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.

The most valuable feature is the admin platform that we work with. It allows us a very centralized approach for doing things and it allows us to manage and control everything right from the very top. We could do that before, but the features that we have with RCN seem more extensive than the previous company that we worked with.

The Voicemail Transcription is more accurate than what we had with our previous company. Also, and I'm not sure if this is because it's a fiber line, we seem to get the responses and the transcription almost instantaneously, faster than what we had prior.

We can do lots of things: We can do call groups, we can do work with our extensions, we can set up our account codes, we can take a look at call logs. There are a multiplicity of miscellaneous settings that are allowed for each user and for the Admin. There's a simplicity to it. It seems they use KISS principle, keep it simple, stupid. It works for everybody because, when I'm not here responding to it, my technicians are; sometimes my network guy is; sometimes our students are interacting with it. It creates a very easy flow for working through the product and the interface.

The automatic upgrades are the best thing that ever happened, because we don't see them, we don't feel them, we just know that they happened, after the fact. What they've done, at least for us, is that we haven't had or felt a crash whatsoever, nor have we felt the disruption as a result of the updates. That tells me that work goes into them to get them done right, and that they really test the code and test the information in updates so that they work properly.

If they could improve on their response times, making them even faster than they are right now, that would be great.

As for the issue of packet-loss and reliability, when I came into this role some three or four years ago, on my first day we had an eight-hour phone outage. When we did the investigation, we realized that there was a DOS attack on the system and, hence, when the guys at the NOC were looking at it, they stopped all service to us. That was the first time. Four months after that we had a similar episode, but for a completely different reason. Within another year, we had the same thing. When we made the decision to go with RCN, packet loss was brought up. So far, and we're going on just about a year working with them, we haven't had a blip on the radar.

We've had 100 percent uptime so far. We haven't been down once, not even for a brief second, not even for a reboot. Nothing.

The scalability is wide open for us. It's excellent. We have a gig fiber line. We were doing a 250 by 250 before. We upped that to a gig. In terms of our functionality, we have anywhere between 160 to 180 units and we haven't had any problems with it.

Our users are staff, faculty, student services, student groups, etc. On any given day, on the data side, we have somewhere between 600 to 1,000 users.

We are constantly acquiring buildings. For example, this past year we acquired a new building which is going to be for student housing. We're still using the temporary solution that was done there, prior, but we're working with RCN because it's only three or four blocks from where we are in downtown Manhattan. We're looking at another building, as well. We fully intend to work with RCN to run that shop as well. I can tell you this: Those intentions are solely based on the experience that we've had within the first year with RCN.

RCN tech support is solid. We call them, there is a response. If we have to email somebody, there is generally a response within a half an hour. For response time, that is very good.

On the solution side, they always provide a workable solution. That doesn't mean that we get exactly what we want, but they provide us with something based upon what they're able to give us, given the equipment we have, given our contracts. For many of the solutions they provide, they give us almost everything we request. There was only one time when we had to do a workaround which they suggested. It worked the way it should work.

In terms of the NOC and customer service, again, we've been very pleased. If I had to rate them from one to ten, I would put them at a ten. These guys they pay attention to detail. Everybody, from the sales guy all the way to the folks at the NOC, and even the folks in billing - I get occasional phone calls from them. "Hey, we just want to make sure everything's okay, is there anything we can change? Anything that we can do?" Given there's an interest in making sure that we can get things done right, it speaks a lot about how these guys want to conduct the relationship.

One time, we were late on a payment and I didn't realize it. We got an email - we were in the midst of buying a new building, we were in the midst of setting up, I hadn't looked at things - and I just got this friendly reminder. I said, "Wow, okay, I like it." Not that we were not going to pay, obviously, we have 600 students here, we're trying to do anything and everything that we can to run the operation. But it was just done right, the way we were reminded it. At the end of it we said, "Okay, this is the way a relationship ought to be."

It helps that they're US-based and within local markets. That is one of the best things. We get people who speak American English without an accent and they understand our idioms, our cultural norms, what you expect, what you're seeing on your system. That is one of the better features that we enjoy. For some of our other solutions we get routed to India, and sometimes the ability to communicate or to be understood when we're explaining something is not exactly the best.

We were working with GTT which, prior to being GTT, was Transbeam. We decided to switch because we had three outages within my first ten months on the job, and I just didn't want that. 

In addition, I came in with a plan, from the moment that I walked in, to cut the budget within three years by a minimum of 15 percent and by a max of 30 percent. I identified four or five different things that we had to work with on the operational side of the budget, including reviewing our existing contracts for hardware, software, and our utility. ISP voice became part and parcel of that. I renewed and renegotiated about 16 or 17 contracts, and it's helped to reduce the budget. RCN is in the top-three in terms of saving us money.

Also, I had a relationship with the salesperson. He had worked for another company, Time Warner. He had solicited our business but, at the time, we couldn't do it. When he moved over to RCN he said, "Bracey, let's talk. This may be a better solution." We looked at and evaluated the numbers over a two or three-month process. Then they came back with a proposal. We didn't even counter, we just said, "Let's sign it, let's do it." Six or seven months later we were implementing.

The setup is straightforward. 

In terms of deployment, this is what we did: We had to wait until the contract with the previous company was done; we had a three-month window to close out that contract. RCN was here six months prior to the end of that contract, and they installed the fiber line from the trunk, under the city street, into the building. They left that for the next five months. About a month prior to the end of the previous contract, RCN showed up onsite with their Juniper switch and their core and made their connection.

On the day of the cutover, which we did on a weekend, they were here running throughout the facility, coding the phones, and prepping the system. From the moment they stepped in, on a Friday morning, to when the phones were dialing, which was midday that Friday, to when everything was configured exactly the way we wanted it for Monday, - for everything to be configured precisely the way we wanted it - took less than 48 hours, two business days.

The reason it was that way - the 48 hours - is because we're a university. We have a number of lines that either need to be forwarded, dialed forward, or have certain advanced settings. We had hunt groups that needed to be reprogrammed. There were a lot of things to do, but it was fairly quick. There were guys on the operational side when we called support, and there were guys onsite. And the RCN sales guy was coordinating a lot of it.

