Newbie Question: Reseller Features/ PBX

[VOIPoTim]

I agree, and I trust Tim will do this "right". That's why I signed up.

However, I am hungry for a few particular features, and curious if they are at all on the radar (even if we're talking more than a year out). In particular, if we can get PBX-like features, such as "call group" or "call hunt", that would open the door to complete with Packet-8 for higher margin business accounts.

see www.8x8.com

Unfortunately I don't anticipate PBX features being added soon. Our direct service is 100% residential only with no business users, so we don't offer PBX functionality directly either.

I'm not saying it's something we'd never offer PBX, but I'm saying that if we ever do it will be a while because it would basically require an entirely new platform to be designed almost from the ground up. While some of the core components could be re-used for a business oriented service, most of it would need to be built from scratch due to the differences in that type of service. PBX is really an entirely different service and different market and not a lot could be re-used from our existing infrastructure.

Just as an example, with our current design the audio does not pass though VOIPo servers except in very rare cases. It goes directly between the end user and the actual phone network gateway connecting the call vs going from phone network to VOIPo to user with VOIPo in the middle. Having it connect direct improves call quality quite a bit for most users and allows us to keep our prices low since we're not paying for bandwidth for all the calls.

For a PBX service, VOIPo would have the intercept 100% of the audio in order to be able to listen to keytones. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to tell when a menu option was pressed.

So there's a lot that would need to be done to offer PBX. We don't want to spread out and do a bunch of things poorly and want to focus on improving and adding functionality to the current system until we're fully happy with them before we start getting into entirely new stuff and complete redesigns.