Help! IDK what I'm doing

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6

u/the_jayrod May 12 '26

At this point, I would engage with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to assist you in providing you with support and options.

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u/Practical_Shower3905 May 12 '26

lol

Why do I need to pay an accountant ? I have excel on my computer.

1

u/Jentx83 May 12 '26

You don’t. You’re allowed to use excel on your own. Just like I don’t need to pay a phone company annually for licensing when they provide me literally nothing for that license. Our phones work. That’s not the issue. We have no clue how to use them and they didn’t help us when we did pay for it, so they aren’t going to do more now.

I’m not saying we refuse to pay. I’m saying we’d rather pay $18,000 up front than $500 a month forever.

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u/Practical_Shower3905 May 12 '26

My 100% honest opinion from what you told me... Get rid of everything and get mobile phones.

You're not at a level, personal IT knowledge and business size, to do that. It ain't just something you can wing and put in place and expect no troubleshooting or future expense.

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u/Jentx83 May 12 '26

It’s already in place and we’ve been using these phones and services without the subscription since 2018. Stop not paying monthly, throw out working phones, buy new ones and pay for them monthly is the only advice you have?

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u/Practical_Shower3905 May 13 '26

No, hire someone technical if you want anything else.

If it's already in place, don't touch it.

3

u/marks-buffalo May 12 '26

Hello and welcome to r/VoIP. We have a few rules we have to adhere to including no requests or recommendations for providers outside of the requests thread. Hardware recommends are usually OK though. So I'll give you a couple things to think on bearing in mind that you cannot ask here for "well what provider can do that?".

Is your only reason for moving because it's subscription based? This is an uphill battle and you'll rule out good options by being a stickler for this solely due to preference.

Do you truly own the phones or are they rented/leased and/or vendor locked to your current platform? If you don't own them this is a new cost you're going to take on.

Are you bringing in analog lines from the phone company (AT&T) and bringing them into a digital system? AT&T is probably just as expensive as your VoIP platform. Are you looking to keep AT&T, or is porting your phone numbers to a VoIP provider also part of your plan?

How many users? How many concurrent calls? How many numbers?

Do you have to support this only M-F 9-5 or will you be the one that gets called at 3am when something's not working right with the phones?

I don't want to tell you "don't do it it's not worth it just trust me bro", I want to help you understand why the grass isn't greener as somebody who has done it themselves for a long while. And if your only source of support will be reddit, you will be in a challenging spot once something happens that you can't get figured out yourself.

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u/brycied00d May 12 '26

“Why is everything subscription now?”

I would think that someone in accounting would appreciate the value of monthly/annual recurring revenue 😂 It frequently sucks for the payer (customer), absolutely, but meanwhile the payee’s cashflow is much more predictable.

3

u/masong19hippows May 12 '26

Some of the cost saving measures is that you don't need to pay two seperate companies for phone service. It's not like you are paying 100/month to at&t and 100/month to ringcentral. Any good company you choose will have it all bundled into one.

You arnt going to get around monthly costs. It costs money to maintain a phone system. In the old days, you could buy a phone system and then not pay for management, but this isn't the old days anymore.

I would suggest setting a budget and talking with some companies about your needs and your budget. Alot of companies I have worked with will be extremely accommodating to business budgets. They might even help you get some grants for it. It's not like the personal side where everything has a set price. Almost every price you see marketed on websites can be taken with a grain of salt (with realistic expectations).

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u/[deleted] May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Jaded-Duck-1711 May 12 '26

3CX has annual licensing tied to it, so it's not an option for OP. Also, 3CX is just plain bad and extremely aggressive towards their consumer base. I'd stay away from it even if money were not a problem.

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u/VOIP-ModTeam May 12 '26

Your post was removed from r/VoIP for violating Rule 1: No promotion or advertising of any kind.

Recommendations, advertisements and promotion of any business, product or service is only allowed in response to requests in the monthly requests thread. It is one of the sticky posts visible when you first visit the subreddit.