The planning that went into it was done months in advance. We started with once-a-month phone calls leading up to month-four, when we went to once every two weeks, and then we started having two or three phone calls a week, and then we executed. The RCN guys were good.

We had five of our staff involved in the deployment. We brought in extra people because we have units all over the place. We needed individuals to direct some of that traffic, we needed some to reset some of the handsets. There were four people from RCN, and we added an assistant and three or four others and it went smoothly and it cut over without a problem.

One part of the ROI is the cost, and the other ROI is that we get efficiency. So far it's 100 percent uptime. Previously, when I walked in, as I said, an outage happened on my first day. People were smiling and laughing, "Welcome to your first day." Since getting RCN, we haven't had a "welcome-to-your-first-day" scenario.

These are the areas where we see ROI. Can you get any better? 

• We're saving money, at least 38 percent.
• We went up five to six times on our bandwidth for both voice and data
• We have 100 percent uptime.

We looked at about five or six other companies but when RCN came in, they beat everybody hands-down, on both the features and on the dollars side. It prompted our people to say they hadn't seen numbers so low for the services you get. 

For us, the monthly price was 38 percent lower. We were paying somewhere between $5,600 and $5,800 every month for voice and data. We got it down to about $4,000 with tax. We signed a long-term deal, we did that on purpose. For us, for budgeting purposes for what we do for the college, it's a win-win. We don't intend to move, we intend to be here for a while. And, since we've now been acquiring other buildings, we're going to extend business with RCN.

We looked at 

• XO
• EarthLink
• Verizon
• Bay Networks.
  

I have three pieces of advice. 

Number one, make sure that you have a good working relationship with the salesperson that you're working with, and that you have a sense of trust with that individual, because if you believe that that individual is not looking to rip you off but, rather, is looking to help you in what you're seeking to get accomplished, there's a good chance you're going to get something very positive out of the experience and out of the service. Our sales guy said, "What are you trying to do? What's the overall initiative that you want to accomplish?" When I told him what I wanted, what our goals were, he worked with me with that. Because I was upfront with him, he was upfront and able to put out certain solutions that we needed to have in place. We've been very satisfied and one reason is that we were upfront with our expectations and what we wanted.

The second recommendation is to do your due diligence in terms of identifying what is being offered. Do a "tale of the tape" with each offering, from RCN and from the other companies. Be brutally honest as to what you're going to get.

Last, and most importantly, make sure they are meeting the basic goals, from the moment the relationship starts.

If a colleague were to say to me that a cloud solution isn't safe, given that we actually use the cloud, and because so many business functions are moving to the cloud, it's almost impossible not to use it. We opted to have a third-party company do a cyber-risk assessment on us. Do a pen-test on your systems, because if your systems are rock solid and have best practices implemented, you're in good shape.

We've been going at it for a good three-plus years, as an organization that has about 1,000 people in it, an organization that's very transactional, and, so far, it serves us pretty well with two of our chief applications on the cloud.

Going back to RCN's service, sometimes we have to request specialty items, for RCN to get involved, and working with them has been great. We constantly look at the application, every day. We interact with it every day. We put in a request to receive certain bills through snail mail and certain bills to come in digitally and they were on top of it as quickly as possible. We've recommended RCN to other clients and people that we work with here in the city.

Regarding maintenance of the system, we have three guys who take care of it: the IT Director (myself), my Network Administrator, and my Network Engineer. The Administrator is responsible for the IT helpdesk, which does both voice and data, as well as everything that is IT-related. When he's out, one of us backs him up. Rarely do we ever need two guys to manage the whole thing.

In terms of disaster recovery, there's a plan in place, which they laid out for us, which we had to take care of on our side. We have to worry about what happens if we have an outage. Based upon the way we configured things, we went with a dual line connection. From our standpoint, and because of what we need to do, we were able to get a backup line from a different vendor, which is what you have to do. That's what you have to do when you do a cyber-risk assessment. The risk-assessment folks are very happy because you're putting together genuine redundancy. We're not talking about two lines from one company. We're talking about two separate lines from two separate companies. We have RCN and then we have a backup, but there's been no need to use it. For our purposes, we need to have it and we've been quite pleased.

If I were to rate the overall solution a ten, it would probably be an understatement. If I could give it more, I would. We've been very, very happy. We've been happy from the financial side, we've been very happy from the technical side, we've been happy from the service side, we've been happy from the support side. I would recommend it.

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.

A lot of users use the voicemail to email, that's a nice feature to have. Voicemail will come to me as a .wav file and, if I have a phone, I can just click on the .wav file and listen to it. Or I can play it on my computer. Whether you have an Android or an iPhone, you'll be able to play it. It's not similar to the Verizon or the AT&T service where they just transcribe the whole thing. It's a recording that plays it back.

It has a lot of other features:

• Do not disturb.
• FollowMe.
• You can check your voicemails on the portal; delete or forward them; if you delete, you can go back and un-delete on the portal. You have the option for them to stay on the portal and send them to your email as well. 
• On the portal you can see a call log of who called you and when they called you. 
• There's a call manager. 
• There's a button that you can click on and see a directory with all the users in the office. You can search by last name or first name. 
• The touchscreen on the phone is LCD-based. It's a large screen and you can flip through the users, scroll down, scroll up.

Another feature we leverage is that the phones can be programmed with a softbot, where you program it to dial a number. We have Vonage for international calling to reduce costs on international service. I program the Vonage number into that bot on the phone. Users call it, enter a PIN, and they can call anywhere in the world for lower costs.

One area for improvement is the Web Portal. It's not a full-view screen, it's more like a minimized screen. You don't get the full view of your desktop. It's more like a five-inch by five-inch view. I think they said the software was designed that way. I don't know if there's going to be a newer version coming out later. With Google Chrome or if you open Excel you have the full view of your screen. You can see everything. With their portal, you have the web browser in the background in full view screen, but the actual portal itself is minimized, not a full screen

That's the only issue that I asked them about it. Other than that, I think their calling features, settings, the voice to email, they're all okay.

The uptime has been excellent. It's a stable solution.

We can add extensions at any time. We can add IDs, direct dial numbers. If I need to order a phone, I just call in to my account manager and say, "I need this extension, this phone set up." They set it up and they can either mail me the phone or send a customer service rep to give me the phone, make sure it's powered on and ready. I have both options. 

