Qwest - Hosted VOIP solutions 1

[des0906]

We have been approached by Qwest with an interesting proposal. Basically, we have several dozen remote offices that each have Panasonic key and voicemail systems. As they die or fall off of maintenance, we have considered replacing them with Qwest's Hosted VoIP solution, which is basically taking all of the PBX/voicemail functionality and moving it from our 'cloud' on the diagram to theirs.
Anyone have experience with this?

Thanks.

 

[senk1s]

Level3 was one company doing that in CA and i think they went under ... we were trying to resell their services ...not with much luck

Technically they call it as IP Centrex - Nortel is giving a good push on that(on the equipment front, probably everyone else as well)

 

[jpm121]

Covad's doing the same thing, including a big marketing push. They bought out Gobeam last winter.

We've been with them for about 18 monts and it's a nice system, but lately they're having some problems.

 

[des0906]

Does the COVAD option allow you to make use of existing analog lines?

 

[jpm121]

Not really des, it's totally IP based. We have a couple of ATAs in place for interfacing to an overhead paging system, but we ported all our old POTS lines over to Covad so they're all lumped in together. We also got a block of numbers to use for DIDs.

We have 5 remote locations with point-to-point T1s that carry voice and data to our main office. Data goes out over our DSL internet connection, voice goes over a Covad-provided T1 line to their softswitch. All we have in house is routers and switches.