Anybody familiar with a hosted pbx phone system?

It's one piece of technology we don't directly provide for our clients, but we are pretty familiar with them. Similar to a hosted exchange email service, it's a great model to not have a huge upfront investment. All support should also be included, making it a predictable expense.

Internally, we use a company based out of NOLA. They use mitel phones and the service works well. I like being able to have an account manager or service tech come to our office. This particular service travels over public internet, so call quality assurance isn't guaranteed. We rarely have problems though. Our firewall has some QoS rules to help with call quality. Since it runs on public internet, I do like the ability to take my phone home and plug it into my router, as if I was sitting at my office.

A few of my clients that used the above service had strange issues. One had severe call quality issues and another would get dead air when dialing certain 318 area codes. They both moved to the Cox hosted phone system (IP Centrix). Cox puts in a second modem and managed switch to have a dedicated path for the phones, traversing through the Cox backbone to the phone network, never hitting the public internet. They say they can guarantee call quality this way but it is a little more expensive and you have to be on Cox's network to use the phones.

I started out with two phones at $35/month/phone. We now have eight phones at $25/phone/month. Cox tends to be $5-10 more per month per phone but there is wiggle room for negotiating, especially if you do a 36 month agreement.

There are a lot of other providers out there, some for pretty cheap per phone. I have heard of issues with those types of providers, mainly support issues. Since the phones are critical for us to have functioning properly, I don't mind paying a little more through a local company.

It depends on who the provider is as far as the per seat cost. Some offer tiers of users with a different cost for each. Others give you just a single rate but fully featured seats. Regardless you'd be looking at anywhere between $15 and $30 per seat. I would stay away from Cox though. They can make all the promises in the world but I've heard it from their techs that it's a bad product and they still don't really know how to service it well enough.

Most of the vendor quotes we have seen includes the phone in the per seat cost. That phone is leased but always under warranty.

I believe the one manufacturer I've seen where you buy the phone is toshiba but I would have to look back on some emails to confirm. This required you to buy the phone and have a per month seat cost for the hosted service.