Evaluating Hosted PBX in Los Angeles County

 
If you are looking for hosted PBX for your business and you are located in Los Angeles County, CA., you have a nearly limitless amount of service providers to choose from. Los Angeles County is one of the largest metropolitan business areas in the world, so it makes sense that nearly every major service provider has built infrastructure in this area.

That may sound like a wonderful situation… until you are faced with evaluating this technology and realize that you have no idea where to start or which carriers should get the first look. I have been in telecommunications for nearly 15 years and our company has been selling every major hosted VoIP provider in Southern California (and Nationwide), for 8 years, so please allow me to give you some starting points. This article will have little tidbits for everyone but will specifically apply to companies with over 25 users.

The first thing you want to do is eliminate any provide that is BYOB (bring your own bandwidth). Those providers are inexpensive but you’ll get what you pay for and nobody will want your job when you’re fielding daily complaints from 25+ users experiencing the productivity challenges of “cheap VoIP.” Let the micro businesses play roulette with their voice quality but not you. With a business your size, voice quality issues will cost you thousands of dollars in lost productivity. If the provider does not offer a dedicated circuit with their solution, it means you will have zero guarantee of voice quality. It doesn’t matter how big your pipe is or whether it’s Fiber or T1, a public Internet connection is a recipe for disaster when deploying hosted VoIP for a decent amount of users because it cannot control hidden voice quality killers, such as Packet Loss & Jitter. Just trust me on that one.

Second, make sure the hosted phone system providers that you evaluate have a multitude of access types, especially if you have multiple locations. Some providers can offer less expensive access types, where available but not all providers offer things like Fiber, Fixed Wireless or Ethernet over Copper (EoC), which will drive your pricing up at those sites where less expensive VoIP access would otherwise be available. Unlike many places in the US, Los Angeles has too many providers and too many access types available for you to settle on a provider that is behind the times. For instance, can do things like having your Beverly Hills HQ on a Gigabit burstable fiber connection, your Pasadena site on 10M Fixed Wireless, your Burbank site on 6M EoC and your Irvine site on DSL.

One thing you will definitely want to do is ask how long this provider has had Hosted VoIP as a product? Again, Los Angeles county has too many providers for you to settle on a carrier that will undoubtedly be going through a learning curve at your company’s expense.

Next, ask around and find out which hosted PBX features are available and which of those you need vs. which you just want. Different providers offer different feature sets and their pricing reflects it.

Finally, ask questions about how many service technicians the provider has. Get a real number. Also ask them for a guaranteed response time (to dispatch). As you are aware, Los Angeles is a HUGE county with a lot of traffic and just like an on-prem PBX, even the best hosted phone systems will have a problem now and then. If you choose a provider with minimal technicians, you will undoubtedly need a technician in the City of Industry and their only available technician will be stuck in Woodland Hills for the day and will “try” to make it out to you by the end of the day.

Hopefully that helped you at least get a start but for more information, please call AeroCom and for no charge, one of our hosted PBX experts will quickly help you narrow your search to the top 5 hosted phone system providers for your specific needs and even better, will make sure you get lower-than-expected pricing on the provider of your choice.