providers for phone line & internet
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@johnhooks said:
We have Comcast, and in 6 years, I can count 3 times I needed to contact them. Two were because we moved, and one when we got married and my wife changed her name.
I heard a lot of negative stuffs from them. Especially their customer service or how they renew contract without notify you in advance. The renew contract isn't much of a surprise. I've seen a lot of company send on 48 hours notice or worse.
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@scottalanmiller said:
General rule, never get phones and Internet from the same carrier, it makes you trapped for no reason.
This. I worked for a third rate cable company in FL, and they had about 6 HOAs locked down. You couldn't get phone tv or internet from anyone else unless you used satellite. They had these people trapped and the service was terrible.
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@brianlittlejohn said:
I have had nothing but problems with a client that is on ATT's fiber Internet service... impossible to get support, once you do get ahold of someone it is days before they resolve issues.
I have a client on AT&T fiber and it has never been down. So I do not know how good or bad the support is.
I have a client on Charter fiber that has also never been down.
Both services I can recommend.
I would seriously look for a local fiber provider. I recently got a 50/50 fiber from Adams in Quincy, IL for $80/month.
As for phones, go with a SIP provider. I recommend VoIP.ms for a lot of things, but never used them with a call center volume of calls. @NetworkNerd can likely recommend a higher level support SIP vendor as I know he has used a few.
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Since I do a lot of consulting about VoIP and telephony, one of the things that we find all of the time is that people combine telephone and Internet together and end up paying outrageous rates for BOTH, lose all kinds of critical features (like having failover) and have no good means of migrating off for better options because if they switch phones they risk the ISP cutting off their Internet and if they switch Internet they will definitely lose their phones. Totally trapped because nothing can ever be "down".
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@LAH3385 said:
@johnhooks said:
We have Comcast, and in 6 years, I can count 3 times I needed to contact them. Two were because we moved, and one when we got married and my wife changed her name.
I heard a lot of negative stuffs from them. Especially their customer service or how they renew contract without notify you in advance. The renew contract isn't much of a surprise. I've seen a lot of company send on 48 hours notice or worse.
We aren't on a contract. We only have internet, and it's just month to month. I'm sure some of it was the cable company in FL, but take those reports with a grain of salt. I had people who were escalated to me because their cable was out. It was in fact that their TV was turned off.
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@JaredBusch said:
I have a client on AT&T fiber and it has never been down. So I do not know how good or bad the support is.
I've worked for larger customers with AT&T and the support was great. But I'd guess it is only when you get to a certain size. Overall, though, I've never personally experiences service or support issues with AT&T but have only used them in limited amounts.
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@JaredBusch said:
@brianlittlejohn said:
I have had nothing but problems with a client that is on ATT's fiber Internet service... impossible to get support, once you do get ahold of someone it is days before they resolve issues.
I have a client on AT&T fiber and it has never been down. So I do not know how good or bad the support is.
I have a client on Charter fiber that has also never been down.
Both services I can recommend.
I would seriously look for a local fiber provider. I recently got a 50/50 fiber from Adams in Quincy, IL for $80/month.
As for phones, go with a SIP provider. I recommend VoIP.ms for a lot of things, but never used them with a call center volume of calls. @NetworkNerd can likely recommend a higher level support SIP vendor as I know he has used a few.
I wish FiOS was in our area. They are around us just not in our immediate area.
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Pretty much what @JaredBusch said about the phones also. We have google voice for our home line. You could either use a PBX or something like an Obihai which is $30. My parents have an Ooma, which seems nice but it's fairly expensive for the device.
Edit: I missed the call center part somehow. FreePBX is easy to set up and just get a SIP provider like @JaredBusch said.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You don't want a single company with the power to turn off your Internet AND your telephones at the same time.
But if you using a SIP line doesn't losing internet mean you use phones too?
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You don't want a single company with the power to turn off your Internet AND your telephones at the same time.
But if you using a SIP line does it really matter?
Yes, if you get them from the same carrier it's exactly the same in every way.
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You don't want a single company with the power to turn off your Internet AND your telephones at the same time.
But if you using a SIP line doesn't losing internet mean you use phones too?
You would most likely pay less having a second internet line for redundancy than paying an ISP for phone. We had comcast give us a price a few months ago (just for kicks) for their hosted PBX. It was going to be about $400 a month for internet and 8 extensions. Only 4 of those extensions have voicemail.
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You don't want a single company with the power to turn off your Internet AND your telephones at the same time.
But if you using a SIP line doesn't losing internet mean you use phones too?
Additionally you can always connect to your SIP trunk from any other Internet connection if so desired. Instead of waiting for it to come up. SO if you are catastrophic down, you could spin up something on a hosted provider and connect and get calls.
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@JaredBusch said:
@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You don't want a single company with the power to turn off your Internet AND your telephones at the same time.
But if you using a SIP line doesn't losing internet mean you use phones too?
Additionally you can always connect to your SIP trunk from any other Internet connection if so desired. Instead of waiting for it to come up. SO if you are catastrophic down, you could spin up something on a hosted provider and connect and get calls.
Unless you get the SIP from the ISP, then normally they lock it to only coming over their own lines, hence the risk of the "all in one".
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@JaredBusch
We use in-house PBX system so SIP is not an option at the moment. Because we use internet and making calls all day, we fear bandwidth may cause the call quality degraded. Our Phone & Internet are two separate services. -
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch
We use in-house PBX system so SIP is not an option at the moment.How does that work? We do in house PBX all the time with SIP, why would in house PBX stop you from using SIP? And why would you run anything that didn't use SIP?
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@LAH3385 said:
Our Phone & Internet are two separate services.
That's fine, but it should still be SIP. There are no downsides to SIP, only upsides due to legal entanglements to legacy phone lines in the US. SIP can always be superior, even if you do it over a dedicated line as the taxes are lower and the quality is higher.
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@scottalanmiller
The phone is SIP capable. We just didn't opt-in for SIP card. We still use PRIs.
We were locked in contract for PRIs with Logix. That ends on November. -
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch
We use in-house PBX system so SIP is not an option at the moment. Because we use internet and making calls all day, we fear bandwidth may cause the call quality degraded. Our Phone & Internet are two separate services.If you feel that your phones are important, which it seems that you would if you spend this much on them, how do you handle failover if your PBX fails, the hardware fails, the line fails or the ISP fails?
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@LAH3385 said:
@scottalanmiller
The phone is SIP capable. We just didn't opt-in for SIP card. We still use PRIs.Why would a PBX be physical and why would you need a SIP card? Is this like a PBX from the 1990s?
A PBX is just another server, the more important it is, the more important it is that you treat it that way and have it be a VM, not have a PRI, etc. PRI just adds cost and risk. There are no upsides to it on a technical level.
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@scottalanmiller
At the time of upgrading we didn't have an option due to contract with Logix on PRIs.
