Voice Carrier Office Review
Gregory A. Sanders
Voice Carrier LLC (formerly Ring Carrier) headquartered in San Jose, California is a telephony technology company that makes “big company” phone services available to small and medium sized businesses. Voice Carrier’s offerings allow smaller companies to have all the features and functions that larger companies enjoy with little upfront cost, no maintenance, and no long term contracts.
Voice Carrier accomplishes this through use of what it calls its Ring Provider platform, which “combines multiple virtual PBX building blocks into a single, easily managed system based on the highly scalable and extensible Voice Carrier VoIP Fabric.” What this means is they provide you a system that allows you to easily adjust your company’s communications system to your current needs without significant out of pocket expense.
A Line is Not a Number – Voice Carrier Office has three service packages which are defined by the number of lines they include. A VoIP “line” is not the same as a traditional telephone line, which we often associate with a phone number. A line is your capacity to have any single connection between your office and the outside world. You can have one phone number and multiple lines. With that one number, you can have as many active calls as you have lines using that one number. This means your callers never get a busy signal.
Additional lines can be purchased individually for $29.95. If you want additional phone numbers, they are $2.00 each.
Features – The list of features included with each of the three packages is impressive. Every account includes unlimited extensions, online account management and call history for every extension, auto attendant, voicemail to email, text emails to voicemail, three-way calling, forwarding and following, call waiting, last number redial, caller ID controls, music on hold, call recording and more. To say this is a full-featured service is an understatement.
Packages – The 2-line package costs $59.95 per month and includes the capability for one conference call at a time and auto attendant. The conference call feature can accommodate up to eight callers at at time. All three plans provide unlimited calling to the US and Canada.
The 5-line package costs $129.95 per month and includes capability for two conference calls at a time and customized auto attendant. Recommended for offices with 6-10 people.
The 8-line package costs $209.95 per month. It includes the ability to have three conference calls and also offers the customized auto attendant. Recommended for offices with 11-20 people.
Hardware – Unlike some VoIP providers who lock their phones to their service, Voice Carrier Office uses non-proprietary, non-PBX digital phones. This means you can pick the phones you want, not just the phones on someone’s approved equipment list. Phones like the Cisco SPA 504G, Yealink T22, Polycom IP550 and more are available to you.
If you wish, you can use an ATA device to interface existing hardware into the Voice Carrier system. Yes, you can use that Mickey Mouse phone with Voice Carrier Office.