Newly Released: Visual Phone Configuration Tool
Gphone is pleased to announce its new Visual Phone Configuration Tool. This tool is available on the Gphone web portal and greatly simplifies remote configuration of popular VoIP handsets. With the click of a few buttons, the end user, office manager, reseller or Gphone tech support staff can easily personalize each phone with the functionality desired by the owner.
Gphone is pleased to announce that it has enhanced its call center application with a new, easy to use, call center reporting feature. Call center report emails give call center supervisors or office managers (with call center functionality enabled) the ability to create emails reports in a variety of formats and time windows.
Comcast experienced a Nationwide outage of its phone services this week. This just goes to show that bigger is not always better. Gphone has not had a large scale systemwide outage in the past ten years. Our cloud base phone service is built with fully redundant data centers and redundant internet connections and managed by highly expert staff. If you are a Comcast customer and want to switch to a reliable service, please contact our sales group at 703-584-4360.
Comcast’s Xfinity phone service is apparently suffering a massive outage today, knocking out phone service for thousands of companies across the country that still largely rely on landline access to do business. According to DownDetector.com, Comcast phone service began experiencing issues around 8AM ET this morning and by the afternoon, areas around the country have started reporting disruptions. The areas most affected appear to be the Pacific Northwest, California, the tri-state area, and Florida.
The official support Twitter account for Comcast Xfinity’s residential and business services has acknowledged the issues, tweeting at 1PM ET today that some “customers may still be experiencing an issue with their Voice service,” though Comcast has yet to release an official statement regarding the issue.
The issue was later resolved for Spokane County, but it’s clear a Comcast landline outage is a serious matter that could affect police and ambulance response.
In a statement issued around 3:30PM ET, Comcast says service has been restored for most of its customers. “We experienced a service interruption today with our Comcast Business Voice and VoiceEdge Select services and we apologize,” a company spokesperson said. “Our engineers began working to address the issue immediately and services have been restored for most of our customers. We recognize that some customers are still impacted and we expect the issue to be fully resolved shortly. We have every resource focused on getting everyone back online and apologize again to the customers who were affected.”
Designed for fast-growing businesses
Gphone is pleased to support the newly released Edgewater Networks EdgeMarc 2900a and 2900e session border controllers (eSBCs). These new SBC models have the traditional Edgemarc capabilities, but what we like most about them is the new failover features and scalability. The routers now have two GigE WAN ports to support redundant internet providers. The 2900a model also has failover FXO ports, meaning that in case the internet fails, all calls can be routed out traditional POTs lines. This is extremely important for large sites like schools and assisted living facilities.
Furthermore, the devices can scale up to 300 concurrent calls with a simple license upgrade, meaning the hardware can support thousands of phones without a hardware upgrade.
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Broadsoft recently published its annual cloud collaboration industry analysis for 2017. This survey shows the enterprise end users’ perspective on unified communications as a service (UCASS). It surveys 1,005 enterprise IT decision makers in 7 countries on all continents. GlobalPhone shares with you a portion of that survey related to what most companies are currently using for communication and collaboration tools. The survey shows that 80% of companies are actively considering moving to cloud-based communications services. It also shows many companies still rely on traditional technologies and old phone systems. The market is still far from saturated.
The typical home office usually lacks good network infrastructure for VoIP business phones. Most telecommuters like to use a Wifi connection at home and often their router is not close to their work desk, making it hard to run an ethernet cable to a full featured VoIP phone. This led to some strange workarounds and a less than optimal phone situation. Thankfully, Yealink solved that problem by adding Wifi and Bluetooth capability to their inexpensive line of T4X series phones. Now we can install a fully featured business phone anywhere in the home where wifi is available, meaning no more fussing with network cabling. It also means a user can use a standard bluetooth headset and enjoy strolling around the house while conducting business.
Businesses will always require fax machines to send hard copy documents. Fax-to-email is a good solution for receiving most faxes, but falls short when sending documents because it requires the sender to scan and then email documents. Gphone’s solution solves the issues of security and reliability with connecting fax machines over the open Internet. It allows users to connect their fax machine to their ethernet; and it allows businesses to merge fax machine traffic with their desktop faxing. Simply connecting the fax machine to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) hasn’t solved the problem – it has merely reduced the reliability associated with faxing fax machines.
Small business owners everywhere know the struggle of trying to fit enterprise-grade technology into a sparse budget. In order to compete with much larger companies, technology and telecommunication services must provide both an excellent value and a rich feature set. One area of particular concern, specifically for customer-service oriented businesses is phone system services.
For years, there was simply no way to have an advanced phone system without a large, costly physical installation. In recent years, however, a move to managed cloud services has provided typical small businesses with a cost-effective way to access the benefits and features of a previously out of reach product. Hosted PBX (private branch exchange) systems move the costly and complicated equipment off site and to a managed facility, from which service is provided to the small business user via IP based networks.
In order to use a VoIP service on your mobile device, you will need to have the right softphone app installed. SNAPmobile is a SIP softphone client for Android and iOS devices that lets you take VoIP functionality with you wherever you are. That way, you aren’t limited to just using a desktop phone or PC app to make or receive calls. It has many attractive features that makes it a true unified communications solutions, allowing you to stay in touch with those that matter the most, regardless of your current location. You simply need to have Internet access on your mobile device for the app to work.