It's highly scalable. I don't think there's a limit on how many extensions it supports. You can have as many phones as you want in different offices. You can even extend it overseas.

If there is an issue, I call or email customer service and they're quick to respond. Their technical support is excellent. They log a ticket and, right away, somebody calls me. If I send an email, their response time is excellent; sometimes it's less than an hour. It depends on the severity of the issue.

For example, when we had the power outage, they noticed that the line was down and I got a call, saying, "We noticed your service is down. Please let us know if this is something that you scheduled or something else." We get notified when there is the loss of what they call a "heartbeat" on their side, when the monitoring service doesn't see any connection or heartbeat for our service. Then we get a call right way. Sometimes on the weekend I shut down my firewall or am doing some upgrades and they notice it's offline for 30 minutes. They call me and say like, "We noticed that you've been down. Are you doing maintenance?" They've been very efficient on that.

In terms of the customer service, we have a dedicated account manager, so if I have any billing issues, if I have anything that needs to be escalated, I go directly to that account manager. If I need to add an extension, I go to that account manager. If I need new services I go to that account manager.

Before, we were using a Broadview's service. They have a service called Office Suite. Initially, I was happy with their service, but their customer service started to deteriorate. A few situations happened where the response from their customer service wasn't satisfactory. 

Because we were using RCN's ISP for our internet, when our contract expired with Broadview, we were able to negotiate better pricing with RCN. And since they offered voice over IP we wanted to centralize our services, the internet and the VoIP, with one provider to have one vendor supporting us on both. And we were able to reduce our costs with a bundled service.

With the setup, RCN really did a good job. We were getting a new office and we were renegotiating our existing service, because we were only using internet. We only had one month, and RCN was able to see the urgency, pool their resources, and put extra resources in place to put the fiber in the street, connect our location, and send engineers to set up services. They required some equipment updates around the area as well to accommodate our increased bandwidth. There was a dedicated project manager who handled the entire rollout for us. In terms of deployment, if I could give a 200 percent rating, I would give it.

It was very well done and coordinated by the RCN team.

When we signed the contract they assigned an account manager, and then it was just a matter of their getting the information from us: How our existing auto attendant was set up with our previous service provider, the user list, the extensions. Once I provided that information to them, it took about a week to build our portal, build our Auto Attendant, the routing and so forth. Then it was just a matter of scheduling when we wanted to go live. It was all based on when we were moving to the new office.

We had three offices. We were moving from one of them to a new one. The deployment had to work such that the day after we moved the deployment was done for all the offices. That way, when users arrived at the new office their phones were working. It was a coordinated process.

We didn't have to use an integrator. It was me, as the IT Manager, and the team from RCN. We didn't use anybody in the middle to assist in the project. It was a straightforward project. I was on the IT side and then they had their team.

We had our internet service provider with one company, we had phone service with a different company, we had T1 lines and voice lines. We were only using RCN at one office. When it came to centralizing everything on RCN's voice and internet, versus what we were paying, we were able to reduce our monthly cost by about $400 to $500 per month.

We're okay with the pricing and licensing. There's no issue there. It's based on the number of extensions. If you want to purchase direct dial numbers, you get that option as well.

At that time we could have continued with Broadview. We had RCN and we had the option to use another provider called Frontier. But RCN was a better choice, a better fit for us because of pricing, the customer service, and the investment they put into their infrastructure in Lehigh Valley, where they have multiple hubs to support redundancy and failover. Those were three areas that we looked at and were a priority for us.

As long as you're able to communicate with the RCN team and provide them with what they want, it will be a smooth migration process. I don't foresee an issue. The RCN team gives you the documentation: "This is the information that we need. Can you populate this?"

I gave them access to my existing portal, so they were able to go in and review it and see how our old Auto Attendant was set up. They gave me a print-out of our existing setup and asked me to confirm that it was set up that way. That's something that can be leveraged as well, if you are with an existing service provider and you are migrating to RCN. You can give them access to your existing portal. They can review it and duplicate that on their side and then provide you with the documentation to confirm this is how you're set up. If you're okay with it, they move that implementation to the RCN side.

If a colleague were to say a cloud solution is not safe, I would say it depends on the service provider. How much has the service provider invested in its security, its hardware, and its infrastructure? I don't think anything's 100 percent safe. If someone can get into the Pentagon or other government sites... But it depends heavily on the service provider: How their data center is set up, how they grant access, who has admin access to view all the customers and make changes.

The phones go back and update the firmware each night. It's always the latest. They're programmed that way. They go in and get any updates and restart. We have a cloud-based version, which includes a control panel, the admin portal, and the user portal. And then we have the desk phones. The automatic updates are seamless. I don't have to worry about anything. We come in in the morning and the phones are working. If something happens with a phone itself or an update doesn't work, it's just a matter of powering the phone off and powering it back on again and it's up and running.

It was more of a bundled offer, and then we were able to lower the price. The quality of service was there. There wasn't a specific feature and we said, "Okay, this is the key that we wanted." We weren't looking for phone-specific features.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, I'm the only IT person and I've been able to manage the service. I don't require additional resources to manage it. Because we're not 100 percent a call center, our use of the service is different from that of a call center. But you manage it through the portal. The interface, and using the portal, are very easy. They give you training on how to use the portal and how to set up phones and call groups, etc. For the users, they also offer two types of training. One is in-person where they come to the office and do the training. They also do online training where people join in via a WebEx.

We have about 150 phones. If we add more employees we would add more phones and extensions. That would be the only route for us to increase usage.

In my view, nothing is 100 percent, but I would give RCN a nine, because of its customer service, reliability so far, the ease of use of the phones, the portal, and the deployment process.

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.

I really like the portal. It makes listening to your messages so much easier as well as changing your voice mail. Some of the attorneys use the Follow Me where the phone will follow them. They like that feature. The scheduling is also a very nice feature.

The way that you listen to your voicemail messages through the receiver so that you can't fast forward or rewind - I don't like that at all. I listen to them all the time through the portal. In fact, if we didn't have the portal, I wouldn't like the phone system.

