I spent a while trying to find a decent supplier of outsourced asterisk. We wanted to do VOIP, we wanted a load of DDI numbers, we wanted cost-effective. We didn’t want to get legacy phone lines, we didn’t want to run asterisk ourselves: because of the hassle (and the infinite scope for fun, fun tweaking!), and because, well, we don’t want there to be anything special about our office: if our ‘net connections go down, we want to be able to take the phones home, plug ‘em in, and just carry on.
What we want is sometimes called “VOIP Centrex”. I believe “Centrex” refers to a type of legacy phone system where a load of lines are run into your office, one per phone, and a PBX lives elsewhere. I think it’s a great idea, but only because I have negative interest in managing a PBX, especially a non-asterix PBX!
We finally found a crowd called Gradwell, who look perfect. I wish I’d been able to find them the first, second and third times I went looking, but eventually I found them. So far I’m pretty happy with them. I really rather like their web interface. As far as I can tell, the web interface is for the admin only – there’s no web interface for mere users. Oh well.
