We are sure you take it as a matter of course that the whole world is going to IP and that VoIP is "the future." Of course it is! Whether you're talking about residential users migrating to Vonage and the like, large enterprises moving call centers and PBXs to IP, or carriers moving to VoIP in their core networks, the move is in progress and inevitable.
 
Inevitable it may be, but we asked ourselves this: is VoIP ready for prime time for business use? Would we recommend that service providers offer VoIP today to their customers, and if so, what would we tell them to improve over existing offerings? Or to look at  it from a different perspective, would we, as a small but highly distributed and virtualized business buy such a service? What would it offer us over more traditional alternatives?
 
This isn't the first time we've experimented along these lines – we've been trying out various voice services for years and years. And we've lamented in these very pages our inability to find a service that reaches all of our locations without requiring costly T-1 lines into home offices. The truly "business class" VoIP services out there just don't reach us without requiring us to get tied into data services that aren't a good fit for our needs. For example, one of our home office telecommuters is in all other respects better off with a much cheaper and considerably faster (downstream at least) cable modem connection than a T-1.
 
So we tried a totally different tack by skipping the pricier integrated voice and data services and going with an inexpensive "bring your own access" service. What we were looking for was a business-oriented service that could give us features like auto attendant with by-name or by-extension dialing, internal extension dialing, caller groups and call routing… basically all the features that one would expect from a PBX or CENTREX type service. The bottom line was that we were looking for a service that could replicate what we might get from the RBOC or a CLEC's small business services - plus that little "extra" in terms of management and configurability that VoIP has always promised.
 
What we most recently tried was Packet8’s Virtual Office solution - a hosted IP PBX service with a companion VoIP business phone that provides unlimited U.S. and Canada calling with auto attendant, conference bridging and voicemail features all included in that base price. Optional features include things like a Virtual Office Switchboard application for receptionists, local main and DID numbers, and extended auto attendant features like group routing.
 
We experimented with the service for several months over several of our offices, with broadband connections ranging from "business class" SDSL to residential cable modem and ADSL connections.
 
Our results? Well, the results were good and bad. The feature set offered was, compared to a comparably-priced POTS service, considerably higher. On a strictly dollar basis, today's telco small business offerings can't touch the price/feature performance of the Packet8 offering. On a feature richness basis, we got almost all that is reasonably to be expected of a small business offering.  Our only annoyance was the lock-in we'd incur in buying Packet8-specific gear - we'd rather invest in equipment we can port from provider to provider.
 
Where our experiences fell a bit behind our expectations was on the performance side of things. We had a few bugs with ATAs and phones acting up and needing occasional reboots – but that's certainly not the end of the world, and is the kind of thing we expect can be updated over time with firmware updates and hardware revisions.