The weather actually affects the lines and, obviously, so does our internet, and electricity. Other than that, when we're on a call, we generally haven't had a whole lot of problems. But we have had issues where, with a storm, the lines go down. And we've had issues where we were dropping calls and that was dealt with by our RCN rep. There are external factors that RCN can't control.

I would rate the stability at nine out of ten. It's extremely reliable. Aside from some learning-curve glitches, we've had no problems with it.

The scalability is unlimited.

Everybody in the office has a phone and there are 22 users. They include the receptionist, secretaries, paralegals, bookkeepers, attorneys, and partners. We're maxed out. We've been growing, and since we initially put the system in, we have added phones, but I don't see us really upgrading any time soon. This is sufficient for us. I am responsible for the deployment and maintenance, along with a receptionist in each office.

Support is fantastic. I love that it's US-based and within local markets. That's something I really do appreciate. I really appreciate calling and speaking to someone I can understand, and getting my problem solved. If I leave the office after I make a call to tech, I come back to four voicemails because they want to make sure that they fix the problem. They're very helpful.

The setup was somewhat complex because we were going from regular phone lines to digital, so there were all these different avenues we had to explore. But once we were set up and things were up and running, it was a fairly smooth transition. Our rep and the gentlemen who helped install Hosted Voice were very helpful.

Setup begins before they even come here with the phones. But the actual onsite setup took about half a day. It was quick.

Our RCN rep who came out to install, Robert, was our integrator. He did the job. He taught everyone how to use it, did a 30-minute training session. If anybody had any questions he was around to answer them. He was very helpful. It took us a day or two to get used to using it.

We have seen ROI with the Auto Attendant, as I mentioned earlier, and the phone lines work much quicker. You can put somebody on hold much quicker. With that, our receptionist really handles the brunt of the calls, and rarely do our paralegals have to take a call. When our paralegals have to take a call, we're pulling them from something that they're doing on a case and interrupting them. They get paid a lot more money than our receptionist does, so right there is a definite return on investment.

Obviously we felt that pricing was fair because we chose RCN over quotes from several companies. It was reasonable, especially considering that we were already RCN customers and it was the easiest choice to make.

We were comparing hosted voice solutions everywhere. We were really just comparing prices. We already had RCN and they offered us the best price.

Do your research and make sure you're getting everything you need.

As for the what I would say to a colleague who said to me that a cloud solution is not safe, I asked our IT department about that. The answer is that everything is on the cloud, and it really is in jeopardy of not being safe, but that's why you take measures to protect your information. For instance, we have firewalls set up all over the place so that our computers aren't hacked. We're working with RCN which is obviously a very well known, successful solution company, and we trust that our information is being protected through the cloud.

In terms of packet loss and reliability, I don't have anything to really compare it to. I can't say either way. Because it's still fairly new to us, we did lose a good amount of calls because people weren't sure how to transfer them or put them on Call Park. I don't think that I'm at a point where I could even really tell you about the reliability.

We don't use the voicemail transcription feature. I'm not aware of the automatic upgrades. I don't know whether it's been upgraded since we've gotten the phones. If it's happening in the background I don't even know, so they must be really smooth.

Transferring a call to voicemail took a little while for people to get used to, as did putting a call on Call Park, rather than putting them on hold. It's not difficult, it was just an adjustment period.

I would rate Hosted Voice at nine out of ten. There are some glitches sometimes. For absolutely no reason, we would drop calls over the last year-and-a-half. We have the caller ID so we can call them back and explain, we apologize that we dropped that call, but dropping calls in our business is almost a safety hazard. If we drop a call from a client who needs an attorney and they call another attorney's office, we've lost that client. That's one of my biggest probably reasons it's not a ten. But RCN can't help that.

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.

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.

The sidecars on the main phones that we use, the ones that receive the calls, are really important. They help us to distribute calls to people, from reception. That's an important starting point for us.

I use the voicemail transcription feature on my phone and I think all staff members do. We also have voicemails that we receive from our main number and that can be really confusing. It's something that I've recently had some problems with: The way that these calls are bounced around from line to line before they land in a specific voicemail box that we have to check. I had to call and was on the phone with someone from RCN for almost an hour, just trying to explain how I needed a copy of these voicemails to go to my email. It was really difficult to parse through all of the technical features to find where these voicemails were landing, from what line, and how to get myself added to that.

Some of the technical aspects of the using the sidecars can be really confusing. It's apparently on us to update the sidecars on the main phones that we use. We have so much staff turnover. Apparently, we'll have to go in and add each person and change the name on every single button, every time we add a new person or change a name. That would certainly be some room for improvement: the editing of the names on the sidecars.

We haven't really had to change any of the functions that we've got. I haven't really had to gauge the scalability at all.

From the perspective of placing work orders, support is really good. The business services Tier 2, for the simple technical issues we have, are always really quick to respond. When it comes to simple things, it's very good. It's always prompt and it's done by email. It's usually really simple.

It certainly doesn't hurt that their customer service is US-based and within the markets.

But when it's complicated issues, it's noticeably different. It's like having to "translate" between languages. I have to describe the capability that I'm looking for many times to either a tech or a person in sales. They will try to come up with a solution that really doesn't cover what we want or need. There's quite a bit of back and forth and it feels like you have to speak multiple languages and explain it more than once to explain something as simple as, for example, "I need a copy of each voicemail message in my email."

The initial setup was really complex. We had some problems with distributing the calls when these phones were first installed. We went through a few different types of phones that we were using at reception. I don't fully understand why, but we had gotten used to using one phone and then, a few months later, we had to switch it to something else. It was not very straightforward when they were first installed.

We were having failed transfers with some of the phones for three or four months after they were first installed. I don't know if that's part of the normal install process.

I wasn't involved in the implementation strategy. We got these RCN phones when we moved and we just explained all of the functions that we liked and needed from our old ones that we wanted to keep for our new ones.

We worked directly with RCN.

Be flexible because things don't always turn out as you might think they should, at the beginning.

In terms of uptime of the system, it does pretty well now. I haven't seen any bigger problems lately. We have around 70 to 75 daily users of the phones and there are at least four or five people who are answering the reception phone. We have three or four people who take care of the system's maintenance. The system is used daily, throughout the week. As far as I know, there aren't really any plans to increase usage, other than potentially adding a few phone lines.

