Category: Soundline

• Comcast is not VoIP.
• Most people have Comcast and would like to believe that it is the same as analog service when in fact Comcast uses the same technology as the top tier VoIP Companies.
• Comcast claims their service is analog because it provides analog phone jacks to hook up analog phones and analog systems. However, it requires the Comcast internet connection to be on.
• Sometimes people say that their internet is down but their phones are still working with Comcast. This only occurs when their computer network is down however, their internet connection is actually still working or the phones would be dead as well.
• SoundLine monitors your internet connection and provides free IT support to ensure that your network stays running.
• Analog Phone Lines are more reliable than VoIP.
• If an analog phone system fails or the power goes out and the phone system does not have or runs out of battery power, the calls simply route to a busy message or a message saying that the lines have been disconnected.
• The authorized contact then has to realize that the phones are not ringing, usually resulting in a large amount of missed calls, and would then need to call their provider or access their website to forward each individual phone number to a designated cell phone or separate location.
• When you forward lines to one cell phone it can be very hard to run your business.
• Calls can end up on your personal cell phones voicemail which appears as unprofessional.
• In larger offices, passing around one cell phone can be highly burdensome and unproductive.
• In even larger offices, it may be impossible to field calls via one cell phone resulting in a large amount of voicemails and unsatisfied clients and/or missed business.
• With SoundLine, even when powering dial tone to your analog phone system or when using our hosted phone system, calls can be routed automatically during any internet, power, or network failure to as many cell phones or outside lines as desired. They can ring simultaneously, in round robin, or in any order that you would like.
• Calls will never end up on a personal cell phone voicemail. Customers will still hear all your menu options (if you have them) and end up in the same voicemail box which can email to as many people as you like.
• If you do have a menu set up, individual extensions can still route to individuals cell phones automatically based on the customer’s personal preference.
• When calls are answered via cell phone, a special alert will tell the the person answering the phone that this is a call from the SoundLine network and that they are to press any key to take the call. This way they can chose whether or not to take the call that from the customer or to let it go to voicemail (or the next person in the hunt group).
• Calls can also be transferred from any cell phone, without needing software, to any extension or outside line by using the pound (#) key.
• In conclusion, your entire business can run as normal in ANY situation.
• VoIP has poor audio quality.
• In the past, VoIP was very hard to implement to a mass market because of the variance in quality of internet connections at different business locations. Most people have not had consistent enough of connections to support crystal clear audio and therefore have abandoned the idea of using VoIP.
• Now that most businesses have at least DSL internet connection, which is a very high quality connection, and with more and more businesses getting cable or fiber internet which only gets better, the internet connection is rarely a factor in poor quality VoIP service.
• There are times where internet service providers have issues, such as packet loss or high latency (ping times) and once reported are usually resolved fairly quickly as they cause issues for many business critical services such as VPNs, streaming video, and of course VoIP
• SoundLine goes above and beyond to prevent this by monitoring our customers internet connections and helping them report any issues to their ISP, while demanding a speedy resolve. 90% of our customers have never experienced any issues with their internet service providers and those that have we were able to be troubleshoot and resolve, whereas our competitors would rather just lose the business and move on.
• Another cause of poor audio quality can be a poor network setup at the customers location.
• If too many services try to use the internet at the same time, or if there are viruses and/or spyware present, they can use too much bandwidth and interfere with active phone calls.
• SoundLine provides free specialized training to customer’s IT professionals and/or provides special routers starting at $85 include unlimited free service and management from us. The use of the router will completely negates this issue by dedicating a small percentage of your bandwidth directly to the phones.
• The only other cause of poor audio quality on VoIP comes from the VoIP providers network.
• Less expensive VoIP providers are prone to cut corners and use less expensive data centers, overload their equipment, and use low cost carriers.
• All of these cut corners can result in a poor audio signal which will impact a customer regardless of anything else they may doing.
• SoundLine uses the most expensive data center in Seattle (The Westin), has premium direct connections to only tier one carriers, and never overloads any equipment beyond 70% load to ensure the best possible experience.
• Hosted VoIP service provider’s systems go down too often so it is better to manage your own phone system in house.
• While many hosted VoIP companies do have more than ideal downtime, it is usually a result of not having geographically redundant data centers.
• If they do not, you might as well run your own phone system out of your office (even though it will cost significantly more and you will have to monitor it yourself). However, your reliability will be similar.
• The other option is that you run multiple phone systems for your office from your own private data centers around the US to ensure redundancy.
• The easiest option is to just let SoundLine host your phone system as we have multiple data centers in Seattle and Atlanta which host multiple instances of each customers system ensuring that calls can never be missed.