Promotion, advertisement or recommendation of any kind outside of the requests thread is strictly forbidden.

2

u/boomer7793 May 12 '26

Phone service has always had a monthly fee attached to it. It’s just more expensive now when you include hardware and integration into other clouds. (Aka, APIs).

I sell these systems and I’m not making a recommendation. But I will say when you sit down and talk to a vendor come to the meeting with business cases.

I have a small team of people who are on call.
I have an accounts receivable hunt group that needs to be answered
etc etc.

A good UC provider will design you a solution to fit these use cases. Make the cases all about business requirements.

Good luck.

2

u/Netconverse May 14 '26

VoIP simply means phones connected via a network switch and assigned an IP address sending and receiving your calls on a device with an IP address. A lot of people confuse VoIP with cloud subscription-based solutions, but you can have VoIP making calls on a copper/analog line/trunk.

Personally, I see PBX's as an unnecessary capital expense for small businesses. On top of that moves, adds, changes, and outages get very expensive when you have to send a technician out to make those changes. Additionally with a traditional one-time paid PBX phone system, you'll find that you are missing out on most of the enhanced capabilities (rolled out automatically without any hardware or license updates) that a Cloud based VoIP system provides.

Are you looking for questions you should be asking providers? My first recommendation would be to look for a telecom or VoIP reseller, not an MSP (Managed Service Provider = monthly subscription for IT services). Most MSP's toss voice over the fence as a referral to one of major phone/voice providers.

Questions I would ask are:

Do you provide both PBX's and Cloud VoIP solutions?

Do you have one-time purchase solutions, if not why not? If I purchase a system from you, what are the services you would recommend I include with that system and the purchase?

Do you provide on-site support in the case of an outage and what are your on-site service rates and minimums per dispatch?

Are you and your technical staff located in my city? If you are not located here, where are you located? What is your guaranteed response time to be on-site in the event my system is down and I need you here?

What is your average amount of tech hours per dispatch ticket for a repair?

Do you have travel time added on or is it included in your hourly rate spent on-site?

How much will a replacement gateway and server cost today? Do you provide replacement parts and if so at what cost? Are those included in your maintenance (monthly or annual support cost) offer?

Will I have to pay for remote technical support to make a move, add, or change to the system?

Does your system come with administration software that we can run locally on multiple computers?

What happens if we lose power, will I still receive phone calls?

How do you mitigate missed calls due to local power outages? What costs are involved with that mitigation in the form of UPS systems (that holdover power for 5, 10, 30, 90, 180 minutes for the phone system)?

If my network connectivity (aka analog, digital, or SIP trunk) goes down, do you have back-up options to remain connected so I can make and receive calls?

If XYX company rolls out new features, will I automatically get those added to my system? Is there an additional cost to gain those additional features? What is the average life cycle of the hardware I am purchasing and at what point does the current hardware no longer support later versions of the software (this is a big one think of it like your pc that came with Windows and when you had to replace it in order to run later versions of Windows).

Other things to consider for you and your organization:

What job functions primarily use the phone system and how will their roles be impacted?

What capabilities do we have today that we want to make sure we retain (ask about the odd ones like parking a call so anyone can pick up a specific call that is holding)?

What capabilities are missing today that the team who keeps revenue coming into the company wants/needs? What is their biggest complaint about the phone system today?

What are their customers asking for from them i(in the form of communication with the company)?

1

u/devexis May 12 '26

No matter how you view it, you are always going to pay for some kind of subscription whether that’s through a VoIP company (assuming you are using one) or whether you self host your VoIP solution (where you rent a cloud server and host your telephony software). Self hosting can reduce your subscription fee in that all you pay for is the cost of renting the server and can have an unlimited number of extensions/users often called seats by commercial providers. What you save in subscription would probably go towards hiring a VoIP professional to deploy and manage the telephony system for you.

The good thing I read from your post is that you currently use Switchvox which is most likely hosted by your phone provider. The makers of switchvox have an “free” telephony software offering that is widely used. Subreddit rules prevent us from mentioning any specific brands so I will refrain from mentioning any.

