I got a phone call yesterday from a small business owner frantic because his new phone system was down and he couldn’t make or get any calls. I asked him why he wasn’t calling the vendor that installed the system and he explained that it had taken then weeks to get the system installed and it hasn’t worked right from day one and now they weren’t even calling him back. So I asked what kind of system he had and it turns out that he had signed up for a hosted PBX service. His cable internet service was down, so of course he had to phone service. He begged me to come to his office right away so I could help him out of his mess.
I went to see him this morning. He has a very small company. They only have 5 phones. He is using Polycom SIP phones with a host PBX service from Cooperative Communications. He signed up for the service though an agent that did the installation and set up and was now unresponsive. It took almost 90 days to get the phones to work and even then they haven’t worked well. He has echo, latency ,and volume issues on almost every call, even with only 5 phones. During our meeting I could hear some of his employees screaming “what, what?!?” into their phones.
One of the biggest problems with hosted PBX’s is the lack of Quality of Service (QoS) on the internet connect. His internet service, from Comcast, can’t distinguish between regular data traffic and VoIP traffic. So even sending an email can cause sound problems on a phone call. Larger Internet traffic issues can bring the whole set up crashing down.
To make matters worse, he has no local vendor, just an unresponsive sales agent. Cooperative just provides the service and they don’t offer any real support.
So, after talking for an hour he decides to switch back to a traditional phone system. He asks me how fast we can get him switched back. He’s losing business every day and he’s frantic. Here is where we run into another head ache of hosted PBX. He no longer had any phone lines in his office, except his fax line. Cooperative had ported his phone numbers to their service and they no longer existed in his building. He would need to contact Verizon and switch back before we could do anything. That could take a month. He realized that’s one reason why it took so long to get the hosted service up in the first place. He would have to deal until his lines could get ported back.
Then another nice little surprise. He had spend $250 per phone for the Polycom SIP phones. He figured he could sell them and get back some of his money, but the phones are locked to only work with Cooperative’s hosted PBX service. So unless he could find some one what used the service, he would end up eating that money too.
All in all, he was not a very happy camper. Hopefully he can hold on for the next few weeks while we wait for Verizon to port his number back. I get calls like this all the time from small businesses that get suckered into the hosted PBX promise of better service, lower bills, and more advanced features. They just forget to ask if they can actually make phones calls all the time without sounding like they are calling from the moon.
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