Great article on VOIP phone systems. http://betanews.com/2015/06/26/voip-done-right-11-best-practices-for-moving-to-cloud-hosted-pbx/
VOIP and ISP latency, jitter and packet loss. http://www.dslreports.com/faq/12257
Test VOIP potential quality. http://www.ringcentral.com/support/qos.html
Test potential number of simultaneous phone calls. http://www.ringcentral.com/support/capacity.html
Here is my RFP to VOIP providers, partly based on the betanews article.
Revised Phone RFP
5 Basic hard phones (able to transfer calls via keypad)
1 Hi-fidelity conference phone
2 Admin interfaces (will use second computer screen for management and softphone for calls?)
1 Fax number (incoming and outgoing)
22 Regular softphones (Bria or Zoiper)
Transition process
There will be two phases of the transition from the existing phone system to VOIP.
In the first phase all the basic hard phones, Hi-fidelity conference phone and the Admin interface will be installed. In addition, all existing workstations and laptops (Windows based) will convert to softphones (16 softphones).
In the second phase, most staff will move their primary workstation to their home. All softphones will be switch to run on Linux desktops and laptops. This will add an additional 6 softphones for a total of 22.
Basic Questions
- What kind of support do you offer?
- What large customers do you service?
- Do we need any special equipment on site? Do you require on-premise PBX units or are you cloud-hosted?
- Can desk phones/soft phones work anywhere?
- What are the contract terms? What will it take to back out of the contract? What are the cancellation fees?
- Is pricing promotional or locked in?
- How many toll free minutes are included?
- How many fax pages are included?
- How fast do you implement new technologies?
- Do you have a trial period?
- What is your Service Level Agreement? What kind of reimbursements/credits do you provide in situations of non-delivery or outages?
- Are you guaranteed HIPAA compliant? Do you rely on the “conduit exception” under HIPAA regulations?