What I want to do next year is get rid of the telephone exchange in my office. When we moved into our office we inherited a Panasonic switch and a collection of their feature phones. It hangs off a couple of ISDN-2 lines and works but costs more than it is worth. I feel that if in the 21st century I can out source my 20th century communication system I should be able to outsource my 19th century communication system as well.

The three big problems I have with having an exchange in my office:

1. It is in my office which means that if I want to work from home/someone else’s office/the pub we have to perform all sorts of telephonic knitting to get calls to me. With VoIP I shouldn’t need to do this.
2. It is in my office which means if a disaster befalls my office, I don’t have a phone system. More importantly, I want a disaster recovery plan which allows me to say something better than ‘call our mobile phones’.
3. Why do I want a phone system in my office?

Now before you say Asterisk and 3cx, I know about those but they don’t really help me with all the points  above – I don’t really want to own and maintain a phone system. I could put an Asterisk system in our racks and pipe in phone calls but then I will have to look after it. If it goes wrong while I am on holiday then I have to persuade someone else to look at it.

Interestingly BT come close with their hosted VoIP service which costs £5 per month plus phones at £68 each. My problem with this service is that you have to use their phones — you can’t use a soft phone for example — and it does not seem to be as flexible as I would like.

Obviously I have typed the appropriate keywords into Google and have seen there are other services but what I want to know is does anyone out their use these services? If so please comment on this blog and let us all know or if you want to send me an email with your comments on send it to pcpro.blog (a) widearea.co.uk and I will summarise and make anonymous as appropriate.

Thanks for the help!