Just last week, I was talking to one of our partners who said their MSP client signed a dial tone agrement with a carrier for a term
of 8 YEARS (for the record this was before they were this partner's client)!? Personally, the longest I have ever seen was a 5 year term so 8 was a pretty big shock. These days, I would say that 3 years is a normal term for copper POTS lines or T1 PRI curicuits. Ok, so you or your customer is in one of these terms does that mean Cloud PBX is not an option?
Yes, it is absolutely still an option!
How is that possible when copper lines or T1 curcuits terminate on-prem and the CLOUD PBX is in ... the cloud? Simple, a gateway can allow you to take analog dial tone and convert it to SIP or VoIP. You can install a gateway like Patton SmartNode and then assign a public WAN IP address to the unit. Then we can register the gateway to the Cloud PBX and like magic dial tone is now going to / from the Cloud PBX.
Some gotchas:
- If the internet connection at that site goes down than the dial tone provider will likely play a disconnect or out of service message until the connection is back up between the gateway and the Cloud PBX.
- Unless your provider has some sort of failover or call forwarding feature there might not be a way around that.
You can connect multiple gateways from multiple sites to the same Cloud PBX. You can also apply Least Cost Routing Rules to make sure your sites save on calls depending on what is considered local or long distance. You can also throw sip trunks into the mix at some point to really save money or ultimately wait until your term is up and completely move to sip trunks to massively reduce ongoing costs.
How many Cloud PBX providers have given you this as a viable option? One, BVoIP that is! Don't feel like you are stuck with old equipment or feel like you have to keep a PBX on-prem just because of terms on analog dial tone. How smart will you look when you can show your customer how to install awesome features while incorporating that dial tone vendor that they are stuck with due to massive termination fees that are not feasable to opt out from?
Want to learn more?
