Crosstalk Cloud PBX vs. RingCentral
Vložit
- čas přidán 4. 02. 2016
- All of the big hosted VoIP providers have one thing in common - they're out to rip you off! Don't be fooled into thinking they are the only way to go if you want hosted VoIP. Rincentral, Fonality, 8x8, Megapath, and all of the other $X/phone/month hosted VoIP providers will drain your wallet faster than you can say MOS score.
This video shows the cost differences between a hosted FreePBX solution vs. a hosted VoIP solution - the functionality differences are minor, but the cost differences are MAJOR.
Check out Crosstalk's full line of hosted and premise-based FreePBX bundles here: www.crosstalksolutions.com/cro...
Chris Sherwood with Crosstalk Solutions is available for best practice network, WiFi, VoIP, and PBX consulting services. Visit CrosstalkSolutions.com for details.
Crosstalk Solutions is an authorized FreePBX and Sangoma partner and reseller.
Connect with Chris:
Twitter: @CrosstalkSol
LinkedIn: / crosstalk-solutions
CZcams: / @crosstalksolutions - Věda a technologie
Hi Chris, I am somewhat new to VoIP. I have seen in your videos how you use Sangoma phone system. What is the advantages and disadvantages of using your local phone company (Charter, AT&T, etc.) with Sangoma phone system or using a cloud PBX? Thanks for all of the videos you have done. I have learned a lot in such a short time.
Hey Chris who do you use for your sip trunks. The one I have been using is a little expensive.
Thank you for the information, time and energy in this. This is SO valuable to hear a thoughtful consumer review that is objective and not from a salesman that is trying to put down the other guys product. This was legit. Thanks again!
Hi Chris! Do you host this cloud-pbx at your home or do you use a cloud-service/datacenter deticated server to host the pbx?
Kind regards, Niki
I rent my servers from a 3rd party FreePBX hosting provider who has multiple data centers in the US.
Hi
I am new here. Are they phones in the background?
Hi Chris, I am testing free PBX and in this video You mentioned $40 for five channel sip trunk. Could you please provide me some good sip trunk providers? thanks in advance.
How about UK any ideas.?
Thank you :)
A few questions:
1)What happens if internet connections is down and thus all your sip trunks?Do you have a backup PSTN line so that the customer can keep making/taking calls?
2)Apart from the cloud solution for the PBX, do you have a backup pbx on site (customer's site) with a gateway to keep making/talking calls (this is an extension for the above question)?
Thanks in advance.
+Athanasios Botsikas There a few ways to handle this.
1. You have backup PSTN connection on site.
2. You can have the number fail over to cell phones. This works good for smaller companies. To do this for a large company you want to use some code, but I can't give up much more of the secret sauce.
I usually in my designs don't have a backup PBX on site for the cloud solution. I usually ask the customer to consider there internet connections like having a backup cable line or DSL. Most cloud/hosted solutions can be restored pretty quickly if there is problems.
+Athanasios Botsikas You can plan for redundancy with hosted VoIP, but to be honest, MOST companies don't bother to do this. If the Internet goes down with either a hosted FreePBX or a hosted VoIP solution (both solutions mentioned in my video), then the phones are out of luck. You can use something like a Sangoma Vega to act as a local proxy server and provide backup with POTS lines, but this is pretty rare.
Most people just put up with some level of downtime as normal course of business. For a small business, large amounts of redundancy can be cost prohibitive.
+Cisco Hunt I agree with this - especially #2 - most people are OK with forwarding DID's to cell phones during prolonged outages.
What sip trunk provider are you using that it is $40 for 5 channels? Thanks this would be a big help!
+Alec Ryncavage I don't give out the name of my preferred vendor publicly because I like to get the referrals, however you can request info on my page here: www.crosstalksolutions.com/sip-plans/
+Crosstalk Solutions Great I just filled out the info page. Waiting for a response. Thanks
Crosstalk Solutions the link no longer works I would love to get more info and your referral link. I actually called into your company today and spoke with one of your techs from Raleigh NC. Great guy he knew exactly what I am looking for and understood to project and timeline.
What sip trunk do you use?
+Spider Man I have a preferred vendor that I recommend to my customers and use in my own business. I like them for great pricing, good customer service, and high availability. I vetted them for a long time before officially recommending them. That being said though, I work with them as a referral partner, and therefore do not give out their name until my customers are ready to go forward with the SIP trunking order. I do still have to make a living! :) Thanks for watching!
how do i get access to you
I agree for the most part. I do use Ring Central for work, but I also have a FreePBX running at home. What about soft phone for iOS and android integration? I use Bria for iOS on FreePBX and it does not work very good for me. One way audio issues over VPN, poor connection quality even over wifi, etc....
