Dear All,

We have been using the Virtual PBX for almost a year now and it works very well for us (glitchy demon broadband aside).

However, we are having our BT landline redirect to Voipfone to use it and this is costing us a small fortune in call costs as we are paying for all incoming calls as well.

I could port the number over but this would knock our broadband out and we are currently under contract and I'm also happier keeping the number with BT.

Does anyone know a way round this? Can we use a voip gateway on site to cross inbound calls straight to the voip system rather than redirecting??

Please help, before we go bankrupt!!

Dan

There are boxes capable of this - Quality is usually not great though so they're not usually worth the hassle. Also you'd only be able to have one call at a time.

I guess your best bet is to see how much it would cost you to leave your contract early and compare that with your ongoing call costs until your contract is up. It may be cheaper to simply pay up and have the number moved over.

Hi,

The cheapest way for many reasons would be to use an Asterisk based PBX system. If you haven't come across it, Asterisk is a mature opensource software PBX that is based around VOIP and runs from any normal computer. It's used in large companies and SOHO offices alike.

There is a great package called Trixbox that you can just install on a blank computer that automatically installs the operating system and Asterisk software for you - or you can just buy a box pre-loaded.

You can include what's called an FXO card to plug your BT landline straight in to the box, which you can then send to IPphones. When ringing out, however, you can tell the box to use your voipfone account as the outbound trunk.

I'm sure voipfone wont thank me for saying this, but you can then save a lot of extension rentals etc. too, as you can run all of your extensions, mailboxes, call queues etc. from your own PBX rather than renting from voipfone. The PBX registers with voipfone as if it was one single extension, so costs just £1.99 per month all in!

A quick scour of Google shows a company offering an Asterisk box pre-installed with an FXO card and two IP phones for £175 (+vat).

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Owain

We were in the same situation but partly (for fallback reasons) didn't want to port our BT number in to Voipfone. We got around the high call charges from BT by taking an 0800 number from Voipfone and diverting the BT calls to that.

As you pay-per-minute for all incoming calls on an 0800 number we then registered a series of incoming sequential numbers with Voipfone and 'assigned' them to departments, switched on an IVR saying...

Welcome too..... Please press 1 for Operations or direct dial xxxx, press 2 for sales or direct dial xxx, press 3 for finance or direct dial etc etc...

Most of our literature still carries what we class as our switchboard number (BT) but find that most people quickly swap to the direct dials to avoid the IVR.

I know this may not be ideal for everyone but this way we retain our BT number which in worst case scenario we can flick off the divert to voipfone and maintain an emergency line, reduce costs of incoming calls and merge the 'switchboard' number with DDI numbers.

Regards

John

In our case we dont have ANY telephone lines whatsoever but then our broadband comes in via a microwave link. We are of course considering getting a PSTN line as a failsafe, but 2 months in we havent had the need. (Talktalk Business do a good deal of phone and broadband for around £25 per month, but thats for another day).

What we had investiged was the use of the mobile network 3G or GPRS, unfortunately reception of these services isnt great where we are so its been put on the long finger, but basically if you get a reasonable connection speed through a dongle, then this can be used as your VoIP carrier!

It can be interfaced through a DrayTek Router http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor2920.html ...and off you go!