It may have never been posted to this blog before, but our toll-free number (1-888-212-KLIK), which has been maintained by RingCentral for years, is being transfered to a wholesale VoIP termination provider. Â This is due to the fact that RingCentral will not forward to numbers when they are currently in use. Â (For example, our local phone number had multiple lines, but RingCentral assumes that this isn’t the case, and there is no apparent way to override this).
As such…we decided to implement our own IP-PBX in the studio and transfer our number to a wholesale provider. Â The carrier transfer was officially completed today, and calls will ring to our VoIP.ms account.
This now means that we have to finalize the settings in both our PBX software, as well as our carrier’s account settings. Â Depending on the circumstances, we may actually decide to drop our PBX software and strictly use carrier-provided systems. Â For example, our PBX software (3CX) does not have call queues enabled unless you purchase a commercial subscription. Â Since call queues are included with our VoIP.ms account, we may simply have our ATA’s connect directly to VoIP.ms and use built-in call queuing. Â But we shall see how things work out!
All of this, of course, is dependent on the studio’s Internet connection being restored.
June 18th, 2010 at 11:33 am
It should be noted that this transition, in addition to technical benefits, also allows us to save a significant amount of money. RingCentral charged us around $16/month for our number, while the base cost of maintaining the number with VoIP.ms will be about $3/month, plus about $.03/minute. Since we never exceeded our monthly allotment of minutes from RingCentral, the numbers tell us that this transition will cut our telephony costs in half. Yay! 🙂