Astound Hosted Voice Reviews

It operates as the central voice for everything that we do. Our people are using it for daily business, daily interaction, conferencing, local communication - you name it, we're using it. 

The speed of delivery, whether it's a transcription notice or it's something that needs to be done on the server side - something that goes beyond our managing the actual system - with almost everything, the turnaround time is a lot quicker. Previously, if we wanted to make any change, we didn't have a platform like we do now where we can do things ourselves. Everything had to go in through a ticketing system, had to be called in, had to be turned around, and it was usually somewhere between a 12-to-24, and sometimes a 36-hour turnaround. With you RCN it happens almost instantaneously. 

Perhaps it's because of the relationship we had with the salesperson or the way things have worked out, but our users have noticed that, from the moment we set everything up and we got it running as it ought to be running - with some tweaks here and there - things have been better. Everybody's quite happy.

With RCN, we use the internet service and we use the voice over IP cloud service. We have three offices and we use the ISP. We have an inside sales team and we have an Auto Attendant that does call-based routing: press one, press two, press three, and there are additional routings once you get into the sub-menus. It can do forwarding. That's what we use it for. 

It's mainly for office use, sales, and customer service. Because we're not like a call center, we're not 100 percent customer service, users use it to make and receive calls and to do conference calls and transfers. We use it for conference rooms, we have 800 numbers for our sales team and customer service. We use it for quite a lot.

Because RCN is heavily invested in the Lehigh Valley we were able to get the internet and the voice over IP together as a bundled service and, at the same time, leverage the redundancy of the infrastructure that they have. This way, they give us more of a guaranteed uptime. In the Lehigh Valley they have what they call an RCN ring with different redundancy points - four or five of them. We are connected to more than one so the chance of a failure or a loss of service is small, unless more than one ring goes down. Let's say we are on the Eastern hub. If Eastern hub goes down, we're still up and running. It wouldn't impact our service because of the redundancy service in the Lehigh Valley. I don't know if other service providers have that feature, but that's one way of increasing our uptime on the internet and the voice over IP.

We don't have metrics in terms of packet loss, but as far as service goes, it has been excellent. There haven't been any issues. The only time there was an outage was because the whole area lost power. Somebody hit a power pole and, regardless of what service you had, it knocked out the whole area. That wasn't an RCN issue. We've had snow storms and we haven't had any loss of service. It's been pretty good on the uptime.

Compared to traditional, premise-based systems, the solution's reliability and disaster recovery are excellent. We haven't used on-premise for five years and we don't want to go back to using on-premise. In terms of maintenance, upgrades, licenses, etc., it's easier to go with a voice over IP solution. In terms of redundancy and uptime, it beats the on-premise. And then there are the hours needed from an IT support team to manage an on-premise system, whereas a cloud-based solution tremendously reduces the amount of time and the effort. We don't have to worry about how the on-premise system functions, and the costs associated with uptime and maintenance of it.

We use the hosted phone system. We have about 65 seats. My team does all the calling. And I have several more who use the Office Mobility part which is the cell phone feature. They also do all our data.

We transitioned to RCN from using the old AT&T regular analog phones and Vonage phone system. We always had problems with crackly lines but as soon as we switched over to the RCN VoIP phone system, the clarity and quality of our calls improved and there has been no downtime. In all the years we've been with RCN we have maybe had one downtime event and it was corrected in ten minutes. With the clarity and the reliability of the calls, it increased our sales. It doubled our sales. People had a reliable product that they could pick up, call someone, and the other person would hear them. It made life a lot better.

I don't think we have any packet loss, in general. It's such a reliable product. It's something I don't have to worry about. I can use my Office Mobility and it's going to work.

It was life-changing for us because we went from the stone age to the future. It really changed the world. Adding Office Mobility was a game-changer too.

