There are a lot of great hosted national PBX companies out there. National providers will sell you a hosted phone service almost anywhere in the country where you have an Internet connection. It’s cheap and it’s easy and fast to get set up. 

But remember, your hosted voice communications goes over your office Internet connection. And sometimes your network may not be up to the task of handling both voice and data for your office.  You may have an older router that works fine for email and web surfing but it’s not so great at transporting voice data. Or you may have a slow Internet connection that can’t handle the bandwidth requirements of both voice and data across the same pipe.

When these types of problems arise, those national hosted PBX providers are of little help.  They can’t really do much to solve your local network and bandwidth issues because they’re not local. They don’t have an army of technicians that can rush out to your office to fix the problem. 

So by going with a local hosted PBX provider, you can get those little extras plus that attention to detail that can make all the difference in the world.

A local hosted PBX provider can offer many advantages over a national provider – but the main one is local consultative service. We get to know your unique needs.

Many times, after we examine your network and match them up with your requirements, we recommend the following for truly exceptional hosted pbx voice experience:

To do hosted PBX the right, you need bandwidth. And not just any ol’ bandwidth.  At Teledynamic for example, we provision both a primary data circuit and a primary voice circuit for our local San Francisco Bay Area clients.

The Primary Data Circuit’s job is to provide fast transport for your email, file transfers and Internet data. It’s a “best efforts” based Internet connection and can also be used as a backup to your voice circuit. The Primary Voice Circuit is a different animal. It’s typically a slower connection but has special properties that make it ideal for transporting voice such as QoS and a robust SLA agreement with the carrier that guarantees performance and uptime.

Configuring your network to optimally handle both voice and data is key to a quality voice experience. We use a specifically configured voice gateway that senses if any circuits are having problems and immediately routes traffic to the other data circuit. Once service is restored,
traffic is routed back to the original pattern. The voice gateway is also configured with very specific Quality of Service (QoS) rules to ensure voice traffic gets the bandwidth and priority it needs.

While the national providers do have SLAs that provide a certain level of response times on issue, local hosted providers can go the extra mile and provide that extra level of service you might need. For example, Teledynamic can provide dedicated support personnel, discounts on new phone equipment and the ability to send technicians out to your local office to solve the problem immediately. National providers can’t do this.

Guest blog by Randy Kremlacek, Owner of Teledynamic Communications in Hayward, California