Regarding the automatic upgrades, I don't really see them happen. If they're happening automatically, then it seems that they're working.

I would rate the system at six out of ten. We had a lot of problems with the install, with the initial rolling out and using of the system. This was despite the fact that my predecessor had many meetings with a representative about the capabilities and functionalities we were used to and wanted, none of which seemed like they were very complicated. That was really frustrating. 

In the meantime, the daily functioning of the phones is fine. The business services Tier 2, the email service that we use for the smaller, quicker technical things, is always really prompt and usually very helpful. But again, some of the more complicated things can feel like a nightmare.

To get to a perfect 10 they need to work on listening to what the customers want, and not necessarily from a technical perspective. They need to understand not just the technical aspect of what the phones do, but the reality of what it's like using them.

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.

The Hunt Group, is the most valuable feature. There are different modes. You can choose round-robin, you can choose priority-for-agents, you can choose the order of agents. There are all kinds of different mechanisms for the next operator to take a call. We find that valuable especially if someone is training. You can change that mode straight up and say, "Okay, this stronger guy is going to take the calls until we get this other person up to speed."

Other than two years ago where, once every couple of weeks or so there was a lot of jitter, we've had zero downtime. It's a solid 97 percent uptime.

Another thing that's really cool is that we had a gentleman who had to be out of the office for a while, he was going to work from home. We literally took his desk to his house with his phone and he was up and running, no configuration or anything else. He just plugged it right into his home router and he was up and running, like he was here in the office. These are truly IP phones.

Regarding the automatic upgrades, I don't even notice that they occur. They reboot them at midnight, so whatever these guys are doing at night, we don't even see it happening.

Wireless needs improvement. We have a manufacturing facility and the majority of the managers walk around with 2.4 gigahertz cordless phones and they have to walk, sometimes, throughout three different buildings. Of course, being 2.4, they lose reception in one of the three. We're still looking for the quintessential IP phone, the one phone that will actually be SIP-enabled and use the WiFi and be able to carry through the three buildings. We still have not found that phone yet. I'm sure it exists, we just haven't been introduced to it.

At the time, five years ago, when RCN came in, they didn't have anything like that. I'm sure nowadays, they probably have something like that, I just haven't had the time to look into pricing something like that. But if I had a magic wand, I would say from the get-go: wireless SIP phones.

Scalability is easy. You just call them and say, "Hey, I'm going to add some folks." They ship it to you or, for us, we're lucky, they are right down the street and they hand-deliver the phones. We plug them right into the network and we're up and running. We just have to choose where the new people are going to sit. That's it.

I deal with tech support 100 percent. No one else from our company does. You get to know these people on a first name basis and they're very cool, they get right to the point. They don't mess around. If you're dealing with an issue, they don't ask you rudimentary questions. They start working on it right away.

For example, I forgot how to do an administrative task. The task came up because of a big snow storm. Everyone in one department left and there was only one person left, so we had to find a backup for that person to take calls. I forgot how to join other people into a call group pickup. This is the stuff that you're supposed to call the regular customer service for. I didn't even bother doing that. I just called Mike, the business level-2 guy and said that I had to put these guys in the group in a hurry." He said, "No worries, I got your back." He got Ed to call me and he walked me through it. I didn't have to think about it. That's what I like.

Their NOC and customer service are smooth.

It absolutely helps that RCN is US-based and in local markets. I would not have this much confidence if these guys were not around the corner. We're lucky enough that these guys are probably just about a mile down the road from us. I would definitely want someone physically here if some kind of problem occurred. There are times when I would want someone to hand-hold me. RCN has been able to do that.

We used two previous services. Way back in the day, when we were copper-line based, we were using Norstar. From there, we upgraded to Verizon and we went on-premise with a PPX system. What caused us to move off of that was that we had an outage with Verizon and that outage lasted us about a week, with no phones. That was very stressful, so we decided to end the contract with Verizon after they got us up and running. RCN, coincidentally, knocked on our door the following month and we said, "Come on in, let's talk about this SIP stuff." It was a big game-changer for us because there was something new. We weren't very comfortable with the cloud-based system, we didn't know how reliable it was going to be. We're happy we made the decision to go with them though.

The setup was straightforward. They come in with a pretty large brigade and they set up all the phones next to your existing phones, if you're migrating over from one platform to another. Then they'll go by department. They'll disconnect everyone, they'll connect a new phone, make sure that phone is up and running and, once that's up and running, they go to the next department. They don't just replace the phones, put them in place and leave. They make sure it's there, it's working, and that there are no problems.

On implementation day, we were there for about eight hours going through a couple of bugs here and there. It was a full day.

Regarding an implementation strategy, we went through the guidelines of what RCN had recommended and what I told you just now, that's what they recommended. We said, "Okay, that sounds about right, we can do that."

We didn't use any third-party integrator. We had 65 to 70 phones and RCN brought in a team of four folks. That was just about all that was required for the deployment.

Pricing is great. If you're not careful enough, you might just order too many. For the service, the price is right.

When you design it, if you mess up and you realize you really need then more lines, the price is negligible.

We were looking to go back to Norstar. They put on a big push trying to get in again. They said, "Hey, we lost your business to Verizon, we're doing SIP-based." But with RCN, the price was right. They came in, they referred us to some of their users. One of them was here in the Valley and it's a pretty big organization.

Just in case, whatever you order, you're going to need to have a spare phone. If you choose RCN, my recommendation is that you always have three or four phones on hand, just in case someone has a problem. Let's say the handheld breaks or something weird is going on with the phone and you don't have time to look into it. You take a phone that you have in storage, you pop it in, you go to the administration portal, type in the Mac address, and you're good to go. It's that simple.

I would recommend you make sure you have enough bandwidth. We're doing just fine with 20 megs, so you if have more than that you're fine.

Out-of-the-box, RCN provides the feature set for its customers. When it comes to having personalization for the system, a lot of the canned answers are going to be, "Out-of-the-box, we can't do that." So it takes either transforming your process to meet what the feature set can offer or you can really bug the level-2 support and sometimes they come out with something.

