Internet phone?

[pizzafanatic]

Anyone using Vonage, Skype or other internet phone for your pizza place? I see that Vonage has Call Hunt which is a necessity for most. Their prices seem lower than my local phone company (AT&T), but I"m concerned with reliability. If you’re using Vonage or other similiar service, please share your thoughts.

 

[Charles]

I investigated it several months back. Skype worries me because they had that famous outage. But they may be worth revisiting.

The problem is that you need a decent broadband connection to handle multiple calls at one location to avoid lag issues. You would also want a router than has QOS to insure bandwidth for the calls.

Ideally, I would only need a couple of lines at the store and put the rest in a queue with onhold information. I know most people will not stay on hold long though.

I would prefer to have a service provider handle the routing of calls over IP to phone order takers who work out of their homes (hopefully well-spoken older (30+) folks). It would need a failover to a landline or cell phones. I can see a day when there are no hard phone lines in the store at all.

 

[paul7979]

A couple other issues to consider. If you switch to one of these. will you still remain in your local white pages and get your free listing in the yellow pages? What about the online directories that get thier info from your local directories. Not sure bout the answers here, but definatly something to consider.

 

[Deacon_V]

I’m not sure what your location is but here in the little towns of America, remember that if your provider “goes down for the day”…you do to! Our town has gotten better, but when the internet based phones first came out I have folks that were without their business “phones” for the whole day as they waited first on “tech support” and then on a field techician to come and track down the line troubles and do the repairs.

 

[Charles]

Yup, that is the worry. Reliability. Now, if you are willing to pay the $500 a month for a T1 line, you will get that kind of attention to service. DSL was never meant to be anything other than a low cost broadband.