Last week my comany, Teleco, installed a phone system at a customer that only got VoIP dial tones. They have a T1 for Internet access and 8 VoIP dial tones coming off of a router. The customer did this because it was much cheaper then traditional dial tones from Verizon. The customer started complaining about some intermittent problems especially people going to the wrong extensions when dialing from the auto attendant. We tested things and found the brand new telephone system wasn’t seeing the DTMF tones correctly.
We replaced the system’s CPU, the voice mail, and the CO line cards, but the problem remained. It turns out the problem is a slight delay or DTMF tone inconsistency in transmitting the tones on the VoIP lines. Since the customer didn’t get any regular cooper lines they are now stuck having to wait a week or maybe more for Verizon to come and install new, cooper service.
The moral of this story is don’t put all your communication’s eggs into one basket. If using the phone is important to your business, don’t just choose the cheapest service you can find. If you run into problems you will end up spending a lot more later. If you do go with VoIP dial tones, always get at least 1 cooper line for every 4 VoIP lines so that you are not left without properly working service in the event of a problem.
Andrew Taub
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