Tong Family

Here are some of the things he has selected…for us. He’s great and some good choices for others that are thinking about small business applications:

* “Fonality”:http://fonality.com. IP PBX and also a PC Magazine editors choce. They sell a hardware box. $1000 is the software charge for standard. Professional is $2K with the main additional things being FindMe/FollowMe and also provides conference bridging for free. The basic $1K thing looks good, for an additional $1K, you get FindMe that routs calls from the PBX to your mobile and Boomerang which does the reverse. They also have this thing called HUD which let’s you manage calls from your PC. Then you don’t have to buy some big dedicated thingy for your receptionist. They sell them with the hardware and also you have to buy handsets from them. You can upgrade to a mini-tower HP PC with onsite service for $650
* “Broadvox”:http://broadvox.com. These guys sell the actual SIP trunks you use to make calls. So they connect to the Fonality server in your office over your broadband provider (Cogent in our case) and then these guys convert it into a connection to the public switched network. This is technically called “SIP Trunking”:http://broadvox.com/SIPTrunking.aspx. The “GO!Anywhere”:http://broadvox.com/GOAnywhere.aspx gives you toll-free, long distance, international and unlimited local calling.

Finally, to connect to the internet, some choices are:

* “Watchguard”:http://watchguard.com. About $2K gets you a firewall. Personally, I think it is quite a bit of money, but it probably doesn’t pay to skimp.
* “Cogent”:http://cogentco.com. It depends on your building, but finding a building with fiber connection directly takes you out of the $400/month for a 1.4Mbps T-1 into getting 100Mbps or even more directly to the internet. Their “On-Net”:http://www.cogentco.com/us/pns_dedicated.php application let’s you check to see if your building is one of the lucky 1,215 in the US and Europe that are connected. They offer 100Mbps, 1Gbps and 500Kbps