Business plan needed: all you can eat LD on voip??

Hey gang,

How do you deal with an office that has "all you can eat" long distance from their telco? I want to switch to VOIP but the 'variable' cost of LD is an issue. Currently, they pay $200 for all LD services (outgoing). I have run the numbers to show that the LD on VOIP can be 1 cent per minute and extrapolated out how many minutes that is (using their cost of 200.00 currently). However, that may not be good enough for a switch to VOIP/Asterisk/etc to happen.

Are there REPUTABLE providers who offer a similar LD package (all you can eat) or something compelling and close to all you can eat? I'm not sure which direction to go in, or if I should drop my dreams of using Asterisk at work!

BTW, office is US-based and needs LD for US only (at this point anyway...)

BTW#2, I have considered keeping 1-2 telco lines for LD & backup purposes in case Internet dies, etc. This could satisfy the LD issue in the short term, but I'm hoping for a better fix.

Thanks for any guidance,

Jonathan

Thanks, John! I am familiar with BV (used them first, I think!) but had not looked into them for a business account. I will check the terms of their usage to make sure it won't be an issue. (There will be a number of people using the 'line' - I may need a few of them).

Thanks,

Jonathan

I would check that the "all you can eat" VOIP plan really does give you more minutes than you would get if you paid for $200 worth of minutes outright. All the unlimited plans I've ever heard of will have some limit above which you will get a stern warning that you are abusing the system and if the high usage levels continue you will eventually be terminated. Strangely those limits are usually close to the number of minutes you get by multiplying the best cost per minute you can find on their site by the price of their unlimited plan. I would ask them outright how many minutes may we use if we sign up for the unlimited plan.

I'd be very careful and run some extended tests before switching to a solution involving a remote voip/POTS gateway. The biggest killer in a business setting is inconsistent service due to overloaded lines. You probably want to find and fix those problems before you go live and get a bunch of complaints about voice dropouts etc whenever other network activities go on.

-wolfgang

While I don't disagree, at least with VoIP you can move around without too much pain.

I have three different termination agreements right now, which means when one is having technical difficulties it's fairly easy to route around them.

Inbound is a bit more difficult, although with a bit of creativity you can do the same.

However, finding all-you-can-eat plans is tough -- There isn't exactly much margin in VoIP termination to begin with, why would a company sell high volume plans at a fixed rate when they're practically guaranteed to lose money? Conversely, why would a low volume user bother with unlimited?

Both good points. Thanks! Interestingly enough, we're more interested in Asterisk than VOIP (or at least the company is!) We may end up with an Asterisk solution with a mix of POTS and VOIP. The real need here is actually PBX, more than VOIP. I would like both but network conditions/speed/etc could become an issue. We'll see...

Thanks for your input! Jonathan

I would prefer per minute in this case (low volume, low number of users, etc). However, the company is concerned that this could be an issue as they grow. We'll see what happens....

Thanks for your info! Jonathan