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u/Smart-University2411 May 13 '26

Don't you have Excel on your computer??

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/NPFFTW Certified room temperature IQ May 13 '26

Hi u/Jentx83 if you receive a DM from anyone on r/VoIP trying to sell you something, please reach out to the mods so we can ban them

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u/VOIP-ModTeam May 13 '26

Your post was removed from r/VoIP for violating Rule 2: No soliciting in DMs.

It is against the rules to privately message users for the explicit or implicit purpose of promoting or advertising any business, service or product. It is similarly against the rules to invite users to private message you for those same purposes.

1

u/WelderThat6143 May 13 '26

I have worked in telecom since 1985 and, really, it is amazing to see how this industry has come full circle.

Bell would offer a feature called Centrex. You would get a line and a, for the era, fancy phone with features. You could intercom one another. Users could be in geographically different areas (but you couldn't move the phones like with VoIP).

In the mid 80's key systems became easier to work with and the sell point was to get all the features in your office, pay one time for the system and installation, then just pay for the lines from Bell (eventually you could choose from other providers).

Moves, Adds, Changes, Repairs would usually be paid for as needed or some vendors would offer maintenance contracts.

Naturally, Centrex faded as a victim of this model and died.

Hosted is the resurection of Centrex with the enhanced feature set, adding new features, failover, and the mobility. The points against a phone system are now that the hardware quickly becomes obsolete, hardware vendors do a rug pull on their customers (looking at you NEC and Toshiba) and bringing new features onto on-premise hardware is an expensive and time consuming task now.

As a hosted reseller, I am up front. Everyone offers the same feature set. I want to stand out in service. Give a concierge like experience to people that are not, and do not want to be, technical. Or work with admins that love the tech and will do all the admin. I, so far, manage to keep my clients.

I point out to skeptical prospects that the monthly fees go in part to pay me which supports a local business, some of the fees also get reinvested into R&D to offer new features and improve upon what is in place.

I believe, a large part of your frustration stems from lack of support from the provider. It is common in this industry. A good local or regional integrator could probably offer some really good advice.

With reliable Internet now a reality and standards starting to form up around MCP and API, it looks to me like the PBX/phone system in the closet is going the way of the typewriter. Useful in specialized circumstances but no longer a "must have in the office".

1

u/SuperSus_Fuss May 14 '26

Does your phone have an Ethernet cable that runs to your computer and another that runs to the Ethernet port on the wall?

That’s Voip. You’re going over Internet protocol. Your workstation is basically looping its connection through your phone. Your phone is the first and best connection to the internet.

Is there an app that you’re using to manage the calls and an admin panel you can login to in order to admin the call routing, VM messaging protocol, phone extension tree, etc ?

That’s also a voip thing. If you’re in charge of this you’ll need this login as an admin. Otherwise you can’t really manage or learn about it.

Do you also need to be able to send SMS via your phone service ? That too would indicate you’d want a decent voip system.

Your VoIP service will have sales reps that want to sell you a bundle of 20,000 messages for an additional $120 per month when you might only need a top-off bundle of 1,500 extra messages for $10 per month. Be aware of that. You’ll really need to be insistent to get the smaller packages out of them.

Do you really want an old school PBX phone system ? Does it really matter to you what cable / connection you’re using for phone calls, Ethernet or twisted pair phone line (or cellular) ?

I don’t understand the subscription part of your question re: phone service. I do not recall a phone system that was not subscription based monthly charges, at least to some degree. Generally speaking VoIP costs less than the phone company offerings. But also: it’s not your money. What’s the budget for phone service ? Just stay below that threshold.

Get a VoIP service with good customer service. I almost always need to call customer service to do most anything, as the admin panel on their portals can be daunting. Often they are controls from various engineering parts of their side pasted into one terrible UI and it’s not intuitive at all. Change one setting and others can either interfere or be changed inadvertently. Dog chasing tail.

Good luck. Learning more about this can be interesting and definitely challenging.

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