VOIP (Voice over IP) phone service

Here is a tip I picked up at a COSE “Technology for Home-based business” workshop led by Joel H Rathbone yesterday.

If you’re a solo business person a great primary business telephone option is neither a cell phone or a land line – but rather VOIP (voice over IP) Internet phone service. It’s inexpensive, generally provides free calling all over North America, often offers free or inexpensive calling to popular overseas locations, and has quality of sound comparable to land lines and much better than cell phones. Get a good head set to plug into your computer and you can recieve and initiate phone calls no matter where you are.

For true mobility, and for redundancy in case your Internet connection gets interrupted, Joel suggests getting a mobile broadband card for your laptop. You’ll not only have continuing VOIP phone service whereever there is a good signal, but you will also have continual access to the Internet on your computer without having to find a Starbucks with Wi-Fi.

Will Limkemann
www.siqualtd.com

Disaster Planning

It appears that, after leaving a trail of disaster, Ike has finally run his course.

I won’t pretend to understand or appreciate the heartaches, trauma, and loss being suffered by people who got the brunt of the storm. In my own little corner of the world here in Bay Village OH we had sixty mile per hour winds come through on Sunday night blowing over trees and knocking out power and communications services througout the area. By some published accounts over 300,000 electric customers were without power.

What was not publicized was the number of subscribers who lost cable or other communications service.

Sunday night our lights flickered for a few minutes, but power stayed on. I thought we were home free until the lights went out Tuesday night and stayed off until about 5:30 AM. So, power-wise, we fared better than many.

Communications was another matter all together. In a previous blog I mentioned that I had transferred my telephone service from “ma bell” to Vonage Voice Over IP (VOIP), using my broadband cable connection.

Well, just as the Browns/Steelers game was beginning, the cable went out. Not only did we not have television, but lost Internet access (which is why no blogs for the past two days) and telephone service. Fortunately my cell phone service still worked and I had pre-arranged to have all Vonage calls automatically routed to my cell phone whenever an outage occurs.

Our cable service provider is Time Warner. Several times I called the Time Warner number to ascertain when service might be restored. The consistent response was that Time Warner service was interrupted throughout north east Ohio and western Pennsylvania due to POWER OUTAGES. In other words, the giant Time Warner (TW) company, which provides critical communications services to homes and businesses, was at the mercy of the power companies!

I find this situation deplorable! Apparently TW is not prepared for disasters. People with land lines had no wide spread interruption – I understand that all telephone exchange buildings have emergeny power. My cell phone was working no matter where in town I travelled the past two days, so the cellular folks apparantly have emergency power provisions.

Why would not TW be prepared for massive power failures as well?

Bay Village will soon be getting a competing cable company, WOW!. Other communities will also have the option of competing cable services. Perhaps a question we need to ask all cable companies before we sign the dotted line is what kind of emergeny preparedness they have.

Well, after two days of frustration over communications problems, it appears that TW has things back to normal. But, I should be grateful – as the folks in Galveston and Houston are really suffering in so many ways.

Will Limkemann
Limkemann Business Advisors
440-871-0976
www.neobizadvisor.com
will@limkemann.net

Internet Telephone Service

A month ago I decided to cut my phone lines (literally), and connect my home and office phones to the Internet using the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology. After some research I settled on Vonage which is one of the largest and best rated providers of VOIP to the home market.

As I was keeping my existing home phone and business phone numbers, it took about one week for Vonage to cancel my AT&T service and transfer the numbers to Vonage. It took about ten minutes to install the Vonage device and my transfer was complete.

It took about six months for me to make the decision, as I was skeptical about the quality and reliability of using the Internet for the all important telephone connections.

Here is my experience to date:

1. My phone bill has been cut in half, or will be once my first two months free has ended.

2. Both my business and home phone lines have all the bells and whistles one could want including call forwarding and caller ID.

3. In case the Internet connection goes down, calls from both lines are automatically forwarded to my cell phone. My Internet actually did go down for an hour last Friday and one call that came in was seamlessly routed to my cell.

4. All voice mail messages are available on the phone and as an attachment to an automatic e-mail.

5. All long distance calls are free throughout North America and much of Europe.

6. Quality of calls has been excellent – in fact in many cases better than on the old “land lines”.

7. It takes a few seconds longer for a local call to ring once the number has been dialed than using the old land lines.

8. Should the time come that I move – anywhere – I can take my existing phone numbers with me should I choose to do so.

9. I find that when I send outgoing faxes from my fax machine, that I often have to resend due to communication problems. As I send few faxes, this has been a minor inconvenience.

Bottom line is I find little not to like about using Vonage, and would do it all over again.

Will Limkemann
Limkemann Business Advisors
440-871-0976
www.neobizadvisor.com
email: will@limkemann.net