We use it for voice over IP. For day-to-day use we have a mix of interoffice and outside office calls. We use it a lot for interoffice, but our sales and production teams, and pretty much every individual here, reach out on a daily basis, outside of the office. For everybody I've reached out to, the calls have been crystal clear. Even international calls have been clear.

We have about 40 to 45 users. We're a wholesale company, so we're talking to retailers, we're talking to suppliers, our visual department is talking to some of their customers who create images. Then we have our accounting team. Everybody's reaching out to somebody, whether it's internally or externally. And we have some international teams that people reach out to on a daily basis.

With our legacy system, we were limited to 35 extensions. Recently we've moved up to about the mid-40s in terms of number of phones now. So it gives us the flexibility to continually add. The legacy phone system had switches that were only eight ports a piece. It was an old phone line situation and each "blade" was only eight ports. We would continually have to have them come in and add another one. It was painstaking. This solution is easy, having it in our own hands. Right now we have a 48-port switch, and at any point, if I want, I can throw in a larger switch or add an additional switch, and I don't have to call anybody to install it. I can do it myself. From that end perspective, it's pretty good.

We haven't had to face any disaster recovery. I haven't had any experience dealing with those on-premise voice-over-IP solutions where you have to host your own server, etc. We're a smaller company, so it's nice to be able to pay for somebody else to take care of that. I don't have to be knowledgeable about any of that. I have to know how to set the phone up and call somebody to tell them how I need something configured. It's nice not having that on my head.

Our primary use case is for inbound hunt groups. We get a lot of calls from customers asking to speak with customer service. The majority of the use is for reaching into our departments. One is customer service and the other one is for different kinds of questionnaires, and they get dumped into a call group pickup.

You can actually hear the person's voice. Going from an old-school phone, an old analog, to one of these, the voice quality blew me away. It is very intelligible, you can understand everything that someone is saying. If the person is mumbling, you hear what's causing their mumbles. Or if you page somebody, it's a very sensitive phone. The paging system is very loud. The phones pick up very well. The sound quality is great.

The solution’s reliability and disaster recovery are amazing. Since their uptime is way over 90 percent, it builds my confidence. Secondly, since it's cloud-based, it's not my problem if the system's down. That's RCN's problem. Since they are a leading internet provider, I'm sure that they have the expertise to get their system up, to make sure my phones are working. It really does lower the total cost.

This is what's cool about the RCN setup. RCN allows us to go to any web browser, at any time, and configure the phones. We don't have to be within our network. For example, let's say there is some kind of storm that brings down the internet and we have no phones. That means no one is calling in. What do we do? Our disaster recovery is: We log in to an RCN website, which ties into our profile, and we put in a new phone number for the incoming number. If you dial our number, it will actually go to that other number. We just change what that number is. We would point that number to something else if we really knew that we weren't going to have internet connection for a couple of days. It's quick. And they have that ability. They make it easy.

Our office phones are the primary use.

We went from regular phone lines to digital phone lines and that was certainly an upgrade. 

The Auto Attendant is also something that is very important to us. It has eliminated the need for people who are getting paid to be paralegals to constantly be answering the phone. The old system, before we had Hosted Voice, would ring through the office and someone had to pick up that line. We didn't have an Auto Attendant.

The transfer from office to office is also an improvement: Putting a call in Call Park and then being able to transfer it to our other office which is 20 minutes away.

Our company was looking to reduce the large initial expense of purchasing a new phone system through another company, improve the administrative capability of the system, and reduce monthly operation costs while maintaining quality service.

Our prior phone system was static in nature and we had very limited information available to us in regards to overall volume, calls being routed, time studies, etc. The results we have now are being used to adjust call routing setup.

We use the system as our main office phones for receiving calls and distributing them to staff members at their desks.

I don't know if the system has really improved anything, but it has maintained some of our capabilities and functionalities in the way that we receive calls and distribute them to the relevant staff members.

In terms of packet loss, I don't think I've personally experienced anything like that. There haven't been any dropped calls that I can report.