For example, we had a need to add a SIP-enabled paging server into our system because we had an old-school analog paging system. We needed some way to tie the SIP server to our analog version and, out-of-the-box, meaning right when implementation was there, they said, "We don't have anything like that." So I bugged them and then they were willing - which I was very pleased with - to say, you choose the paging server you think would work and we'll take it to our team and see if we can incorporate it into your solution. I was very pleased it worked, and it still works today.

So, right out-of-the-box, they may not have everything for you. You just have to ask all the questions in the beginning.

We don't use the voicemail transcription feature. What we do offer is that when people make a call in, we turn on the emailing function for those that ask for it - until they find out they get too many emails and then they ask to remove it. But if it is helpful.

We haven't seen less packet loss or a higher reliability with RCN Hosted Voice, but what I can share with you is, if you have a rogue device on your network, it will cause disruptions. We had a problem, two or three years ago where every other week, there would be a "storm" on the network and all the phones would have this horrible jitter. No one could hear anything and it would last for an hour. We found out that it was actually a rogue device on our network, one we didn't authorize. You have to watch out for things like that as they will interrupt or you will see some kind of problem with the phone systems. As a defense for that, we decided to lock down all of our ports and only enable the ports that we want to authorize. It's a pain but that's the only way we can really go about that.

The solution requires close to zero staff for maintenance. These things are set-it-and-forget-it. As long as you don't have some odd requirement for it, which we don't, I don't foresee even needing to touch the administrative portion of it. And I'm a fiddler, I like to know what's going on with these phones. But they lock them down to the point where, once a night around midnight, RCN makes updates if there are any available and they reboot all the phones by themselves. It's hands-off.

Among our 65 users we have accounting, receiving, purchasing; all the major departments that any company would have. The customer service users are the heavy hitters; those are the guys who are in a multi-line hunt group. For something like that, you get a dashboard, you can get true metrics on who's dialing in, how many calls you drop, how many calls you receive; you get the full stuff, if you have a customer service department.

We don't have any plans to scale up right now. With the floor space, with everyone in the company, we are just about maxed out with where we could physically put the phones.

If a colleague said to me, "A cloud solution isn't safe," I would say, "You haven't tried RCN yet." It's not an issue at all. We're very happy with it.

I give it a solid nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement.

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 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.

Feature-wise, the price was right for what we were looking for. They're our internet service provider as well, so it was an easy decision to have both our primary ISP and our ISP for our VoIP system be the same company.

I use the voicemail transcription feature but I'm not sure about the security of the voicemail system, as you can only use numbers for a password, and your direct-dial number is your username. That's kind of vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The passwords are limited to six digits, so I'd be a little concerned about security on that end, but I don't think anybody's really leaving too much personal information on their voicemails.

My only complaint with RCN's service would be that I've had issues getting phones sent out that were good to go. I think it's just the particular rep I have assigned to me. One of them who did the on-site changeover was not really attentive and just wanted to get the heck out of here. It seems he also takes that kind of attitude when he originally sends me a phone. My workaround is that as soon as I get the phones from him, I just contact another guy at their tech support and he resolves my issues immediately. RCN as a whole is pretty good, but that one individual guy that I have isn't the best.

Our strategy, as far as how it's deployed is that we have RCN supplying everything. It's split into two different modems; VoIP is on a secondary line for security reasons. All those VoIP lines are on their own switch, a dedicated network. Everything's hooked up to the wall rather than through a computer.

The stability has been great so far; no real downtime.

Scalability would just be a matter of adding another switch if I wanted. I feel we have the ability to grow. We'd outgrow our office before we outgrow this phone solution.

I would rate technical support at nine out of ten. They get back to me pretty quickly. I've had issues with the phones arriving in not-working order, and as soon as I reach out to their tech support, for the most part, we get it resolved rather quickly. If not, they're extremely responsive by email. Usually, at most, it's a five-minute turnaround time. That's nice to have, especially when you have that pressure to have something out and deployed immediately. It's nice to not be waiting on them for anything.

It helps that they're US-based and within the local market. It's much easier speaking with somebody local. I don't need to go into detail about any of the nightmares of the tech support phone banks in other countries that give you nothing but, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear about that, sir." It's nice to deal with somebody whose manager is either next to them or down the hall. I don't have to go through all the baloney of shouting how important it is that something needs to be fixed now. It's nice to have some kind of responsiveness.

We had XO Communications and it was a legacy phone system. The costs were going up and RCN came in at a very competitive price, especially for the bandwidth they were willing to give us. They came in with 20 megs or 50 and they upgraded our regular internet and co-opted that into the phone deal.

They agreed to double the speed of our regular internet for no extra cost, which was very nice of them. The fact that they are our ISP as well as our voice provider is nice. If anything goes wrong, it's one company you have to deal with. It's not like, "Hey, the phone system's not working. Is it our internet provider, is it our phone service provider?" It's all the same.

The initial setup went pretty smoothly. The guy who came and did the setup was just a little rushed. If we had a little more time for him to teach our users, rather than his handing me some YouTube videos and pamphlets to go through, that would have been great. But that's more of an individual than RCN as a whole. Their tier-2 business response, their helpdesk, has been great with any issues I've had.

The deployment took less than a day. They were pretty quick about it. All the phones were delivered a day before, so I was able to get the phones set up and placed at each desk. I wired everything myself. When they came in, it was just a matter of going to the patch panel and they installed a secondary modem for the VoIP line. Once that was up, they switched the lines from XO Communications - our old phone company. Once they switched over, it took about an hour. We did it first thing in the morning. Total downtime was about a half hour.

In terms of the staff required for deployment, it was just me.

We used a third-party consultant, the Abadi Group, and they were phenomenal.

We didn't feel like buying phones. RCN, as part of the deal, leased us phones at a reasonable price and each line was extremely reasonable as well.

All in all, for about 45 phones, we're paying around $900 a month. It was getting to the point with XO, our old provider - even though we bought all the phones outright, so the purchased phones were not included on the bill - that the bills were almost higher than RCN was going to be with leasing the phones and the lines themselves.

The fact that we're only held to 40 lines - that's what we originally started with in May - and we can always remove anything over that from the contract, is nice. They're pretty flexible with removing phones and adding phones. 

