Tips for switching phone line service from Consolidated or Verizon in Houston outlying areas?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 14, 2009
CONTACT PERSON: JAY HARPER
OFFICE: 281-894-6606
TOLL FREE: 1-877-891-1911
EMAIL: SALES (AT) ttechnologyinc.com

Switching your phone lines from lockdown to ip.

I just had a really nice phone conversation with a very nice houston based business owner. His location puts him in an are where he is completely locked down in his choice of phone line provider.

Consolidated & Verizon have certain outlying areas of Houston, such as Conroe, League City and such, completely locked down.

The conversation that I had with this very nice business owner is a conversation I have at least 8 times a week. To that end I thought it might helpful to publish this information.

The concept is this. Internet trumps the telephone network.

Consolidated and Verizon keep their local strangle by 100% maintaining complete control of thier own telephone network. Sure they will sublease copper trunks and copper T-1 lines to any other service provider, but the cost is kept high enough to totally discourage the practice.

This keeps direct IP providers like Logix, cBeyond, Broadvox and the like out. They just can't make any profit buying a local T-1 from the local telephone network, it's too costly.

But what they cannot keep out is the internet. The open internet. They also can't keep out Comcast, who now offers a business telephone line service.

From the open internet you can get a variety of providers pumping your phones calls to you over your internet connection. The name most people are familiar with is Vonage, but there are certainly others.

The next point of every conversation I have with business owners is the fact that they think they need to buy something new to make it all work.

Comcast, Vonage and the others are going to tell you that their voice traffic is VoiP. This is always misleading with regards to your current telephone system. For some reason, everyone thinks they need a new voip phone system.

Couldn't be further from the truth.

Yes, said phone line providers do get the voice traffic to your office via IP packets and computer compression techniques. Much like your computer received this web page you are reading right now.

HOWEVER, all of these providers know that requiring you to buy an IP phone system would stop their business overnight.

So they generally provide you with an ATA. An Analog Adapter. This device plugs into your internet connection, recieves their voice traffic and then hands off to you an emulated, analog telephone line signal.

In all cases such as this, your phone system has absolutely no idea that it's current voice traffic was once an IP signal. Nor does it care. All it wants is voltage and that's exactly what the provided ATA will give it.

All you will need at time of install is a phone technician (like us) to "cross connect" the lines from the ata to your phone system. Very easy work.

One word of caution and this does bother me a little. Companies such as Vonage are going to charge you something like $100 per month per ATA device in your office. Far as I can tell, their ATA devices are two lines per device. As a seller of telecommunications equipment, I can promise you that these devices don't even cost Vonage a SINGLE $100.

I must wonder if it would possible to buy your own ata and have it work with their service.

I'll do some more research on that subject and post some results later.