business voip phone services

The features you are looking for require some sort of PBX. Kadin2048 mentioned Asterisk and Digium, which are PBX's that run on a Linux box that you manage in-house. If you have Linux help in-house or nearby, either the free version of Asterisk with FreePBX or one of the commercial versions are great. Take a look at these guys for a simple implementation: http://www.freepbx.org/ There is a Windows-based PBX on the market called 3CX (http://www.3cx.com). I have tested it and found it to be excellent for smaller installations (100 users in the Telephony world is small). The Windows interface is easy to navigate and adding SIP providers is straight-forward. There are also hosted VoIP PBX solutions where you just need a fast, reliable Internet connection and IP phones, though some will even provide you with the phones. The company handles programming the PBX, hooking it to the SIP channels, etc. Look at http://www.fonality.com/small-medium-business/pricing.html Good luck - send memail if you have specific questions.

Look into Verizon business. They can do some really amazing could based phone services, they will deliver the data lines (called PRI's) AND the VOIP hardware (usually a cisco-based system). It's not the least expensive option, but it works, and if you have Verizon cell service you can integrate your dial plans for 4 digit dialing, single number reach and a whole host of other really cool services

Where are you located? Do you need to keep your current internet provider? If call quality is important to you, you should really get voip from your ISP, either buying a SIP trunk through them to connect your own PBX through, or to buy their hosted service directly. I would highly, highly, not recommend running your own PBX unless you have someone on staff with a lot of voip experience, or you've hired an outside IT contractor who can handle installation and on-going support, and budget accordingly for support after installation. Roll-your-own voip solutions can be a nightmare to implement if you don't know what you're doing, though once the kinks get worked out (QOS, etc), it's usually pretty smooth saililng.

Kadin is right, that's two things. (Well, it can be one thing, but that's going to be expensive. In the old days it was called Centrex. Which is where instead of obtaining your own phone system, you would rent services from the phone company. I don't know what it is called now, but I have to think it isn't going to be an optimal solution.) Things to think about: 1- What kind of phones do you have right now? Just a bunch of Vonage phone adapters hooked up to analog phones? To maintain that set up, that is going to require a lot of wires and phone adapters. 2- What kind of internet connection do you have? Will it be able to handle the phone usage, on top of internet usage? 3- What about your LAN? How much are you going to spend to get these employees set up with computers and phones and wiring outlets? What I'm getting at is that you are going to run into a scaling issue. The features you want aren't cheap. And they aren't going to work well at all if it is done via some remote service. All that traffic is going to require a fat internet connection, which is pricey. You can spend your money on that fat internet connection and a remotely managed system, or you can spend it on your own (or leased?) phone system. The benefit of a traditional VOIP system (Cisco, Asterisk and SIP phones) is that it can reduce capital spending when rolling out a bunch of new employees.

Btw, if you try to run 100 seats over an internet connection that doesn't belong to your voip provider, you're going to run into a world of hurt, unless you get a dedicated connection just for voip -- which is expensive, and is also going to put a hard limit on the number of simultaneous calls you can make that a shared link won't have. You're going to want end-to-end QOS, and hosted PBX's like Vonage can't provide that.

Empath has a point, although at the place I'm sitting right now we have a VOIP PBX that has its backhaul over an ISP that knows nothing about it. But it's a good connection, and that's what counts. What I'd recommend not doing is trying to put business-critical VOIP over some sort of consumer Internet connection. There are basically two types of Internet connections in the world: those that have Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and crap. Most of us make do with crap, because crap is a lot cheaper than something that comes with an SLA. But if you are moving your phone service onto an Internet connection you probably want/need the SLA, which will guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth and uptime (and sometimes latency and maintenance windows and other stuff), and will also prevent the ISP from doing any monkey business with traffic shaping and whatnot. Here is http://www.verizonbusiness.com/terms/us/products/internet/sla/. (tl;dr: 100% uptime outside scheduled maintenance windows, 45ms CONUS latency, 90ms NYC-London, <1ms backbone jitter.) It's been my limited experience that the phone companies have a better handle on this stuff than the cable companies do, although supposedly you can get actual SLAed business connections from some cable providers now. Not sure that I would trust them without really going over the fine print, though. If you are looking at non-ISP VOIP services, it makes sense to ask the provider what ISPs they use, and get an address where you can test the latency from your servers to theirs yourself. I'd be immediately suspicious of anyone who can't provide this. Going with VOIP service from your ISP certainly reduces risk, though. Also, nearly all PBX systems have the ability to keep a certain number of regular POTS connections alive and connected, and fail over to them under certain conditions. I think this is a good feature and one you should take advantage of. Keeping two POTS lines should cost you less than $50/mo and you can set up the PBX to route emergency calls to them, and to fail over to them for outgoing calls if the Internet backhaul goes down. While I guess this might be decreasingly important as more employees have cellphones, it has always struck me as a good idea.

Another variable in the equation I don't see explicitly defined is how many channels do you plan on having concurrently? You can have one main number and 20 channels and 50 extensions which can make and receive calls using those channels. Naturally, when #21 tries to make a call or #21 tries to dial in, they will receive a busy signal. Having a large block of DIDs is only necessary many of your extensions require direct dialing. I've set up the VOIP systems for a few small companies, both with on-site equipment, and virtual servers, all running through providers like Voicepulse or VoIPStreet for the DID termination. For your volume, I'd suggest an on-site server with a g.729 card (which gets you the necessary licenses) g.729 lowers the bandwidth for each channel by more than half. It can be done in software for $10 a channel, but you increase the CPU needs dramatically. 31.5kbit/channel ends up being about 3.2Mbit/sec. FiOS could handle that, but as Kadin mentions, the SLA might not meet your business need. VoIP Handsets are going to run you between $50-$150 each, with brand names costing more. E.g. a Cisco handset is going to be more than a Grandstream. For cordless phones, you can get converters and use regular POTS cordless phones, as opposed to using the WiFi based VoIP cordless handsets, which I find balky. If you are doing on-site equipment, you should also consider a FXO/FXS card. You wouldn't need the converters to use regular POTS handsets, and it would give you a place to plug in the analog lines you should get for backup. Once you've got all of this set up, you can get softphones on most smartphone handsets these days, so you can use them to log in to extensions too.

My friend's company has moved a bunch of businesses to hosted VOIP at http://www.vocalocity.com/small-business-voip/. The customers seem to like the service.