+Gus Evening Yea - I'm not a huge fan of the smartphone softphones. They don't work well, and when they do, they suck up your battery power. Thanks for watching!
Do you setup a VPN to the freepbx in the cloud ?
Gus Evening
Nope - it's all firewall and fail2ban.
ok cool. thanks. Great videos!
Gus Evening
Thanks for watching!
About reliability of CrossTalk PBX
We have limited internet. How would a 20 to 30 phone system perform on a 60/4 or 100/4 cable ISP connection?
+Andrew Williams You wouldn't want to use VoIP in that scenario. I would look at PRI or fractional PRI for your trunking. On the LAN side, you can be all VoIP no problem.
To play devil's advocate, there are some features on RingCentral that are nice, that I haven't really seen replicated by the FreePBX eco-system. What, if anything, do you recommend RingCentral customers when they ask about these items. 1) RingCentral iOS/Android app that provides faxing, messaging, visual voicemail, and softphone. 2) Desktop app that provides faxing, text messaging, and visual voicemail. 3) Call flip (ability to seamlessly move a call between your desk phone and your mobile, and right back to the desk phone. These are questions that have been posed to me. For voicemail, most settle on voicemail to email, but I know that having a mobile phone app with visual voicemail would be a great feature add. and have that be integrated into an official mobile softphone application. The text messaging only works with Sangoma's own SIP service. I think there needs to be more work done on a fully fleshed out unified communications system. The call flip thing, I saw one forum post on someone that seemingly got something working, but getting into the nitty-gritty of coding the backend of freepbx/asterisk is beyond my current skill set, and the post was not all that detailed. Would be great to have this functionality built in.
I am happy with Ringcentral. They give us unlimited simultaneous calls and texting to the same company number. They gave us a great deal on a contract. You can use your own phones with them (you can either auto-provision or use sip user/pass authentication). If you don't want desk phones, included is their great app that you can use. They're not ripping us off at all, and they're one of the only ones that offer this. Lastly, you NEVER have to configure anything yourself with Ringcentral. You can call their nice support 24/7 and they will set everything up just like you want. This video was a bit misleading.
Hi Chris, love your videos! You seem to be really great with the technical aspects of this stuff, but I have a different perspective on what you are saying here. Let me play devil's advocate for a moment.
I'm looking at your pricing table, and what is screaming out to me is how much more money you could be making if you were able to sell your customers your solutions for the rates that the other vendors are charging. You would make tons more money for way less headache if you went after customers that were willing to pay these sorts of rates and focused on the sales and marketing side of your business.
Just some food for thought. You clearly know what you're doing, so you deserve to be making the amounts on the left side of your pricing table ;-)
+cmoullasnet If you're looking for a job as my Sales guy, you're hired! Seriously though, I believe I charge a fair price for a good product, and I make up for what I *could* be making in volume and referrals. Could I charge more for my services and product? Sure - but I see quotes from phone system vendors all the time that just make me shake my head because I know they're ripping off their customers by charging outrageous prices for the services provided, and I just don't want to be one of those guys. In the meantime, my yacht will have to stay docked.
But Leo Laporte swears by Ring Central!!! :-)
+Corey Thompson I'm not familiar with Leo Laporte, but he should watch this video!
I don't necessarily agree. Ring Central also offers Meeting Services ( partnered with Zoom ), GLIP which is a collaborative tool similar to MS Teams and they also offer soft phones included in their pricing model. Hosting your own cloud solution would require you to manage the redundancy and up-time not to mention most soft phone solutions are $5 per month. Though I would agree there is a considerable cost savings to be had by managing your own cloud PBX, there is an up-time risk factor. You're comparing a tool with all the bells and whistles vs. a basic phone system and making it sound like they both offer the same features. This really isn't the case.
this guy definitely works for the big guys!
You seem to be oversimplifying the networks, software and cloud servers these providers are offering.
Bullshit. I worked for many years at one of these companies, and I know the inner-workings. I also have many friends in the industry at similar 'big' hosted phone companies, and they say that it is the same. These companies throw all they can at Sales and Marketing to make their shitty products look pretty, and then once they have you on your service, they know you won't leave because it's a pain in the ass. Customers will put up with a LOT so that they don't have to go through the number porting process.
The infrastructure they create is bare minimum. Way too many customer servers crammed into virtual machines. The 'fix' for customers who complain about voice quality is to simply move them to a less populated virtual server. SIP security is almost nothing.
After about an 8-10 month ROI, these companies are making 90+% profit from their customers...but you still pay in perpetuity. Imagine buying a $20,000 car - but instead of paying it off, you just pay $2000/month forever.
Chris,
Whilst I agree with the general sentiment that many VOIP customers are getting overcharged by the "big players" I'm not sure your comparison is a totally fair one.