The cost for leasing the phones is pretty nice and if at any point we want to upgrade a phone, we don't have to hold onto it. We can just send it right back to them. I like the flexibility with them.

We looked at Vonage and 8x8.

My advice would be to start the deployment very early on a Monday morning. We did it on a Friday. On a Friday you have to deal with the possibility that the people who come out have mentally "checked out." I don't want to say they were not doing their job, but it's like going into surgery. You'd rather go on a Monday when doctors are all fresh than on a Friday when they're getting ready for the weekend; their minds might be elsewhere.

In terms of packet loss, I haven't looked at the number of packets being dropped or coming in or out. Besides user error, we haven't really had any dropped calls or the like. In the initial stages of deployment, it took some of our people a little while to learn the phone system, particularly with how to transfer and hold calls. But as far as the system itself goes, I haven't seen any real faults with it.

I would rate the uptime of the system at nine out of ten. It's been great, other than a few additional phones that I've ordered that have come in non-functioning. I've had to go back and forth with tech support to get them up and running. Other than that, everything's been great.

I haven't used the automatic upgrade feature yet.

We don't have plans to increase usage. RCN was a replacement for our old phone service, and everything it's been doing has been going great. Any increase might involve updating phone models for some users. They have some models that have video-chat capability. We might look to do something like that, but we're not even using the system to its full extent right now, so I don't really see us adding more features.

If a colleague said to me, "A cloud solution is not safe," the complaint I have about the six-digit password on the voicemail is definitely disconcerting. But I don't think nowadays that people, at least in our company, are really giving private information over on a voicemail. People tend to wait until they can actively talk to somebody on the phone. As long as you're not really leaving anything in your voicemail like that, I don't think you have to worry.

Security-wise, always use a dedicated line. A friend of mine works in security and when people have had their VoIP network on the same network as their servers, he has found ways to compromise it by using dial tones and the like. After hearing that, that was my biggest sticking point: not having them on the same network.

Overall I would rate RCN Hosted Voice at eight out of ten. If it weren't for the security on the voicemail having such a small number of characters, and some phones I've had sent out to me that weren't functioning, it would be a ten.

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.

The Office Mobility feature has been the most satisfying one because it allows part of my team to be remote at an event and still be active with the phone and their client base. They're always in reach during office hours. It also gives me the freedom to work remotely too, which is amazing. The quality of the calls doesn't diminish between using the Office Mobility and the desk phone.

The analytic part of it, the control panel, those are their biggest areas where they have to improve. There are competitors out there where, when you open the control panel, they have tons of analytics, the ability to add lines, to see which people are on the phone. I've gone through this with a bunch of people at RCN before. They have a great product, but they could make it outstanding with the right analytics and control panel. To do a call recording takes forever. 

In their control panel for administrators, like myself, who have to manage the system, it would be nice to have a feature where I could go on there, order a phone if I need one, get a line, and see which members of my team are online right now.

The uptime is excellent. We're always up. We don't have issues. I can always reach someone. Someone can always call me. The stability of it is spotless. It's rock solid. Everything works great. There's no need to tinker with it. I'm sure people always tinker, but it's a rock solid product, stability-wise.

We haven't had a disaster yet. The only time we had something happen was when the City of Chicago accidentally, while they were looking for a water line, cut a bunch of fiber lines. It not only affected RCN, it affected the whole city block radius. Every person in the area was out and down. But they did a really good job and, within 24 hours, rerouted everything and had us back up.

Looking back at the traditional, stone age system, we had issues all the time. We had static on the line. We always had some type of issue with AT&T traditional phone lines and Vonage. If you've ever dealt with AT&T, their customer service is horrendous. The same with Vonage at that time. They were horrendous. It cost us money.

When we gave RCN a chance that all changed. We never had issues. Someone was right around the corner to pop in and take a look. 

The scalability is fine. We are maxed at 80 employees. We're a small company so we don't have the need for that larger scalability where we're going to jump to 150 users. I don't have that knowledge about how scalability would work at that size. But given what I know, I imagine that scalability would not be an issue. As long as you have the proper data, I think this product would work the same with 200 users. But my knowledge is just on 80 users in total.

We have a sales team and their primary job is hitting the phones every day, making calls. They can range from 15 to 170 calls a day. They are always on the phone. They are really pushing it hard and maxing it out. We also have a production team. They're not on the phone as much. They'll probably get five or six calls a day. There are also managers, HR, finance, but they're not on the phone. They get incoming calls. Most of my calls are incoming. But out of all those users, with their different roles and using the phones at certain times, I haven't had an issue where phones weren't working.

The reliability and scalability haven't been an issue. That's why I refer people to it all the time.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, I take care of the solution myself.

Everyone is using it every day to do their jobs. I don't know what 2019 holds for us, as far growth goes, just yet; maybe two or three more users. It all depends on the first quarter. I'm not worried about growth and this product. I'll just add another line, add another phone and not think about it because I know it's going to work.

Customer support, for me, has been outstanding. If I have to talk with the support guys, my questions are answered right away.

IT helps that they are US-based and within local markets. I know they're local and that's good if someone has to come out. We can have someone here fairly quickly. It means a lot to have them local because if we do need something they are right there. They're a few miles away from us and they can be here very quickly. They have some pretty good people working there.

I don't use the tech support that much but when I have had to use it, it's been awesome. I get help right away. Within about ten or 15 minutes I can actually get things accomplished. But rarely do I have to use them; once or a couple of times a year, because there's nothing technical I need to call about.

The initial setup was straightforward. RCN had a team come in. They had already started the migration of our numbers from AT&T to their system. When the team came in, they set up the phones, completed the migration, and we were up and running. We didn't have to do anything except move out of their way. They did a great job setting that up for us. I had no issues whatsoever. The setup for us was seamless.

The whole deployment, from the time that they started the migration was about three weeks, and that was because of our closing down for a week for Christmas. Some of that was waiting for AT&T and Vonage to release numbers to RCN.

Regarding our implementation strategy, we did a test line to see if it was going to be a right fit for us and it worked fine. We had five test cases and it worked great. After that, implementation was all at once. I did everyone at one time. I killed all my contracts with AT&T and Vonage and started the process of migrating all 70-some numbers. 

