Astound Hosted Voice Reviews

We use it for phone and internet.

The phone quality is what has improved. Our phone quality was just not good before. We have absolutely seen less packet loss and higher reliability with this solution. We're not dropping calls like we did before, which is both reliability and packets.

Compared to traditional premise-based systems, this solution's reliability and disaster recovery are much better.

It's basic internet. The ease of the desktop phones is a valuable feature.

The uptime is excellent. We haven't had any issues. We haven't had any downtime.

I'm not sure they can change it because it's the programming, but the Auto Attendant with the dialing in: We had to tweak our extensions because of the way the menu is set up. That's just their program, but I would say the flexibility in the dialing-in options could be improved.

In our old system, you just dialed the extension directly. With this system, you have to put a "one" in front of it to trigger it. A lot of clients didn't know that and they'd keep trying to dial the old extension number and would get nowhere. So we had to tell people about dialing the "one" and some people thought that was the extension number so some people would dial two "ones". It's been a little confusing. We're dealing with it. It's not even a horrible aggravation, but it's the biggest stumbling block.

The stability is very good. It's excellent.

The scalability is unlimited. There aren't going to be any issues.

We have called them for help They've been very supportive. The support and the people at RCN are very easy to work with.

It helps, absolutely, that they're US-based and within the local markets. That was one of our criteria, that when we call a person we're getting America, the United States, that we're getting someone who speaks English.

Our other solution had outsourcing of customer service, it had bad phone quality, it had connectivity issues. It was just not a good product.

The initial setup was very easy. They have really good technicians who helped us. It was super smooth. They had good project management. We had weekly phone calls. It was great.

They came onsite and the phones are pretty simple, so we didn't need a whole lot of training, and the training was onsite.

Including planning and having to do some rewiring and construction stuff - that's what took the longest - the deployment took about 30 days from start to finish.

Our implementation strategy required that we had to go live, switch from the old system to the new system, and not have any downtime. So we condensed the deployment as much as we could.

It was just RCN and our internal IT consultants.

I don't have any data on ROI but there is general satisfaction among the staff. It's definitely money well spent. Because we're leasing the equipment we didn't make any investment. We just swapped out the equipment and we're leasing, so there wasn't any cash outlay upfront.

The pricing is very fair. They have very good pricing.

We looked at two other providers, in addition to RCN. The other two weren't as local, which is one of the reasons we didn't go with them. They weren't out of state, but they were further away.

I would highly recommend RCN Hosted Voice. Their project management, their implementation process, are just very organized. It was a seamless switch. They know what they're doing.

We don't use the voicemail transcription feature.

We have 78 people using the system from secretaries to paralegals to attorneys. We don't have any internal staff for deployment or maintenance.

I would say the automatic upgrades are seamless because I'm not aware of them. We don't see any stops or starts, so if they're happening, they're seamless.

As for someone who might say to me that a cloud solution is not safe, I'd say that's not true. We're taking our network to the cloud as well. It's safe with the right protocols and the right security.

I would rate it as a ten out of ten. Compared to the last two vendors we had in-house, this is definitely a ten.

We use it for our entire operation. We've got three separate operating companies and we're all combined together into one phone system. Our plan was to get a system that could allow for call recording and playback.

We've been able to combine three separate operating companies into one phone system. They are related companies in terms of what they do. Before, what we had was a landline system and we all had our own phone numbers. If somebody called in for one of the operating companies that we were not part of, we would have to just say, "Okay, I'm sorry I can't help you out. Here's a phone number to call." Now, we can just transfer that person directly to whatever line they need to get to. That's been very important for us.

Regarding packet loss, and as far as reliability goes, it's been very good for us. We've got everything flowing through our server, and that includes the other operating companies. Everybody is flowing through one server to the internet, back and forth, and we're very happy.

We use call recording. It's important to us because there's information that's passed from the customer to us. We sell ready-mixed concrete. It's very important that we get the right information and if there's ever a dispute, we've got that recorded phone call to know if we've done something incorrectly or if the customer ordered incorrectly. That has been very helpful to us.

We also use the recorded calls for training purposes. We spend a fair amount of time going through the phone calls with our dispatchers to improve their phone etiquette as well as how they take in orders, etc.

The thing I like best about them is that they have a local office that has been very responsive. As soon as we have a problem, somebody comes out here.

Because we are supposed to administer the phone system on our own, they gave us some training in the beginning. But if it's something you don't use a lot, you forget. It's a little bit more complex than just picking something up one day and knowing how to use it. If they had better ongoing-training options, for example, if they put something out on YouTube where you could just go and look for individual things that you need by looking at a video, that would be very helpful. Something that says, "Here's how you change people's extensions," or "Here's how you do this, here's how you do that."

The stability is very good. The system is up and running something like 97 percent of the time. We've had a couple of outages here and there, but nothing spectacular. A couple of the issues were caused internally, because of our setup.

We have a very unusual setup in that we actually have land and a building that are alongside railroad tracks and the rail company refuses to allow providers to do hard cabling in. We had to come up with a solution where we're doing a wireless connection from a building that we own which is two blocks away. Signals are shooting between antennas and then down into a cable system. Those two antennas had been up and running for quite a while, but at one point they both went down. We lost everything for a couple of days. 

What we realized is that we need a backup system. So we're using the DSL as a failsafe mechanism. If RCN goes down, we will switch back to the Verizon DSL, but we've not had to use that at all.

Technical support has been very good. They're here within an hour if we have an issue. It's very helpful that it is US-based and within local markets.

We had a very old phone system and we were looking to upgrade. The phone system that we had just wouldn't be able to handle the technology. We were looking for certain features.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had an old phone line and we also had DSL. They came in and we were able to switch everything over without any problems at all. They did it over about two days. They installed phones in all the companies. At the time, we had a fourth company, which has since closed its doors. So we had four entities running without a problem. They came through and set up each phone separately and then individually walked us through how to use the phone.

They shipped the phones in and, on the first day, they did the installations of the individual phones. Then, on the second day, they came back and did training.

It's very affordable. We're very happy with the pricing.

There was a local company here that offered phone systems while continuing to use Verizon, but we found Verizon to be very difficult to work with. Maybe it's the sheer size of Verizon, but things just don't seem to work very well.

Because it is a voice over IP, you want to look at what your backup strategy is. If anything does happen to the system, and you can't get back up quickly, do you have another way to go about it?

We had a third-party IT group that had worked with RCN before. We talked to them about it, as they had it installed in their office, and they gave us the pros and cons and helped us to get ready for it.

We have about 25 users altogether. They are our dispatchers here in the office, our office administration people, and our management people. Our salespeople use it and there is a person at the front window who takes in trucks and gets them loaded. She uses the phone quite a bit. We're pretty much at capacity in terms of the people who would use the phone lines, and we use them constantly throughout the day.

We don't require any staff for deployment and maintenance of the phone system. We don't have anybody dedicated to the phone system. The automatic upgrades have been invisible to us. I haven't seen or heard anything regarding them.

If a colleague said that a cloud solution isn't safe, I would say that my experience has been that we haven't had any issues. I've worked with other cloud-based software before and haven't had a problem. As long as you've got a server, people can hack you no matter what, but I don't think a cloud is any less safe.

I give it a nine out of ten. We have had little things happen. I give it a nine not knowing why those things happened. It could also be our particular server with the strange setup that we've got. We've had some dropped calls and we've had some funny things that happened to the line, but again, we don't know if it is RCN or if it's our server.