Who can tell when bandwidth will be scarce at your office – used by those nosy neighbors with the gaming server in the break room?

Many people believe that using a cloud-based phone system uses more bandwidth than an IP-PBX that is located on site. However, depending on the usage, there are many times where cloud-based phone systems use considerably less internet throughput.

Forwarding to Cell Phones

When forwarding calls to cell phones, cloud-based phone systems – such as our MBX service – do not use any of your internet since the call is being forwarded from our network instead of using your network to forward the call. So, when a call is taken on a cell phone using an IP-PBX system, your network’s internet is used for the incoming call and for the call that is going out. In high-definition or in U-LAW (uncompressed audio), this would use 160k from your upload AND download for the duration of the call, even though it is on an external cell phone. With the cloud based MBX, there is no internet usage.

Playing Music on Hold

When you play music on hold with an IP-PBX, you are forced to use high-definition audio (G.722) or U-LAW codecs in order for the music to play clearly. This uses 80k of your network’s upload speed. With MBX, music is played from our network and does not use any of your upload speed. This allows you to use compressed audio (G.729) for your voice calls, which only uses 40k up and down, and can help you save even more bandwidth without compromising the perceived audio quality for music on hold.

Playing Greetings & Auto Attendants

With MBX, all greetings and audio messages are played from the MBX network and do not use any internet from your network. With an IP-PBX, all greetings and auto-attendant messages are played using your network’s internet connection and consequently requires a constant 80k of your upload speed – per caller.

Call Queues

With an IP-PBX, while customers are on hold, they again are using your network’s upload speed at a minimum rate of 80k per caller. With MBX, while callers are listing to your on-hold marketing messages and waiting to be connected, they are not using any of your network’s internet.

If you’re looking for a phone system that can support your mobile staff, and you’re considering Vonage or similar options – think again. For agents who routinely spend time in the field, Vonage’s SimulRing (and other competing VoIP services too) has major flaws, not the least of which deals with its cell phone forwarding, simultaneous ring feature. Imagine this example: Two staff members are in a meeting and one of their cell phones is turned off or loses service connectivity. A client is tries to call him on his cell phone directly to schedule a last-minute appointment and the call is passed straight to the person’s cell phone voicemail box. So, the client decides to call the main number and the call is routed to the cell phone again – and through the simultaneous ring feature is immediately picked up by the out-of-order cell phone’s voicemail. This happens all too often with competing VoIP technologies, including Vonage.

If you’re looking for a phone system that can support your mobile staff, and you’re considering Vonage or similar options – think again. For agents who routinely spend time in the field, Vonage’s SimulRing (and other competing VoIP services too) has major flaws, not the least of which deals with its cell phone forwarding, simultaneous ring feature. Imagine this example: Two staff members are in a meeting and one of their cell phones is turned off or loses service connectivity. A client is tries to call him on his cell phone directly to schedule a last-minute appointment and the call is passed straight to the person’s cell phone voicemail box. So, the client decides to call the main number and the call is routed to the cell phone again – and through the simultaneous ring feature is immediately picked up by the out-of-order cell phone’s voicemail. This happens all too often with competing VoIP technologies, including Vonage.

Lifter? What a silly invention! Go Yealink or go home, we say.

SoundLine Communications’ MBX service has a solution. With our simultaneous ring feature, every time you answer a call on your cell that was directed through the main number, our system will tell you who the call is from and prompt you to press ‘1’ to answer the call. This way, if you don’t hit ‘1,’ it will continue to ring the other staff member’s cell phones. This also allows you to know when a call is coming through the system versus a call directly to your cell.

Unless you can guarantee all of your phones will be on and in service at all times, SimulRing will not work for your business. Vonage, and other companies too – could fix this simultaneous ring feature for their customers but they have a reason. SimulRing is designed to ring up to 5 single user devices. Most people have an office phone, cell phone, and maybe another office phone, so they can make sure their own devices are on and can remove the phones that are offline from the ring queue in advance. Since they are personal phones, this isn’t really an issue. Also, Vonage’s support of a feature like SoundLine’s simultaneous ring would encourage users creating virtual offices, like most people want when they imagine the possibilities put forth by simultaneous ring – but more importantly, would create simultaneous usage of more lines. Due to the possibility of higher expenses, Vonage cripples this feature. We don’t.

(Awesome!)