I then notified the team what was going to be coming. RCN said they were setting them up in groups of five. And it worked fine. They'd get a phone plugged in, get it connected, and within ten minutes each person was up. By the end of that morning, we were pretty much done. We had already provisioned the firewall with the information RCN provided for us for our data to flow through the firewall. It was so smooth. Competitors have been trying to get me to move but I'm worried that another change and migration would be rough.

We didn't need a third-party. It was handled pretty quickly. Everything moved smoothly.

The only return on investment is the increase in sales because of the reliability. Having the reliability of the phones allowed us to increase our volume of work which, in turn, gives us greater revenue. We bought all our phones from them so we reduced our revenue costs there.

The pricing is fairly fair. Our contract ended two years ago and it's going to expire next year. We negotiated rates. We were being wooed by RingCentral and Nextiva again with pricing and some of the newer toys that they have on their systems. We had a really good rep and she did a great job of working out a contract and a pricing solution that was acceptable and fair. We were happy and we continued our relationship with RCN for their VoIP solution.

We did try out Nextiva early on. This was before RCN when we were still toying with a few things, and that would have been seven years ago. One of the reasons we tried Nextiva was that we thought technology was moving that way. But we didn't have the proper bandwidth at that time to really give Nextiva the proper testing it needed. It wasn't until we got a full fiber network in our facility that we saw a change and the possibility of having a VoIP phone system. Once we did move to this new technology it changed our lives a lot.

We also evaluated 8x8 Business VoIP. Skype was the other one we tried. We also looked at trying to roll out even more Vonage on their business side, but because of their technical support, because of their customer support, we scratched them off the list fairly quickly. It was our rep who handled our fiber who said, "Hey, we have a phone solution, a VoIP phone solution that we think would save you money and work really well for you." He said, "Can I have a copy of all your phone records?" I said, "You have to really get some good savings here for us to cut ties with AT&T and Vonage." They came back with a good offer and I said, "Okay, that looks great."

I would recommend that everyone do their research. My own feedback would be that with RCN you're going to get fair pricing, if you do your homework. You'll get reliability. You will get great customer support. I can't speak for all the reps at RCN, if they're not as great as Courtney was, but overall, if you decide to go with RCN you're going to have a very reliable product that you're going to be satisfied with. If you want all the bells and whistles and the dashboard and the analytics, it may not be the product for you. But if you want great service and a great product then RCN is there. 

I highly recommend RCN to people. Know what your needs are and you'll find that they meet a lot of those needs and you'll be satisfied with the results.

If a colleague were to say to me that a cloud solution is not safe, I would tell them, because I have a security background, that nothing is safe. Nothing is 100 percent. Everyone does their best to keep things safe. But everything is vulnerable; that's just the nature of our society. I would say there's nothing to worry about, really. We're moving to full cloud very soon. We're moving to G Suite and we're moving to a server cloud solution. I don't have any fears. As long as you put certain things in place, the security gates that you need, you should have no worries.

The Voicemail Transcription is pretty good. I personally don't use it. I'm kind of old-fashioned. If I see a notification that I have a voicemail, I check my voicemail. In my position, I get hundreds of emails a day, so to sift through and use it... From what I can see it looks nice. I deactivated it on the control panel for me. But it does the job. People mention it all the time, saying that it works great for them. They can see it on their phone.

The automated upgrades happen automatically so I really don't see them. I have no real opinion on them because I don't see it happen and they haven't affected my product.

I would rate RCN Hosted Voice between a nine and a ten out of ten. Nine would only be because of the analytic part. But overall, it's a ten. It's been a fantastic product for us as a company. It's been reliable. There's no downtime. They have mobility features that allow us to work remotely and allow us to stay connected to our company and our clients. It allows us to continue to provide service to our clients.

Overall, with the customer service we got from Courtney and the support from their team when we need it, our satisfaction with the product is that it delivers what they promise. They promised that we would always be up and we would always have clear calls. We always do. That's it.

 I can't say anything negative about them. In general, they're outstanding. Anybody who decides to go with them will be satisfied and have a great product. We've had a long relationship with them now and I don't see that ending.

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 like the administrative features RCN has available. It is important that we can balance call loads through programming options, and have full control of our messaging, schedules, etc.

It should be easier to set up new phone additions to the network.

Also, while we certainly like the voicemail to email feature, it is not something we set out as a requirement of the systems we were looking at. It would be more user-friendly if the voicemail was transcribed into text, but the audio file works well.

The stability has been excellent. As far as uptime goes, so far so good. We have not experienced any outages that were not weather-related. I cannot speak to the issue of packet loss but, since implementation, the overall reliability has been excellent.

We have added two phones to our system thus far. The ability to easily add to our system is what we had expected.

As far as increasing our usage of the solution is concerned, we will do so only when we need to add bandwidth or phones for additional staffing.

Technical support has been good. Any problems that have occurred have been resolved.

In terms of the solution’s NOC and customer service being US-based, and within the local markets, we always prefer a US-based service. But it all boils down to response time to our immediate needs.

We used a previous solution. Cost and additional features are why we switched. We felt we were getting increased value.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. The team of installers was well prepared and the migration was completed as we had anticipated.

After the initial review of our system and installation of RCN's required fiber, the final install was completed in half a day. Overall, we probably invested a month in the upgrade.

Our implementation strategy was to over-prepare for the change in phone systems so there would be no loss of phone or internet service. Through proper preparation and some work being completed in stages, the cut-over was executed without any major issues.

The solution is saving our company money, based on the initial, up-front cost that would normally be required. The monthly ongoing cost is comparable to prior solutions.

My thoughts on are pricing are that it is always too high.

We considered three companies in the Lehigh Valley area as potential providers.

Compare several options and talk with more than just the salesperson presenting the solution. If you select RCN products, work with the point person assigned to ensure the transition is completed without major issues.

If a colleague were to say to me, "A cloud solution is not safe," I would reply, "We are an online school. You secure the best you can."

We sought the solution directly through RCN.

The 13 members of our company are all using the solution, including the owner, staff, and interns we hire. In terms of maintenance, our COO and one administrative staff member are responsible for the phones' operation. When we need maintenance we call RCN.