Business VoIP in Canada
Atcom recently had the opportunity to help a new customer in Toronto vastly improve their business phone system with VoIP by AtcomCloud. This stand-alone business had recently joined a national company and needed to up their communications game in the process. Here is the story.
Old Phone System
The existing system was called Unison by Rogers and worked to some extent, but introduced the following pain points:
- All calls were handled by cell phones, and coverage at the site wasn’t great
- Changing the programming of the system was not intuitive
- There were limited options when it came to Auto Attendants and Call Queues
- Transferring calls to other users was either difficult or impossible
- It was VERY difficult to port a phone number away once Unison had control of it
New VoIP Phones by AtcomCloud
The company decided to switch to a true business grade VoIP system and chose AtcomCloud for their service. The site had a few difficulties that might have prevented other off-the-shelf VoIP systems from working to an acceptable level.
Our first challenge was that the site didn’t have the usual options for high speed internet service, such as fiber or coax connections. DSL was available but at a dismal service level. Atcom was able, ironically, to help set up a Rogers LTE connection with an external antenna that resulted in decent upload/download bandwidth.
Challenge #2 was that internal wiring for a network was nearly non-existent. We were able to provide a high-quality WiFi access point and WiFi capable phones to overcome this obstacle with ease. Over time the customer plans to build a proper network cabling infrastructure, but our solution allowed them to get up and running right away.
The third challenge was that the voice and data networks needed to be segregated from each other. Atcom was able to accomplish this with ease since our standard, cloud managed, POE switches support VLAN tagging out of the box.
In the end our client ended up with a far superior phone system that still allows them to answer on cell phones when desired, but also provides our best VoIP phones at each desk. In addition, this was all done for around the same price they previously paid each month!