For example, what about the costs of providing ongoing monitoring & changes? In theory at least, an operator like RingCentral should be pro-actively monitoring their service in order to minimise / avoid issues and this is included in their monthly fee. For configuration changes, I do understand that companies like RingCentral do shift a lot of the responsibility for making changes to the phone system onto the customer by giving them access to a configuration interface for their system.
However, your own plan does not seem to include a monthly recurring fee to cover your costs in providing these two services. Or is that so little goes wrong with a hosted VOIP service that a paid for monitoring service is seen as unnecessary?
Also, how do you handle requests for changes from your customers? Do you give them access to the FreePBX UI or do you make a charge for any changes that you then make?
Would it not be a fairer comparison to include a monthly fee for your time spent monitoring the service and carrying out changes when comparing your service to RingCentrals?
+David Brooker That's a fair point. But, to me, the MACs (Moves/Adds/Changes) are kind of a wash. This is not something that most companies call into the provider for - they're easy enough to change in-house. For my customers, I provide training for how to perform these basic functions, and then take over with an hourly rate if they get stuck or have any issues.
Here's the other thing - service contracts/support contracts are big business for these providers. Typical price for a PBX service contract is around $5.00/extension/month. Doesn't sound like a ton, but I recently switched a customer away from one of the 'big guys' who had 100 phones. They were paying $6,000/year in support fees. How much of that do you think they were actually using? The answer is very little - once a phone system has been dialed in, it is rare that you make the type of sweeping changes that require support. The hosted providers are a bit sneakier about it - they hide this cost in the $34.95/phone/month fee...you're still paying it and you don't have the option of going without the support contract.
So, for my customers, I don't do service contracts - I don't feel comfortable charging them for services they aren't using. If they have an issue, I am available to assist at an hourly rate. This is not acceptable for some organizations who need 24/7 instant support, but it's good enough for the majority of companies out there.
So the question really comes down to what kind of support does your organization need? If it's 24/7/365 chat/phone/email support - then you'll have to pay for that. But if your PBX is more 'set it and forget it,' then my model is very cost effective.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
PS. You mentioned that RingCentral provides value in the pro-active monitoring and minimized downtime...I worked for one of these guys for 7 years, and let me tell you - when you get behind the curtain, you would be shocked at how little pro-active monitoring is happening. Most of these companies have a terrible back-end infrastructure but throw so much money at sales and marketing, it seems like they've got their stuff together. They will literally tell you anything to get your business.
+Crosstalk Solutions I currently do data network support for a couple of schools in the UK where we are thinking about replacing the existing old-style proprietary hardware based PBX's with a VOIP system.
One thing that concerns me about switching to something like FreePBX is the question of reliability. As inflexible as they are and as expensive as they are to run, one thing that has always impressed me about the old style PBX's is their reliability. Our current PBX's just sit there , connects calls and never fail (but are expensive to run and maintain). Even though it has improved a lot in the last 2 - 3 years, our current Internet access still manages to fail for approx 15 minutes every 2 - 3 weeks or so. I do know that if I replace the simplistic reliability of the current PBX's with an all-singing, all-dancing VOIP system that is even slightly unreliable I will be getting all sorts of grief (the cost savings will be quickly forgotten by someone who has problems placing/receiving a call). Given this, you can see why my focus is on pro-active monitoring & service contracts.
VOIP systems appear to me to provide much more flexibility than old style PBX's but as a result are more complex and have a whole lot more that can go wrong. Or am I overstating the risks? It sounds like you believe that VOIP based PBX's such as FreePBX are approaching the reliability of the older style boxes. Is that the case?
+D Brooker A server-based PBX is going to be as reliable as the hardware you choose to install it on. I always recommend at least RAID1 disks and redundant power supplies for my medium-large customers - I have a specific 1U server that I use for this purpose.
To take it a step further though, FreePBX can be configured very nicely for warm standby if you have a second server - it can automatically sync the config between servers on a schedule, and works well. And even beyond that, they have an HA commercial module that maintains a heartbeat between servers and switches automatically upon failure (but the license is pretty pricey).
The problem with any kind of redundant systems though, is that the further you go down the redundancy rabbit hole, the price starts to go up drastically. The key is finding the balance between budget and downtime acceptance.
+Crosstalk Solutions Thanks for the thoughts. Keep up the good work with the videos.
-Do you offer encryption like Ring Central?
-Is your service HIPAA compliant?
-Do you offer good mobile app and messaging service
-What if I want to use all phone at the same time? How much my bill will be?
-Do you offer Fax with your service?
-Are you service reliable? Any down time?
-Do you have Desktop app? If yes, can you transfer call between different devices
--- not a big fan of Ring Central, just to be fair..
Hey, Baraa Abbas Your all problem has one time solution Try CallHippo best VoIP phone system with all latest features. callhippo.com/voip-phone-system