The Life and Times of Seattle’s Small Business Systems Consultant. Articles and advice on small business phone systems, phone and internet services, VoIP, and all things technology related.
Selkowitz Technology | Seattle’s small business network and telecom consultant
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Shopping For Business VoIP Service
Given the economy and savings that VoIP offers, its not surprising that so many businesses are looking at Voice Over IP phone service. But VoIP isn’t like traditional phone service - here’s a few things to know when you go shopping.
The first step is making sure your internet access is good enough for VoIP. [...]
Clear WiMax Comes to Seattle, Great for VoIP
Clear (formerly Clearwire) has just released their new 4G network in Seattle, after a few weeks testing it all over town, I’m very pleased. Most people are now familiar with 3G (EVDO) which is typically expensive and slow. 4G from Clear removes both concerns as its very reasonably priced and fast - it may be [...]
How IP Voice Can Save Your Business Thousands over PRI
PRI is a common business phone service, it basically a voice T1 with Caller ID. PRIs have an advantage over traditional phone lines as they can do “Direct Inward Dial” (DIDs), enabling a business to have numbers ring directly to staff or use different numbers for marketing campaigns to track the effectiveness of their marketing. [...]
Is Comcast Business Phone VoIP?
Recently I recommended a client switch service from Verizon to Comcast Business Voice as doing so would drop their bill from nearly $400/mo to $250/mo. Verizon told them Comcast was VoIP and had subpar quality, which I found humorous.
The first irony is Verizon itself offers VoIP services, so one would figure VoIP wasn’t intrinsically [...]
Comcast Business Internet One Year Later
I felt it was time to revisit Comcast Business since its been about a year since my last post. While I was generally happy, I found the speed fluctuated quite a bit at the time - still fast, just not consistent.
Comcast as of December 2008 upgraded service levels for many markets, Western Washington included. [...]
Why VoIP Sometimes Doesn’t Work Right
I regularly speak with many small businesses who’ve tried VoIP systems and are having problems, here’s one email I recently received:
“I have tried Fonality (dropped calls), and another voip system and the probem I was dropping too many calls, etc.”
In the past few months we’ve replaced an Accessline Vertical Accelerator VoIP system, Blarg’s VoIP [...]
Understanding Ethernet Over Copper In Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma
Ethernet Over Copper is a new kind of high bandwidth internet connection which will range from 5-30Mb. There will inevitably be many comparisons to cable, DSL, bonded T1s, and fiber.
What separates this connection from DSL and Cable is a matching upload rate (a.k.a. synchronous). Cable and DSL can now offer download speeds of up to [...]
How to cut a phone bill by thousands of dollars
I recently had an opportunity to review the very old phone system and phone bill for a local church. They’re growing and moving into a new space and wanted a new phone system for the new location. What they didn’t expect was a new system would cost them less than keeping the old one!
Their old [...]
What You Need to Know About Leaving VoIP
We’ve recently had a rash of businesses want to leave VoIP carriers like Packet 8 and Vonage due to call quality issues. The first thing to know is the origin of the phone number - if the phone number originated with a traditional carrier then its easy to bring it back, though it often takes [...]
Why Looking at new Phone Service with a new Phone System Makes Sense
One of the universal truths is no one likes talking to the guy trying to sell them phone service. But in many cases when a business is looking at a new phone system, its a good time to talk phone service as well to make an optimal package.
For example one job we did recently the [...]