Frequently Asked Questions
We have answers!
Cloud PBX or hosted services are now firmly established, and some great advantages to business users of all sizes, from all sectors: – Reduced costs – Low or no capital outlay and no annual maintenance or upgrade charges – Predictable pay-asyou-go pricing by user – Highly reliable – with disaster recovery built in – Huge to-site calls – Extensive ‘add on’ capabilities to enhance ease of use and productivity. – Simple web portal to manage your service, so need for in house expertise or expensive supplier contracts when you need to make changes
With our hosted communications service, no phone system is required at your site or sites. All you need instead is a local area network (LAN) that your phones can plug in to, IP Phone handsets, plus a network connection to our hosted telephony service. We can either provide a new connection or you can use your existing broadband or data connections – we can advise per case by case
If you wish to retain your current phone system, you can use a gateway product to link an existing phone system to Dotdash Cloud. This is known as SIP trunking, which offers valuable functionality and scalability with minimal new hardware costs. This gives you the opportunity to benefit from the investment made in your existing phone system whilst offering you a way to replace your expensive ISDN circuits. This approach also allows a gentle and often seamless migration path towards a fully hosted service. It can also be a good strategy with multiple sites where newer phone systems may be retained, whilst other sites take the fully hosted route.
As well as the conventional phone features you would expect, Dotdash Cloud also offers users access to an array of communications services such as audio and video conferencing, instant messaging, and desktop sharing from their phone, mobile, PC or tablet. This means you can chose both the device you prefer to communicate with, perhaps your mobile or tablet when you are away from your desk, and also the most appropriate medium, for example arranging a quick video or audio conference, or starting an instant message “chat” between colleagues or external contacts, for example As the interface is the same regardless of the device you prefer, using the service quickly becomes intuitive
Hosted telephony or hosted pbx services are hugely resilient – instantaneous disaster recovery can automatically reroutes inbound calls to another site, home lines or mobiles. What would happen if you lost either your lines or phone system today? – Allows people to work from home with the same capabilities that they have while in the office. Hosted telephony supports remote and field staff and can improve their productivity and help them feel connected to their colleagues.. – Organisations operating on multiple sites can act like a single entity, with one dialling plan and abbreviated dialling between offices. Distribute your call centres and hunt groups between different locations to spread workloads, or deal with busy periods. – Advanced features, such as Call Recording are available to everyone (including home based staff) without the cost or technical complexity of a hardware based approach. – Moving to new premises? No problem, all your numbers move with you! Existing numbers can be ported with a hosted phone system so you maintain continuity. – Users can control their own call handling, features and services with traditional star codes, phone-based graphical user interfaces or their own web portal. So features like day-of-week or timeof-day based routing become easy to use. And there is no need to wait for an administrator or your network provider. – Dotdash Cloud makes it so easy to access useful features such as video and audio conferencing, instant messaging and desktop sharing. Unlike conventional standalone services, No additional equipment, cumbersome set-up procedures or lengthy subscriptions are needed. You simply pay per month, for those staff members that require specific features.
Based on real life experience of existing customers, yes. We recognises that all the advantages of a hosted VOIP service can be undermined if customers experience poor call quality as a result of problems in the network. Therefore, we will always recommend the implementation of a voice optimised connection to ensure voice calls are prioritised over other traffic types within the network. This procedure ensures that issues associated with ‘standard’ connections are avoided. We ensure control of the call from end to end, by engineering interconnects with our chosen carrier partner in a resilient manner – and investing in performance monitoring of all systems 24/7
Dotdash Cloud is priced per user, per month on a minimum of 1 contract terms. Different licenses offer varying ranges of features and can be “mixed and matched” to address different end user’s needs. (see our pricing plan.)
IP enabled phone – The service can also be accessed from IPhones, IPads, Android phones, PC’s and Apple Mac’s. Routers – We can recommend and supply a range of routers for new connections. Network connection – We will advise, based on the overall number of users and concurrent calls you will require, and can provide access circuits as required, or work over customer’s existing data connections
An established process exists for the transfer or port of numbers from a conventional landline to the hosted service. It is also possible to port IP numbers from other IP providers. We can confirm lead times on a case by case basis, but typically its 20 working days. Alternatively, a customer may select a non-geographic number (for example, a 04 number), or a geographic number associated with a desired ‘virtual location’, such as Penang. This is ideal for organisations wishing to portray a presence in the capital (or anywhere else) but who are located elsewhere
