How many of you use VOIP telephones in your shops?
If yes do you convert the line to analog to run through the Whozz Calling caller ID box?
If you want to use the whozz calling you will have to convert it. Depending on your phone system you will probably lose the connection between lines (line 1, line 2, etc) that the whozz calling will output vs. your telephone handsets.
i dont trust it…internet goes down a lot compared to the old fashion copper phone lines.One Friday night with no phone will easily eat up any savings from VOIP. and then customers will call another pizza place…even worse.
We’ve used our cable-TV provider for phones since day one, and oddly enough, they are more reliable than our “Copper-Wire telephone line provider” We even switched our home phone to cable/phone
RG6 coax cable in, a modem splits that to our phone modem and internet modem, 60mb speeds online, clear calls on 2 phone lines, more reliable than if I went traditional telephone service. And no weird prefix’s for my area.
Oh, I forgot to mention that cable phone service is just 37% of the cost of using the local telephone provider, plus no 2-year contract with ETF’s either. My POS caller-ID box works with it flawlessly (point of success) with it too.
Charter is the provider in my area, they have been great with customer service too.
Does Charter convert it to an analog signal then so you can use any old telephone? Or did you have to sort out the converter box yourself? We have used VOIP since day one (open 5 years now) Functionality, portability, expansion and a vanity number were part of our reasons to go with VOIP. We have one number but it rings to line one then to line 2 if line one is busy etc. If those are down it forwards to a redundant tel. line, we have even taken calls when there is no electrical power in our shop.
The telephone modem from Charter converts to a signal any phone can use, even the POS caller-ID module works seamlessly with it
In my area, the old copper phone system is built like a tank. Very little issues in 47 years. Internet on the other hand is stable, but not stable enough to risk losing business when it goes down.
Wow, I thought i was in a rural area being way up in far northern Wisconsin. We’ve actually got a more stable cable system than our copper system. I think it is because most of the cable is buried, while telco shares room on power lines, and when you’re in a heavily wooded area, and get storms, the trees like to knock out power and phone. I’m willing to bet that our cellular system is more stout than our landline network since all the towers run on DC power from a battery bank, so when power goes down, the cell towers are still powered. And with LTE showing up a year ago, we are styling…
VOIP once I switched to Nextel, I have not had a single issue.
Bump…Any more folks want to weigh in? We use a VOIP system with two of our other unrelated businesses. No issues, but it’s a bit weird to get used to. Less intuitive than the old phones.
I would choose cable for reliability. Even though good old copper wires are very robust, phone lines go down in neighborhoods during storms whereas fiber optic and cable are underground.
Cable and fiber are not always buried either. It all depends on the area. When comparing copper to cable, you have to remember copper is dedicated to voice and they added data on top of it. Where cable and fiber are data, with voice added on.
It is a subtle difference but a big one. I would honestly take copper over voip any day.
We ran traditional copper for 48 years and the last two years have been “digital” via our cable company. I’ll tell you one thing, in the 48 years when we ran on traditional lines I don’t even recall having an outage, but with digital phones through cable, we’ve had 3 major outages in the last two years. Costed us a ton of headache (and actual cash). We forwarded our lines to cell phones when they went down, but talk about a major pain.
Another thing I liked about analogue lines was they were self powered. No electricity? You could still accept calls from customers. Now we got one more box on battery backup for when our power goes out or flickers…
Example: we lost power for about two hours the other day when a fuse blew and I actually received an email from a customer who was completely furious telling me that he was never ever going to order from us again after decades of being a great customer and how we failed him completely and essentially have no clue how to run a business (true story). Why? Literally because we didn’t answer the phone… We couldn’t! We were frantically trying to figure out how to handle a restaurant full of about 120 customers that were all in the dark! The guy trying to call had no idea of the chaos we were going through at the time, all he knew was he was hungry and we failed him.
Customers now a days are on such edge that you really can’t make ANY kind of mistake or they just go ape shit on you. It’s kind of sad really. So yeah, I guess the point of this is if we still had analogue phones I could have at least answered that guys call instead of getting destroyed via email for not doing so.
I spent quite a few years in the telephone industry and this is my take on things. If you are in an area that is truly analog on copper right from the central office, it would be my go to situation. In the world of digital technology after you are a given distance from the central office the likelihood of being on straight copper is drastically reduced. There are many different ways to get dial tone most are through digital carrier systems.
I personally have gone to VOIP provided by my cable company on coax because of a fight with the telephone company over a service outage. They refused to send someone out on a Friday at 5:00 when the carrier system failed because in their mind it was not a service outage because I was the only one reporting it. I had to wait until the next appointment time for a repairman to come and check my equipment in the store to be sure it was not the cause of my problem. They sent a young punk that had 1 year experience and attitude that was out of this world. When I told him what the problem was and who needed to fix it, he said “Do you think you know more about telephones than I do?” I handed him my certification card and said “Yes I do. Now call Dale and have him bring a high voltage card for the carrier that is in the cabinet in the parking lot.”
This happened at least 3 times in a period of 4 weeks. I switched over and I have had one outage with the VOIP setup in 6 years and they dispatched repair within 10 minutes of the call.