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One of my startups uses ringcentral for a public-facing phone system, but i also have a need for teleconferencing and video chat. Are there deccent low-cost providers for both of those services combined?

My requirements

  • public telephone and fax number that can be routed to my other phones
  • incoming and outgoing faxes
  • teleconferencing between multiple parties (3+)
  • video conferencing
  • other?

Low cost is good.

at other employers I have used webex as well as others but I want something that is not too pricey though will work when needed and won't turn off prospective partners or customers.

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Whatever you go with, keep in mind the value of controlling your phone numbers. Provider lockin can be terrible if you can't port your numbers and the service gets bad. We opted to go with a low cost DID (phone number) provider (les.net) which we route to our actual service providers so that we can readily change service providers without changing our number. – Paul McMillan Oct 29 '09 at 3:51

closed as off topic by Gary E♦ Dec 10 '12 at 18:02

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

There's little advantage to having a single provider for all of these services. Yeah, consolidation is nice and all, but you already have to deal with different providers for different services as is: gas company, electric company, water, sewer, trash pickup, dsl, etc. By separating these services out, you have the opportunity to pick best-of-breed services that, combined, may very well be less than a consolidated solution.

You've already identified two copmanies that, combined, can provide you with all the services you need: RingCentral for phone/faxes/routing and WebEx for teleconferences (just start a meeting and use the call-in number) and video conferences. It'll be hard to beat the combined price of < $100/mo.

Plus, if you find that you can't stand WebEx, you can switch to GoToMeeting without disturbing your phone service. And visa-versa.

--
UPDATE: RingCentral is inexpensive but has caused us headache after headache. We keep getting one-way audio (callers can hear us, we can't hear callers) and RC does something on their end to fix it. It's just not worth it the hassle.

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I don't agree - these are not unrelated services - telecommunications clearly covers both teleconferencing and videoconferencing and voice and fax. It's not as if I am asking someone to provide me with accounting services and a phone line - this is telecom... – TimJ♦ Oct 29 '09 at 2:38
You get what you pay for, and "comprehensive solution" and "low cost" don't go hand-in-hand. Cisco will gladly sell you one of the most impressively automated and integrated telcom systems you've ever dreamed of.... but it will probably you cost more than you made last year. At the start-up size, hobbling together services is generally better than single-soruce. – Alex Papadimoulis Oct 29 '09 at 5:19
I understand and that is good advice – TimJ♦ Oct 29 '09 at 15:15
I have just dropped RingCentral myself. I see the light and will go to the best service provider for each bit - there is no one best solution that is also fairly priced that provides all the services I want/need. Thanks Alex. – TimJ♦ Nov 4 '11 at 14:27
up vote 2 down vote

I assume a self-hosted asterisk box is technically beyond your means? If it's not, it's the ultimate in flexibility. If you've got a dedicated server somewhere, adding asterisk to it is not very hard.

Don't try and use asterisk on a VPS, it generally doesn't work well.

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Thanks for the suggestions, but we don't have the time for dealing with that or hosting another box. We pay others to do our web, email, subversion and other hosting. The last thing i want to do is manage a box that is critical to our business. We are software developers, not sys admins. While we could learn it and become competent it s a waste of our time and resources. Perhaps i will look into someone else managing it. thanks for the suggestion. – TimJ♦ Oct 28 '09 at 16:19
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For those of us who don't know, what's a VPS? – CoderDennis Oct 28 '09 at 20:48
Virtual Private Server. Usually much cheaper than actual private servers, they have several instances sharing a single physical box. The user has root in their operating system and can do whatever they want, but they're sharing machine resources. The problem with asterisk is that the kernels for the VPS host machines are optimized such that realtime services like phone calls don't get the overall priority they need, resulting in lag, poor call quality, and dropped calls. Some providers will set up a custom kernel for you, but most won't. – Paul McMillan Oct 29 '09 at 3:49
A friend of mine has a company that will host asterisk for you: Fonality. – Joe Nov 28 '09 at 14:30
up vote 1 down vote

I'm a Canadian small business owner, and I've had a lot of luck with web conferencing from Vesta Networks. They're Canadian, which I like to support, and have a nice robust system.

You can check them out at this website: http://www.vestanetworks.com/

Regarding the regular phone services side of things, I'm afraid I just have a regular business line - it's the most reliable choice!

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up vote 0 down vote

While it isn't a solution for your public facing telephony services, I've found www.dimdim.com to be a good alternative to webex or gotomeeting for web and voice conferencing (both voip and dialin). They have a free service which is sufficient for small teams and incremental pay services.

Between dimdim, skype and google voice we've been able to manage a distributed team fairly effectively and at a low cost

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