switched to VOIPfone.

Ported over our existing numbers, purchased the phones from them and came preconfigured, plug in and away you go! No issues since.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

If you want to keep your existing landline number first thing is you need it ported out and bt must assign you a new landline number for the Internet. At the moment your current number is assigned to bt Internet and needs to be released for porting without breaking your Internet. A good ISP or VoIP provider will advise further for those steps.

For Hardware yealink all the way, even refurbished units are fine. Do not buy the bt VoIP they offer for customers. Heavily modified firmware tied into their yealink supplied phones and bt routers and very limited after that what you can do.

 

[scstock]

Check out CircleLoop - VoIP in the Cloud so no special hardware needed, just use an app on desktop and/or mobile. I've been using them for 2.5 years and very happy.

I ported our geographic number (that was a bit painful, mainly due to BT who I hate with a passion). It's also cheap as chips.

 

[transcom]

Porting may be a pain and take some time, but its pretty easy to get new geographic / non geographic or even free phone numbers. The traffic and setup side for what your requiring is pretty easy. If you need help, we have a voip softswitch and can talk you through the setup.